Servant leader traps - being liked
Servant leadership has traps for people who come to management with people-pleasing tendencies.
For most of my engineering management career I described myself as a Servant Leader. I love the concept: the care for human beings, the focus on psychological safety, on individual development. There are great books and blog posts on servant leadership. But lately I’m cooling to servant leadership as a holistic management approach because it seems to be a trap for people who come to management with people-pleasing tendencies.
I’ve spent the last few years of my own self-work shaking out that those people-pleasing beliefs. I see how I brought a lot of that energy to my work. There are many ways that servant leadership is a trap for people-pleasers, but the one I want to focus on today is the need for your team to like you. I find many brilliant and thoughtful people managers fall into a trap of primarily seeking approval from their team, and it’s an even bigger trap if they were promoted into a lead role in their existing team.
This can look like a manager who is really anxious if their review scores aren’t 100%; a manager who is too scared to give critical feedback or to set challenging goals; a manager who is afraid to speak up and tell their team that they aren’t meeting expectations; a lack of aligning team expectations with the business. This often means their team languishes and doesn’t deliver to the standard they’re capable of. This team cannot be high performing.
This kind of people-pleasing leader over-empathises with their team members. In some of the worst cases, poor performers are protected because this manager hasn’t given corrective feedback for years, and feels too ashamed to start. The worst evolutions have this leader becoming defensive and reactive as they try to protect the team from mean stakeholders, nasty management, and the penny-pinching, results-driven business.
These tendencies come from a desire to care but are ultimately destructive. In withholding tough feedback, you remove the opportunity for individuals to grow. In lowering your expectations, you become a barrier to the development of a high performing team. In protecting poor performers, you are keeping them in a job that they’re not good at, even saving them from moving to a job or company that they might thrive in.
The way out of this trap is to first recognise your people-pleasing tendencies—there’s no shame in caring, it is to be celebrated. Face down your anxiety as you start to give tough love, hold up a high standard and hold people accountable to it. Show care by setting team goals in line with business needs. Push your team on the painful journey towards high performance. Let go of the poor performers who can’t turn around.
Learn to be dispassionate in your people leadership. Pleasing every individual isn’t necessary or possible. Psychological safety is one foundation of a high performing team, but if that’s your sole focus you will lose sight of delivery and find it hard to build a high performance culture or grow in your own career.
