What is Servant Leadership and Why Should I Care?

Let's define this and why it is the most enduring and powerful leadership style in history!

Note: The following is an excerpt from our new book “Practical Servant Leadership: No Nonsense Tactics to Ignite Your Team for Remarkable Results,” by Joe Palm and Dr. Mike Moss. We expect to publish it in Q4 of 2025, and it can be pre-ordered for half price at this link.

Here is an excerpt from Dr. Moss’s Chapter One, entitled “The Case for Servant Leadership.”

“Servant leadership is all about making the goals clear and then rolling your sleeves up and doing whatever it takes to help people win. In that situation, they don’t work for you, you work for them.” Ken Blanchard

The key feature distinguishing Servant Leadership from other leadership styles is that the leader’s primary role is to serve and enable employees to ensure they can be maximally effective in achieving organizational goals, rather than the typical command and control perspective, where employees are viewed as serving leaders. To convey this, a poignant and common visual depicts the Servant Leader organization structure as an upside-down triangle with the leader on the bottom, in contrast to the typical structure, which shows a triangle with the leader on top (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

There is no agreed-upon, unifying Servant Leadership framework or model that describes what Servant Leaders actually do to “serve and enable employees.” While described similarly across books and articles on the topic, the various descriptions and models vary in complexity, particularly in how Servant Leader behaviors are parsed, categorized, and labeled. We suggest that the many and varied depictions ultimately reflect the 5 Servant Leader Key Objectives:

1. Gain trust

2. Make employees feel valued

3. Create a safe, collaborative environment

4. Cultivate growth

5. Relentlessly enable employees

A relentless focus on these objectives demonstrates to your team, in no uncertain terms, that you genuinely care about their well-being and truly have their best interests at heart. While the consultant in us might want to make this more complicated, it’s that simple—make them feel like a relevant part of something bigger, and you will ignite passionate and productive behavior in your organization. We’re saving that part for later, since the rest of the book dives into it.

Below, we offer a Servant Leader framework—based entirely on research results—to describe how Servant Leaders directly influence employees’ behaviors and how those behavioral changes impact business outcomes.

How does Servant Leadership influence employees and drive business outcomes? A Framework

Think about it. How would your own work be different if you felt useful and valued, free to be yourself and speak candidly about difficult issues, empowered to make “executive” decisions whenever it makes sense, with a boss you completely trust who is vested in your growth and success, and works relentlessly to help the team succeed?

Figure 2 shows a simplified version of a Servant Leadership framework offered by the University of Virginia business school personnel who completed a comprehensive review of Servant Leadership research. As you might suspect, and as shown in the middle box in Figure 2, Servant Leadership positively influences employee attitudes and behaviors in many ways. Research shows employees working for Servant Leaders are more committed to the team or company and engaged in their work, more likely to help colleagues and fix problems, more empowered to take calculated risks and make level-appropriate decisions, and feel “safe” to speak up, try new approaches, and make mistakes. Feeling safe at work—or having “psychological safety”—has a particularly indelible impact on individual and team behavior. In fact, in their landmark “Project Aristotle” study, an internal Google research team found that psychological safety was the most critical determinant of successful teams.

Figure 2

Accepting that Servant Leadership positively influences employee attitudes and behavior in the ways outlined above, it’s not difficult to see how a team or organization with a culture characterized by a prevalence of these constructive behaviors would yield better business results than, let’s say, the typical culture experienced in a Fortune 500 company. The box on the right in Figure 2 lists some of what the research shows are the indirect effects of Servant Leadership on actual business outcomes. Studies have shown that employees working for Servant Leaders are less likely to miss work, tend to stay with the company longer, and are more intent on delivering high-quality products and ensuring positive customer experiences. When employees’ behavior is buoyed by psychological safety instead of fear of negative consequences, they innovate and find better solutions to challenging problems.

More Evidence That Servant Leadership Yields Business Results

In 2008, the Cleveland Clinic, a large and complex healthcare system, launched a new People Strategy to address concerningly low employee/caregiver engagement levels (43^rd percentile of peer hospital systems) and patient satisfaction scores (25^th percentile). The centerpiece of the new strategy was a Servant Leadership model programmatically linked to and woven into other key HR initiatives and processes. They made Servant Leadership training required for all new hires, purposefully integrated reinforcing Servant Leadership messages and content into other key engagement programs and training material and began to include Servant Leader metrics in performance evaluations. By 2013, employee engagement increased from the 43^rd to the 87^th percentile among peer healthcare systems while patient experience rose from the 25^th to the 80^th percentile.

A University of Chicago-Illinois study of nearly 1,000 employees of 71 Jason’s Delis across 10 cities offers pretty compelling evidence in a retail setting. The study found that stores run by Servant Leaders had higher performance (6%), higher customer service (8%) and lower employee turnover (50%).

In 2004, Art Barter bought Datron World Communications, a company in the red with $10MM in annual revenue, vowing to implement a Servant Leadership model in every corner of the organization. By 2011, annual revenue had increased 18 times to over $180MM, with healthy profits and strong financial metrics. In a 2014 interview, Barter attributed the growth and success of the company to the increased productivity and need for fewer employees under a Servant Leadership model.

James Sipe and Don Frick, in their book Seven Pillars of Servant Leadership: Practicing the Wisdom of Leading by Serving, analyzed the average 10-year stock returns of eleven companies known for prioritizing Servant Leadership. They compared these returns with those of the twelve companies featured in Jim Collins’ Good to Great and the overall returns of all 500 S&P companies. The average return for the S&P 500 companies over the 10 years ending in 2005 was 10.8%; for Good to Great companies, it was 17.5%; and for companies applying Servant Leadership principles, it was 24.2%.

These examples clearly illustrate the significant impact that Servant Leadership has on business outcomes.

There are a lot of corporate bullies who claim to be Servant Leaders. Other leaders would say they are Servant Leaders but would struggle to define it. Other leaders I’ve spoken with have grown tired of the ambiguity and, frankly, the perceived irrelevance of Servant Leadership to their operations.

Yet given the compelling case for Servant Leadership, it becomes imperative to not only understand what it is, but also how to recognize it in the trench warfare of corporate politics, ever-changing org charts, and a historically complex and dynamic business climate.

My next series of posts will work through the specific manifestations of a Servant Leader who is making it practical. The Practical Servant Leader, if you will. These will be defined based on the University of Virginia macro study referenced above and made more transparent and colorful through brief stories that we hope will drive things home for you as well as encourage and inspire you to action.

You will make things even more interesting and compelling with your comments along the way, so please consider this a challenge and encouragement to launch and join our conversations.

So, stay tuned and get involved. We’re in for a fun ride!