During my career, I’ve worked with different types of CEOs, Division Chiefs and Regional Presidents–basically the person who is ultimately responsible for the success of the company or region. I felt lucky to be around them because I got to see what it was like to be “in charge.” My dream was to be in charge, and so what better way to see what it was like than to be around people who were “in charge”? 

Honestly, the first half decade of my career, I struggled to really understand what their role in the company was. Clearly at the earliest stages, I thought being the CEO meant being in charge , and also making a lot of money. But then I met CEOs who were running startups and would not draw a salary and other C-suite officers who struggled to get anything done because nobody respected them. Then I matured a bit and thought the role of a CEO was to make all the tough decisions and take the responsibility when things go wrong–”the buck stops with me” mentality. While this is true, this is only part of the role of a CEO and I’ll argue that it’s not the primary role of a CEO. 

Then I became exposed to some phenomenal leaders who were leading non profit organizations that were dependent on a volunteer workforce rather than a paid employee workforce. I saw how willing people were to show up day-after-day for a reasons that wasn’t for the money they were earning. It was for the impact they were making. This is when I began to really study what it meant to be a leader. 

I confidently say that at some point in our lives and careers we’ve had an encounter with the word “leadership”. Whether it was a conversation with a colleague, an interviewer asking about our leadership skills, or one of the many other opportunities that bombard us on social media. Truthfully, I felt eluded by the definition of leadership for a while and currently I define it as the ability to guide and influence someone to a common goal or destination. 

It seems vague doesn’t it? With that definition provided, I want to discuss one style of leadership that I truly believe works. I believe it works in the workplace and I believe it works in our home life. 

You’ve probably noticed something interesting about the most effective leaders you know. They spend more time asking questions than telling people what to do. Most of the time, they are deeply involved in the work alongside their teams, and not just delegating from behind their desk. They spend a considerable amount of time checking on their employees to be sure that each employee has what they need to perform their best. They put the employee’s well being high on the list of important benchmarks because they understand that without a healthy workforce, the business is going to suffer. 

This isn’t weakness or lack of ambition—it’s servant leadership, and it might be the most powerful leadership approach for building businesses that last.

To new CEOs, I offer that understanding servant leadership matters because it shapes how you’ll build your team, serve your customers, and eventually work with a COO. I want us to explore together, what this means for your journey of building a business that serves its people well and leaves a lasting legacy.

What Is Servant Leadership, Really?

At its core, servant leadership flips the organizational chart upside down. Instead of employees working in the company to do what you need them to do, servant leaders empower employees to do what they need to do by serving the needs of the employees first, and ensuring the employee has everything they need to succeed in their position. They lead by serving first, not by commanding first.

Robert K. Greenleaf, who coined the term in 1970, made this concept popular through Hermann Hesse’s story “Journey to the East.” In the tale, a servant named Leo supports a group’s journey through menial tasks and spiritual encouragement. When Leo disappears, the journey falls apart. Years later, the narrator discovers Leo was actually the leader of the sponsoring organization—he had chosen to serve rather than command.

This story captures the essence of servant leaders being servants first before being leaders – as you the word servant is literally positioned before the word leader in “Servant Leader”. They have a natural desire to serve, then make a conscious choice to lead. This differs fundamentally from people who seek leadership for power and authority.

But let’s be clear about what servant leadership isn’t. It’s not being a doormat. It’s not avoiding tough decisions. It’s not letting poor performance slide. Instead, it’s using your leadership position to help others become their best selves while achieving organizational goals.

The Core Principles That Make It Work

Servant leadership isn’t just a nice philosophy—it’s built on specific principles that guide daily actions and decisions.

Deep Listening

Servant leaders listen with the intent to understand, not to respond. They create space for employees to share ideas, concerns, and aspirations. This isn’t passive listening—it’s active engagement that seeks to understand what people really need to succeed.

In practice, this looks like putting down your phone during conversations, asking follow-up questions, and remembering what people tell you. When someone comes with a problem, you first seek to understand their perspective fully before jumping to solutions.

Genuine Empathy

Empathy is the ability to see situations from others’ perspectives and trying to understand how you would feel if you were in their position. Servant leaders cultivate this skill because they understand that people aren’t just resources—they’re humans with complex lives, motivations, and challenges.

This shows up in how you respond to mistakes, how you design policies, and how you communicate changes. When layoffs are necessary, empathetic leaders feel the weight of those decisions and handle them with care, not just efficiency.

Acceptance and Growth

Servant leaders accept people as they are while believing in who they can become. They separate the person from the person’s performance. When they offer feedback, it’s honest yet maintains respect for the person as an individual and a human being.

This balance is delicate. You might need to tell someone their presentation skills need work, but you do it in a way that builds them up rather than tears them down. You see potential and invest in developing it.

Intuition and Pattern Recognition

Experience develops intuition—that gut feeling about decisions, people, or situations. Servant leaders trust these instincts while remaining humble enough to know they might be wrong. They use intuition as one input among many, not as absolute truth.

This might mean sensing when a team member is struggling before they say anything, or recognizing when a seemingly good strategy doesn’t align with your values. You take this into consideration but verify with data and dialogue.

Self-Awareness

You can’t serve others effectively if you don’t understand yourself. Servant leaders invest in self-awareness, understanding their strengths, weaknesses, triggers, and biases. This awareness enables authentic leadership and helps reduce the probability for their blind spots to harm others.

Regular reflection, feedback from others, and sometimes professional coaching help develop this awareness. When you know yourself, you can lead from a place of authenticity rather than ego.

Persuasion Over Position

Instead of pulling rank–which is the lowest level of leadership–servant leaders build consensus through persuasion. They explain the ‘why’ behind decisions, invite input, and work to get genuine buy-in rather than mere compliance.

This takes more time than commanding, but it builds stronger commitment from everyone involved. People generally support what they help create. And also when you need to make unpopular decisions, the trust you’ve built through persuasion helps people accept them more easily because they know you didn’t make the decision lightly.

Big Picture Thinking

While handling daily operations, servant leaders don’t lose sight of the vision and purpose. They balance immediate needs with long-term vision, helping others see how the work they are doing helps to color in the big picture.

This means painting vivid pictures of the future while keeping feet firmly planted in present realities. You help people understand not just what to do, but why it matters.

Anticipating the Future

There’s a saying “leaders see further, faster”. This means weighing the probability of potential outcomes  before they unfold. Servant leaders develop this skill through experience, observation, and learning from others. They make decisions today with tomorrow in mind.

This might mean investing in employee development before you desperately need those skills, or building systems that will scale before your growth happens and make those skills critical. You act on future needs, not just present pressures.

The Benefits (Beyond Feeling-Good)

Servant leadership isn’t just about being nice—it delivers tangible business results that show up on your bottom line and in your culture.

Engagement That Drives Performance

When people feel genuinely cared for and supported, they bring  more of their whole selves to work. They aren’t just there for the money, and don’t just complete tasks; they more willingly innovate, collaborate, and go beyond expectations. Research consistently shows that engaged employees deliver better results across every metric that matters.

This engagement shows up in lower turnover, higher productivity, better customer service, and increased innovation. People who feel served by and cared for by their leaders naturally serve customers better. 

Building Sustainable Culture

Servant leadership creates cultures that outlast any individual leader. When serving others becomes embedded in how work gets done, the organization begins to develop resilience that survives leadership transitions, market changes, and growth challenges. 

These cultures attract top talent who want meaningful work, not just paychecks. They retain people through difficult times because employees feel connected to something bigger than quarterly earnings. These are the types of organizations that still get things done when the CEO is out of office on vacation–something I believe you as a CEO desires for yourself!

Customer Success Through Employee Success

There’s a direct line from how you treat employees to how they treat customers. Put in simpler forms, if you treat employees poorly, you are showing them it is okay to treat customers poorly. Also to help with perspective, as a CEO, your employees are also your personal customers. 

Servant leaders understand this connection and design organizations where employee wellbeing is high on the list because they know that there is an ultimate correlation to customer satisfaction.

The Honest Challenges You’ll Face

Now that we’ve spent time looking at the upside of servant leadership, let’s be real—it isn’t easy, and it comes with legitimate challenges you need to understand. 

The You Problem

Let’s start with the You problem. You are human and you will have stressful, horrible, and nearly impossible situations that drain your will power to want to serve anyone. People are also unpredictable and unreasonable. You could do everything the right way for employees and they still do something completely wrong and nonsensical. 

How do you lead as a servant leader then? 

The solution isn’t black and white, but it will require you to lean more into grace and humility and not to succumb to your emotions, which are valid. 

The Perception Problem

Some people, especially those who grew up in cultures where power and control are important, might see servant leadership as weakness. They might try to take advantage of your serving nature or dismiss your authority.

The solution isn’t to abandon servant leadership but to be clear about expectations and consequences. You can serve people while maintaining high standards. In fact, helping someone improve their performance is a form of service.

The Confrontation Challenge

Servant leaders can sometimes struggle with necessary confrontation. The desire to serve and support can make it tempting to avoid difficult conversations or tough decisions.

But avoiding confrontation isn’t serving anyone. Sometimes the most serving thing you can do is to have that hard conversation, to make that unpopular decision, or to hold someone accountable. The key is doing it with care and respect.

The Time Investment

Building relationships, listening deeply, and developing people takes time—lots of it. In a world obsessed with efficiency and instant results, servant leadership can feel frustratingly slow.

This is where long-term thinking matters. The time invested in serving your team pays dividends through lower turnover, higher performance, and stronger culture. It’s not going to feel efficient in the moment but it will be highly effective over time.

The Recognition Gap

Servant leadership may be misunderstood or undervalued by those who prioritize more traditional western leadership styles and metrics such as power, authority and financial performance because servant leadership is work that is often done behind the scenes, enabling others to succeed rather than seeking spotlight. 

In organizations that reward individual achievement over team success, this can feel thankless. You need to be okay with others getting credit for successes you enabled. Your reward comes from seeing people grow and the organization thrive, not from personal accolades.

Why Your Future COO Must Be a Servant Leader

When you eventually hire a COO or any employee, servant leadership becomes even more critical. The COO role specifically, by its very nature, is about serving others’ success because the COO is an orchestrator. 

The Ultimate Support Role

COOs exist to make everyone else more effective. They remove obstacles, provide resources, streamline processes, and create conditions for success. This is servant leadership in its purest form—using executive power to serve the organization’s needs.

From my perspective, a COO who seeks the role for power or prestige will fail. The job requires someone who genuinely finds satisfaction in enabling others’ success rather than seeking personal glory.

Behind-the-Scenes Excellence

Unlike CEOs who often represent the company publicly, COOs typically work behind the scenes to make sure that operations run smoothly, teams have what they need, and strategies become realities.

This requires someone comfortable not getting constant recognition, someone who measures success by the performance of the organization as a whole rather than personal visibility. Servant leaders naturally gravitate toward impact over recognition.

The Organizational Glue

COOs bind strategy to execution, departments to each other, and vision to reality. This connecting role requires seeing the organization as an interconnected system where serving one part serves the whole.

Servant leader COOs excel at this because they naturally think about how their actions impact others. They make decisions considering ripple effects across the organization, not just local optimization.

Developing Your Servant Leadership

Whether you’re building your own servant leadership capabilities or preparing to hire leaders who embody these principles, here’s how to develop this approach.

Start With Self-Reflection

Ask yourself some hard and uncomfortable questions and be honest with yourself in your answers. Why do I want to lead? What brings me joy in leadership? When do I feel most fulfilled? If your answers center on personal achievement rather than enabling others’ success, you have work to do. 

And it’s okay that you have work to do, but at least you know. Like I said at the beginning of this article, I used to want to be CEO and in “leadership” positions because I wanted to be in charge. It took a lot of effort to shift that perspective and honestly, it’s still something that I have to be intentional about doing. 

The pressures of business can pull you toward command-and-control. The intentional reflection is what helps pull me back to service. 

Practice Active Listening

In your next meeting, focus entirely on understanding others rather than preparing your response. Ask questions that go deeper. Acknowledge what you heard by summarizing it and ask the person to confirm the accuracy of your summary. 

Make this a practice, not just an exercise. Set reminders to check: Am I really listening or just waiting to talk? Am I seeking to understand or to be understood?

Invest in Someone Who Can’t Pay You Back

Identify someone on your team with potential and invest in developing them. It doesn’t have to be a massive investment. It can be small like meeting regularly to mentor them, or paying for a certificate course or a conference. 

Watch what happens when you genuinely invest in someone’s growth without expecting anything in return. The loyalty, engagement, and performance improvements often exceed any other investment you could make.

Build Systems That Serve

We will go into more detail about systems in other articles, and this exercise is not encouraging you to remove necessary structure and systems. It’s asking to review why the systems exist and what they are meant to serve. 

Look at your organizational systems and policies through a servant leadership lens. Are there policies in place that serve your people or just protect the company? Do your processes enable success or create barriers? 

Start making adjustments to systems and policies that don’t serve. Maybe it’s a vacation policy that treats adults like children, or an approval process that creates unreasonable inefficiencies. Each change signals your commitment to serving rather than controlling. 

Measure Differently

Traditional metrics found in western culture focus on individual performance and financial results. Consider adding metrics that matter to servant leaders such as employee engagement, development conversations held, obstacles removed, and success enabled due to someone else’s help.

What gets measured gets done. When you measure service, not just results, you create a culture where serving others becomes the path to success. Some people will try to game the system, but eventually they will realize that they actually like being a servant leader or they don’t and they will have to leave. Either way, the culture of serving is strengthened. 

Building Your Legacy Through Service

As a new CEO committed to building a business that matters, servant leadership offers a path to creating organizations that serve all stakeholders well. It’s not about being soft or avoiding tough decisions—it’s about using your position to enable others’ success.

I would go as far as to say that it’s highly likely that most of the companies we admire decades after their founding—the ones that created lasting value while treating people well—were usually led by servant leaders. They built organizations that thrived because people thrived within them.

Your choice to embrace servant leadership influences every subsequent decision. It influences who you hire, how you structure operations, what culture you build, and ultimately, what legacy you leave. When you serve others first, you create businesses that serve customers, employees, communities, and investors in meaningful and sustainable ways.

Start small. In your next interaction, ask yourself: How can I serve this person while serving our mission? Listen more. Invest in someone’s growth. Remove an obstacle. Make someone else successful.

Over time, these small acts of service compound into a leadership style that transforms organizations and lives. That’s the legacy servant leaders leave—businesses that succeed by helping everyone they touch succeed.

Whether you’re leading solo today or building toward a future leadership team, servant leadership provides the foundation for businesses that last. It’s not the easiest path, but it’s the one that leads to meaningful, sustainable success.

Ready to build a servant leadership culture in your organization? We help new CEOs develop leadership approaches that serve all stakeholders while building lasting businesses. Let’s explore how servant leadership can accelerate your journey from startup to legacy.