Servant Leadership - August 14, 2026

If Servant Leadership Works, Why Isn’t Everyone Doing It?

Every employee in every company should hope to have a servant leader, ideally both as their immediate supervisor as well as the person leading the organization. A servant leader aims to make it easier for the team members to do their respective jobs, which develops a heightened amount of trust, job satisfaction and company loyalty. Given this, why isn’t this leadership style more prevalent?

In my 35 year career, most of which has been spent leading teams of people, and sometimes leading entire organizations, I have been practicing “Servant Leadership”. Initially I was using this approach without knowing the term for this leadership style, but once I learned of this term and its meaning, I knew I was a servant leader.  I would regularly ask my immediate staff or other members of the leadership team,  “What issues are preventing you from getting your job done?”; “What can I do to help?”. In this context, I was working for them even though I was more senior in the organization. 

When we refer to “improving the ability to do their jobs”, we are referring to removing obstacles the team may face, that they can’t deal with themselves.  Examples of this include inter-departmental challenges, issues arising with suppliers or problematic customers; things that fall through the cracks, or are too much to expect subordinate staff to handle.  

Examples of Servant Leadership:

1) Many years ago I was working with a SaaS startup (“SaaS” = Software as a Service), and we were about to on-board a team of Sales Development Reps, whose job it was going to be to generate sales leads for our direct sales team.  They were going to work from a pod of desks all facing each other, and were starting on a given Monday.  By mid-day on the preceding Friday, their desk hadn’t been assembled yet.  I asked our Office Manager about the situation and she indicated that the person who was supposed to assemble the desks hadn’t been able to do it yet.  I took a look at the un-assembled desks, saw that they were basic Ikea desks, and decided that I’d take care of it myself over the weekend.  I was in a C-level position in this company, but the desk needed to be assembled. I had worked in many start-ups before then and understood that regardless of the job title, you often have to roll up your sleeves and do what’s needed.  In this case, our Office Manager needed help with this task, to ensure our new employees had a place to work when they showed up for their first day in our company, so I did what needed to be done.  In this context, I was working for, or “serving” the Office Manager.  

2) In the same company there was an issue brewing between the operations team and our product development team.  Our operations team’s responsibilities included on-boarding new customers.  In reviewing the time-to-on-board metrics, we realized that it was taking too long to get the customers up-and-running on our solution.  The longer it took to get a given customer started on our software platform, the later it would be before we could start charging them licensing fees…i.e. this slow down was delaying our revenue.  The issue was that our customer on-boarding portal within our product was too difficult for the customers to use, and our operations team members had to personally guide our new customers through the on-boarding process.  Our Head of Operations had raised the issue with our Head of Product Development, but had gotten nowhere.  So, we spent time with our product development team, explaining the issue and the consequences it was having on the company realizing revenue on our hard-earned product sales.  We found a way to improve the customer on-boarding portal within our product, and soon thereafter our time-elapsed from receiving an order to recognizing revenue shrunk considerably.  At the next quarterly Board of Directors’ meeting, when we reported the improvement in our customer on-boarding metrics, our Board members were quite happy, as were we on the Leadership team. 

It seems difficult to ascertain how widespread servant leadership is. There is no authoritative global measure of how many organizations practice servant leadership. Some have suggested that roughly half of organizations surveyed report servant-leadership practices, but the evidence is too fragmented to claim that X% of organizations worldwide use this approach. This is because servant leadership isn't usually reported as an organizational category in business surveys.  

Even if we can’t measure how widespread servant leadership is, intuitively, I would wonder why every leader is not using this approach?  

One theory is that servant leadership has not become dominant because it challenges some deeply embedded assumptions about what leadership is supposed to be. For much of modern business, leadership has been associated with authority, control, decisiveness and hierarchy.

The conventional view on leadership is essentially:

“I am the leader because I have responsibility for the results, and therefore I direct the people who produce them.”

Servant leadership reverses that:

“I am the leader because I have responsibility for the people who produce the results.”

That's a significant philosophical difference.

Research published in 2017 from the Academy of Management Journals found that employees who perceive their leaders as practicing servant leadership tend to report greater satisfaction, trust and commitment, along with better performance-related behaviours and lower intentions to leave.  When the team members know their leaders are genuinely there to help them perform well in their jobs, it engenders loyalty.  Given this, and my own experience creating cohesiveness and delivering results using servant leadership, I would assume every leader would adopt this approach. 

Perhaps the reason servant leadership isn't adopted more broadly isn't because it doesn't work, it could be because it requires leaders to rethink what leadership actually means.

Leadership isn't about having people work for you. It's about making yourself useful to the people who work for you.

Thanks for reading. 

Do you lead a team or an organization? Or do you work for a good leader?  Share your stories or experiences with servant leadership with our readers in the comments section.