Transparent Leadership Beats Servant Leadership
tl:dr: Parenting and leadership is similar. Teach a man to fish, etc. I spent a couple of years managing a team, and I entered that role – like many – without knowing anything about how to do it. I tried to figure out how to be a good manager, and doing so I ended up reading a lot about servant leadership. It never quite sat right with me, though. Servant leadership seems to me a lot like curling parenting: the leader/parent anticipate problems and sweep the way for their direct reports/children. To be clear, this probably feels very good (initially, anyway) for the direct reports/children. But the servant leader/curling parent quickly becomes an overworked single point of failure, and once they leave there is nobody else who knows how to handle the obstacles the leader moved…
