Breaking the Mold: How Embracing Servant Leadership Revolutionized our Workplace

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Transcript:

(AI Generated)

 By all market objective measures, this is clearly working well. And the reason why it's working well, I believe a lot of it has to do with me adopting a servant leader disposition to my leadership style. I lead from behind. I support everybody. I remove obstacles from their path. I'm engaged in their personal, professional and academic wellbeing.

I'm obsessed with that. I'm putting the needs of the organization, specifically the needs of the employees before any other needs, before any other profit, motives or whatever the case may be. And part of that comes with treating these people like adults, perfectly capable of managing themselves.

And I think that's the distinction I have to respect them. Cuz in many cases, they were actually older than me, much more experienced than me. Mm-hmm. Much more adept professionally than me. And these are things that scare some leaders, but for me, they're causes for celebration. Because if you're able to do the work that I would've done individually at a higher degree than I can with a higher degree of quality, faster than I am, better than I can.

This is perfect. And I had to remind myself through this process that a leader's job is to create more leaders. I can't be selfish about this. My job is to create an environment where people thrive and they're able to do what I do better than I can do it so that I don't have to do it. Then I can move on and solve other problems.

So there was two pieces of feedback. Jens, to answer your question more succinctly, the first was, wow, it's clearly working. My contemporaries were saying, how do we do what you're doing in this department? Hmm. Give us the blueprints, give us the documents, run some workshops. Teach us how to recreate this.

Clearly functional team and team dynamic and team structure so that we can achieve similar results. But then what I was getting from some of the more closed-minded members of the organization, some of the resistors, some of the traditionalists was, well this isn't in line with union rules. And if you're doing this, then it becomes hard for us to explain to other leaders and other managers and other employees why they're being treated differently.

And so I don't think anybody disagreed with the fundamental premise of treating people well and respecting them like adults and helping them to achieve self-actualization. I don't think there's any disagreement there, but I think the tension was around the optics of it. Jens. Yeah, that was the tension.