Career NorthStar News - Issue 10: When the Leader Becomes the Servant, Teams Thrive
- Jan 29
- 3 min read
A leader’s job is simple to describe and hard to live: make your people better so you, your team, and your company can succeed. It sounds straightforward, almost obvious, doesn’t it? But in practice it requires discipline, humility, and a daily commitment to elevating others. Real leadership means pouring yourself into your people so they can grow, removing obstacles so they can move forward, and creating an environment where they can do the best work of their careers. It means choosing service over ego, clarity over control, and long-term trust over short-term optics. When leaders embrace that responsibility, they don’t just improve individuals, they strengthen the entire system around them.
This is not an abstract concept, but in the daily work of:
Creating safety
Building trust
Developing skills
Removing obstacles
Protecting team chemistry
Making an environment where people want to stay, grow, and win together
This is the work. This is the job.
And when leaders embrace it, teams unlock a level of performance that can’t be forced, faked, or politically engineered.
The Best Leaders Make It About the Team. Not Themselves.
Teams fall apart when leaders shift the spotlight inward. When the priority becomes:
How they look
How they’re perceived
How much power they can accumulate
What information they can hoard
How they can “win” internal politics
That’s not leadership. That’s insecurity wearing a title. And insecurity always has a cost. The team suffers first. People don’t stay where they can’t succeed. Or worse, they do stay but silently give up, costing valuable performance.
Servant Leadership Isn’t Soft. It’s Strategic.
When leaders flip the script and make themselves the servant or shepherd of the team, everything changes.
Servant leadership means:
Lifting people up instead of holding them down
Coaching and hands-on instead of controlling from behind a desk or title
Sharing information instead of weaponizing it
Creating a micro-climate where people can set strategic goals, stretch, struggle, and still feel supported
Rewarding growth, not perfection
Challenging people because you believe in them, not because you need to prove something
And the data backs it up. A 2020 Gartner study found that project managers who practice servant leadership deliver 15% better project outcomes than those who don’t (Gartner, 2020).
Servant leadership isn’t soft. It’s a performance multiplier.
This is when teams do their best work. This is when trust becomes the engine of results.
Support People Even When Their Growth Takes Them Beyond Your Team.
One of the biggest tests of leadership is what you do when someone’s aspirations take them somewhere else.
Weak leaders try to block it. They fear the extra work. They fear the loss of control. They fear being exposed. They are selfish.
Strong leaders do the opposite. They support the transition. They celebrate the growth. They take pride in the fact that someone is leaving better than they arrived. Because the leader’s reward is not retention at all costs. It is the success of the people they have developed.
If You Have the Title, Act Like It.
Leadership is not about being the most important person in the room. It’s about being the most responsible and most accountable.
If you hold the title, then:
Make it about the team
Build the environment where people thrive
Challenge them, support them, stand with them, and reward them
Remove obstacles
Protect the culture, so they can feel safe to do their best work
Lift people up, even if it makes your job harder
Your success is measured by the success of the people you serve. Lift them, and everyone rises.
We’re cheering for you!
– AL (Bridget, Jessica)
Servant Leadership Toolkit: Developing Entrepreneurial Skills, Gartner, Apr 2020. Gartner.com/documents/Developing Entrepreneurial Skills
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