My leadership style: two weeks in the Bahamas with no wifi
My leadership style can be described as two weeks in the Bahamas with no wifi. 🏝️
It's summer break season again and I was recently reminded of my answer to an interviewer's question a few years ago about how I like to lead my team. It was a witty effort to describe in short the servant leadership style that I strongly believe in and apply.
But don't let the tempting visual of a tropic vacation fool you; servant leadership takes a lot of hard #work and focused effort. According to Robert Greenleaf who coined the term in 1970, it can be summed up as "Servant first, leader second". You start from what the #team needs in order to grow rather than from what you need in order to feel useful. His test asks whether the people you lead become healthier, wiser, freer and more autonomous under your care and supervision over time. And it's not something you assess while you're around.
So, here is August. You are on a beach right now, or you were three weeks ago. How many times did you open Slack while you were away, and how many of those were to check on your team?
If your answer to this question ranges from "multiple times per day" to "daily" or even, "frequently", then you have to re-evaluate the signals in your day-to-day running of your team. Each one is a signal pointing at something you have yet to build, and they get harder to fix as you go down the list:
The handover
If you are writing a whole document for one week away, you have a delegation problem. Your team should know what to do in your absence, unless they are all new hires. Good news, the fix is straightforward: more onboarding/ training and a RACI board.
The weekly team meeting
Does it still happen without you in the room? If it dissolves the moment you leave, it was a performative status report and not real team alignment. Cohesion is harder to fix than delegation, because it means nurturing collaboration above everything else.
The questions
Messages arrive that are not emergencies about things they could work out on their own. This is about agency, and it usually traces back to how many independent decisions you have allowed your team to make before you went on holiday.
The decisions
Something ambiguous came up and someone had to speak for the function. Whether your team decides without you is the outcome of what happened the last time someone did and got it wrong. They remember exactly how you reacted.
Trust is at the core of servant leadership, and it runs in all directions. Your team has to be able to back each other and act on their own without your mandate.
So the useful question was never whether the work continued while you were gone, but to what extent your team can briefly run the show without you?
🌟Sparking Leadership # 57: a weekly series on human-centered sustainable #leadership. Reach out if you're stuck in your #career and need a change or follow for more sparkling content. In the meantime, lead with spark! ✨️
