Season 2 Episode 1: What I've Learned about Servant Leadership This Past Year

Servant leadership sounds great in theory—but what does it actually look like at work? In this episode, I reflect on my own leadership journey, the challenges of empowering others, and why psychological safety, accountability, and intentional communication matter more than any leadership “style.”

Transcript

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Welcome to Learning To Manage. I'm Aruna Seegolam, an administrative and operations professional with over a decade of experience committed to continuously improving my leadership and management skills. This podcast explores leadership, growth, and the practical realities of managing people and organizations. Welcome back to the podcast. This season I'm gonna focus on what leadership looks like in practice. The real kind of decisions, tensions and moments that shape how I make decisions, how all of us as managers need to make decisions. And in this episode specifically, I am gonna talk about servant leadership. I made strides last year on my final paper for my DBA. So kind of talking about servant leadership in theory and then my role as a servant leader- how I've tried to adjust and I say this in person- I don't remember if I've ever said this in the podcast. I am A servant leader. I am trying to be one, but I know that I don't encompass all of the qualities. I really struggle with empowering others. That's my biggest one. But I do think that this is the most effective style of leadership, and I will explain why in this season as well. So when we talk about servant leadership, we're talking about specific qualities that a manager has. It's a leadership style, so there's transformational, authoritarian, ethical, transactional. There's so many different management styles. Servant leadership is kind of considered type of transformational, but it is very specific in that there is specific language such as servants and followers and the servant leaders are the managers and the followers are their subordinates, essentially. However you'd like to use that language their employees, their staff, their team members. So in theory and in literature, servant leadership is described with a number of different qualities. There are certain behaviors that servant leaders have that show up all the time, right? And those are things like listening, empathy, humility, accountability, empowerment, stewardship, and these all come together in such a way that when a manager exhibits all of these qualities, you have this amazing transparency and communication between leader and follower, which then impacts the way that the leader performs at work, the employee performs at work, and essentially how the organization performs overall. Please understand that Human Resources stands for humans as resources. They are the most important resource that an organization has. So you can have the budget and the AI and these great softwares and program management, but if you do not have good, real effective people managing and actually doing the day-to-day work, an organization can't meet its goals. So when we're talking about servant leadership as a leadership style in concept and definition, we are talking about someone who is an effective communicator, who listens, and in using these really great qualities like accountability and empathy, and humility can perform in a certain way. And as part of my academic studies, I interviewed an organization that had a servant leader. Their culture was servant leadership. And I don't think that I expected the organization to be what it was. In practice the lack of servant leadership, I can talk about that from now until the cows come home or whatever that saying is. The lack of servant leadership means that people are confused all the time, they're anxious, they have no idea what their manager wants from them- if their manager's constantly changing their mind. I worked with one manager who you could show them an email that they sent and they would say, that's not that. I didn't send that, and I was just. There is no logic behind how terrible this management was. And then you look at a servant leader who is transparent, has things in documentation, is accountable, and says, wow, I'm so sorry that I, that I didn't do that properly. Let me fix that and give you what you were supposed to get to begin with. Or, let me adjust since my mistake caused this error or I misunderstood the way that this was supposed to be. You see such of a difference, and you see the way that employees thrive because they have the leader that is accountable and who listens and who communicates effectively. I've seen servant leadership in all types of forms. A true servant leader has all of the qualities and it is evident when all of the qualities are there. when some of the qualities are missing it looks a little bit different, and that's why it's sometimes hard to identify servant leadership, but you can always tell when a leader says, whoops, sorry, that was on me, I misunderstood that, or I had that wrong. And this is not to say that people stay for jobs where they're overqualified and they just stay to be comfortable. No, the organization creates positions and moves them up in a way that most effectively works for them. And there was one manager that I interviewed that kept saying, I don't think I exhibit this quality or I don't think that I do this enough for my team. And when I interviewed that person's team, I got the complete opposite. They told me how supportive this person was, how much they listened, how much they had empathy, and were humble and were accountable. And no matter how many times they asked the question and they were there. And it made me think that, and I made sure I told that manager that I was, I was like, I, I think you need to know that you're taking this worse than it is, you're being really hard on yourself but that people really, really admire the work that you do and the amount of time that you spend on them. So two concepts I wanna talk about is having difficult conversations and decision making. So I don't think that servant leaders have difficult conversations with their employees. I think that conversations need to happen in the workplace, and servant leaders know how to have certain conversations with certain people. One person may want you to be a micromanager. One person may want you to, leave them alone and do things as they feel that they can do best. And then you have other people who want to, meet you in the middle where they want some kind of confirmation, but most of the time they can work by themselves. It is up to the manager to understand our employees. When I first started learning management, one of the classes I took said, well, everyone needs to be managed differently. You have to learn how to read people's personalities and manage them according to where they wanna be met. And I think that is exactly what servant leadership does, and takes it to a level where the manager knows the employee so well that they can take the information that they need shared and give it to them. So I'll use myself as an example. I am not the person that wants to hear, and this is how I also was taught in one of these courses, how to give feedback to others. You start off with a compliment. Oh, Aruna, you do such a great job. I'm so happy with this report. It had everything that we needed, but, and then you go ahead and give the constructive criticism. I don't like the fluff. I've read the books, I've done the management training. So when my manager starts talking to me and and gives a compliment, and then there's a, but I immediately go, I start shaking my head, no. Can you just tell me what's going on? I am not someone that wants to hear that fluff. Now, there are some employees that want to know because of lack of other managers having done it or lack of just not hearing it all together. They wanna know what they've been doing well. I have been told what I've been doing well for a long time, and let's separate this from being a good manager. I'm a good employee. I think I'm pretty good at what I do, but I'm not a great manager and that is what I like being told. I like being told Aruna, this is where you can do better. So if there was a report that I had to submit. And it was 90% great, but you're afraid of hurting my feelings, so then you don't tell me about that 10%. I'm going to make that 10% mistake every single time, and that doesn't work well for me. I don't like knowing that I've done that. So for a manager to support me well, I need to know about that lack of that 10%. That doesn't mean that I don't give you that 90% all of the time. I've just reached a point in my career where I wanna know about that 10% because I have been given the compliments. I have been given the nice raises. I have been given the promotions. What I'm looking for now is how do I improve and how do I make you happy? How do I make my manager happy? How do I make my organization happy? And this is, again, different from me being a manager. I'm just talking general, what some people might be looking for. And the second thing I wanted to talk about is decision making. So there's a shared decision making between servant leaders and their employees. And what I'm referring to is, say for example, you have a non managerial employee. Is giving them, here, this is what you, this is the bandwidth and the breadth of your work. You can make decisions up to and including this point, whatever that point may be. However, after that, unfortunately, according to the, rules of this organization's, any other kind of decision making needs to come to me. So what's going to happen at the beginning is that you're gonna have an employee that's consistently coming to you. They're afraid of making the wrong decision, but as a servant leader, what they do is they give the information that people need, no matter how many times they need it. So I once had an employee that would consistently come to me. I would give them clear instructions. I would write it down, send it in an email, and this person would bring that email to me, reread the email to me and say, do I understand this correctly, that I would have to, and then proceed to read like three bullet points. And I would get frustrated and I would say to them, you're literally reading from the email instructions I gave you. Why are we confirming this again? And I would get frustrated and the person would get frustrated and they were like, well, I just want you to confirm. And I remember this conversation very, very distinctly in my mind because I was just like, are you insane? But that's what that person needed. There was a point in my life when I was that person, but I forgot what, you know, just because I might've picked up on a specific topic faster than this person did, does not mean that there are other situations where that person would've picked up on a topic much faster than I would. So it is removing yourself from that situation and saying, I'm so sorry that my instructions seem to not be clear enough. Yes, that is absolutely what you need to do. And, and when I say that this went badly, this went badly. This person eventually resigned from the, not because of that alone there was many things, but person eventually resigned from working under me because of this. So there's this decision making now, I think back to. When my servant leader was working with me, when the company was talking to me about taking on the position of interim CEO. Like, what do you think, you know? She said to me, Aruna. Many times you come to me for confirmation because you're afraid of making a mistake, but you generally have the right idea and the right answer. Trust in yourself. And she said it to me with words, but that's exactly what servant leaders do in action is they give you the encouragement, they give you the autonomy. They helped you gain that confidence no matter how long it takes. The employee keeps coming to you with questions. Then eventually they stop asking about this one thing because they feel confident enough. Then they find something new. They start asking you questions about that. Then they stop. Then they find something else. That's how you see the growth in an employee and what servant leaders do is they just help employees build that confidence through this kind of shared decision making. I have not seen in my time as a manager that an employee has taken advantage or toyed with the boundaries of a servant leader. It has happened when I've tried to be just a general transformational leader or transactional leader it's definitely happened, but has never happened while I have been trying to employ servant leader attributes. I am gonna say in the last year, my view of servant leadership and leadership in general has evolved. My experience at my last job taught me that I struggle with a leader that isn't a servant leader. I really do. It made me realize that servant leaders bring this kind of psychological safety. You feel protected as an employee of a servant leader and when that psychological safety is missing, it is very difficult to be productive and have good performance that positively affects your organization. I think that servant leadership may not be appealing to everyone, but I will say that the attributes are extremely important, such as listening effectively. We shouldn't just hear what our employees say. We need to listen, we need to act on it. We need to have effective communication. Everyone understands things differently. We need to be accountable. We need to be humble. We need to be empathetic. We need to empower our employees. We need to give them autonomy. We need to build community. We need to provide psychological safety. So I think that individually these attributes are extremely important and servant leadership and the term may not be as exciting to some people, but it's these behaviors that we do need to focus on. And one thing I realize about having a servant leader and in trying to be a servant leader myself is that not every day looks the same. It is a constant struggle to try to keep all of these actions together. And I'll give my last example. In my last position. There was an employee, very positive, very energetic, always came with a smile. And when this person used to come to me, my first instinct was. What is this person's intentions? And it's something I'm not used to in the workplace. And I was trying to create boundaries where there didn't need to be boundaries, frankly. And it was just a matter of a miscommunication where this person thought that I had a specific role because of the person that I replaced. And when this person and I eventually had a conversation, I realized where the disconnect was. My attitude changed completely because I realized that this person was trying to share concerns because they thought I was the outlet to where they needed to go to. And I just snapped myself back and, and I was like, a servant leader wouldn't do this. This is where I always come back and I say, i'm not a servant leader yet because there are days where i'm looking at myself and protecting myself first rather than trying to understand what this employee needed. And now I don't even work there anymore and this person still calls, still talks. I don't think this is someone that I would lose contact with. And it's great and you create these long lasting work friendships and work relationships that you just evolve after time. And that is the, that is the epitome of a servant leader. So my takeaway from all of this is that servant leadership is being intentional. You are intentional about the way that you show up for your employees. It is a lot of work focusing on others. It is extremely selfless. Servant leaders are still leaders, they're still managers, they're stewardship. I didn't talk about stewardship. I will talk about it in a future episode in this season. But stewardship is extremely important. Servant leaders are still doing their jobs and they're doing it well. Thanks for listening to Learning to Manage. If you have leadership experiences, challenges, or perspectives you'd like to share, I'd love to hear from you. Please feel free to reach out through the podcast page or on socials. I appreciate you being here. Until next time.