How to Become a Servant Leader in a Digital Age

Perhaps no other thinker has done more to define the practice of servant leadership than Larry Spears. Spears, who runs a center for servant leadership and has written over a dozen books on the topic, has searched the canon of servant leadership texts, case studies, and examples to distill 10 characteristics of servant leadership.

After years of analysis of servant leadership scholarship and theory, Spears determined that servant leaders share the following characteristics:

• Listening: clarifying the will of a group

• Empathy: listening with positive intent

• Healing: creating wholeness

• Awareness: of the self, and of the situation

• Persuasion: convincing, rather than forcing compliance

• Conceptualization: seeing the bigger picture

• Foresight: identifying likely outcomes

• Stewardship: "holding something in trust for another"

• Commitment to the growth of people

• Building community

According to Spears, not every servant leader embodies all or most or even some of the characteristics on this list. But chances are, those who are committed to this practice will find some overlap with these characteristics.

Still, I question whether this list holds up today.

Spears published this list in an article printed in the 2010 edition of the Journal of Virtues & Leadership, and 2010 was a remarkably different cultural moment. Social media was gaining popularity but was still mostly the domain of the young and tech-oriented. Smartphones were widely available but were mostly owned by affluent, professional consumers. Today, digital distraction is the default experience: swiping and scrolling having replaced small talk and conversation - multi-tasking and messaging having become the normative ways of working.

Can you really listen deep enough to clarify a group's sense of will when pings and alerts divert both your own attention, and certainly the attention of other group members? Can you actually create a sense of group wholeness when digital distractions cut into our moment to moment experience?

I would argue that Spears' list is still a useful and authoritative compendium of the habits of the servant leader. I would also argue that such a list has pre-requisites for a distracted, digital culture. In other words, these traits of servant leadership require pre-work.

The pre-requisites are simple: First, slow down. And then, tell stories.

Slowing down: Each of Spears' attributes requires the servant leader to step aside from the fast flow of the digital age. One can't listen deeply if you're sprinting from one task to another, nor is it possible to take the time to persuade others without effort and intentionality. Conceptualization is constrained by our tendency to sprint from one meeting to the next. Thus the first-prerequisite of servant leadership is to "slow the proverbial roll" that engulfs our efforts. While slowing down seems simple in theory, it is nearly impossible to adopt in practice, with everything in our surrounding culture pushing us to accelerate. It's not so much that the servant leader creates intentional moments of slowness: leadership retreats, mindful pauses, cleansing breaths. Rather, it's that the servant leader consistently deploys micro-habits to subtly slow things down.

A few specific habits of slowing down come to mind from the servant leaders I have worked with:

• A commitment to small talk: Idle chatter is not irrelevant, and the servant leader recognizes this. Not only does the servant leader tolerate small talk at the start of a call, a meeting, or a presentation - he or she welcomes it. Moreover, the servant leader remembers the details that emerge from these conversations: who is seeing which movies, who supports which sports teams, who is doing what over the weekend. When prioritized, small talk makes a big difference in slowing the pace.

• An elimination of digital distraction: The servant leader recognizes that multi-tasking is a myth. Whether closing a laptop screen and turning off a phone in a face-to-face setting, or turning on one's webcam in a group Zoom, or taking a weekly digital Sabbath - the servant leader sees the tension between analog focus and effective service.

• A return to shared values: Many organizations have shared aspirations, many workers take assessments to understand their core values or personality types. The servant leader draws upon these commitments and sources of motivation at the start of a shared effort.

When we slow down, we create one of the pre-conditions for servant leadership, and make it possible to share stories.

Telling stories: A few years ago I toured the offices of Menlo Innovations, a small software development firm in Ann Arbor, MI. Menlo is led by Rich Sheridan, who describes himself as the company's Chief Storytelling Officer. Among the standard executive-level responsibilities, Rich sees himself as responsible for the telling of stories: those of the customer, the employee, and the end-user. It's this ability to create coherent, compelling narratives that makes Menlo Innovations a joyful place to work.

The digital age is saturated with content but short on stories. We know what people do but we rarely understand the why.

Telling stories is about creating coherent stories from the scattered, fragmentary data of our day-to-day existence. It's about pushing ourselves to understand purpose - of our own efforts and those with whom we collaborate. It's about starting with small talk and gradually moving towards the big picture conversations that create deep trust.

When we commit to slowing down and telling stories, we begin to practice servant leadership. When we slow down and tell stories, Larry Spears' list of 10 characteristics is all the more likely to describe how we lead people. And our communities are more likely to say they were better off because of our leadership.

Servant Leadership in a Digital Age

Servant Leadership is a trending topic in all forms of organizational life, from churches to universities to non-profits, small businesses to multi-national corporations. Yet as the popularity of servant leadership has increased, its definition has become increasingly ambiguous. What exactly is servant leadership? How is it practiced? And what might it mean in a world of continuous social change and digital acceleration?

Google searches for servant leadership have doubled in the last 14 years.

Robert Greenleaf first coined the term Servant Leadership in a seminal 1970 essay, "The Servant as Leader."

In the essay, Greenleaf writes:

"The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature."

Greenleaf's roots were in the corporate world. He worked at AT&T for nearly four decades. Yet despite his work in the telecommunications industry, one wonders how Greenleaf's ideas might have evolved were he working in our contemporary tech-shaped culture. He passed away in 1990 at age 86, leaving a legacy that continues to shape leaders of all vocational and spiritual backgrounds. In this post, we'll explore how the idea (really, the ideal) of servant leadership transfers to a digital age, and what it means to be a servant leader in a time of constant technological acceleration.

We need a new approach to leadership

Acceleration and a drive towards efficiency are the only unifying aspects of all organizational life life today. Digital technologies have expedited the flow of information providing us with an abundance of data while conditioning us to move quickly. As communications dart across our screens we cannot help but feeling a sense of busyness, even a sense of overwhelm and malaise. The same corporate world that gave rise to the concept of servant leadership expects constant availability and its responsiveness, far more than it expected from its laborers in Greenleaf's day. Lean staffing structures and ceaseless digital connectivity are a potent pairing, explaining why organizations see increasingly more of their people affected by exhaustion, burnout, and anxiety.

Indeed, this is a time that requires a new approach to leadership. So many of those who aspire to leadership today do so because they believe the can improve efficiency, increase speed, and crank up outputs. Mark Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency" has become a widely adopted template for doing less with more. If aspiring leaders are successful in this drive towards acceleration, the market will reward them accordingly. Yet in prioritizing these outcomes they exacerbate the anxiety and freneticism that characterize organizational life.

Servant leadership offers an alternative to the hamster wheel of digital age efficiency. While still driving towards a meaningful vision of a world that could-be, a servant leader consciously charts an unconventional path.

Motivation: The Heart of the Servant Leader

Motivation is the most distinctive attribute of the servant leader. Their motivation appears rather backwards when compared to their peers.

The conventional digital age leader thirsts for productivity gains and increased effectiveness. And let's be clear - there's nothing wrong with efficient, high performing organizations. But in servant leadership, any performance indicator is understood to be an output. When servant leaders achieve such ends, they do so by starting from a commitment to service above all else. The servant leader chooses to serve - to serve first. Being a servant leader in a digital age is about prioritizing a mindset of service to one's team members, stakeholders, members, or community. To paraphrase servant leadership guru Ken Blanchard, any profits reaped by the organization are the applause they receive in exchange for quality service.

The heart of servant leadership is this orientation towards making people and communities more complete, more whole.

To identify a servant leader, ask them about the purpose underlying their work. Ask them about their why. If their answer is presented in the metrics of the marketplace or in the terms of the efficiency expert, than they may be a conventional manager. But if they are driven to make a demonstrably positive impact on their surrounding communities, then they might just be on the path towards servant leadership.

Best test: The Outcome of Servant Leadership

As with the conventions of motivation, the conventional metrics of the marketplace are outputs to the servant leader.

While they are likely to be as or more effective than their conventional peers in generating revenue, profit, and growth, they measure their effectiveness over time with a different yardstick. The growth logic of the marketplace is less immediate than the growth of people. The servant leader repeatedly inquires as to the effect their work has on colleagues, customers, suppliers, and members. If their leadership is to be meaningful, their entire network must benefit.

Greenleaf established a test for would-be servant leaders when he wrote:

"The best test [of a servant-leader], and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, not be further deprived?"

Servant leaders can be shrewd negotiators and crafty marketers, powerful executives and commanding authorities. They can be successful capitalists and wealthy investors. Each will employ a unique approach to their exercise of leadership. But what will unite them is a continuous process of reflection into the well-being of their community. The best test of servant leadership is in the betterment of others, for the benefits of servant leadership must be shared.