Covey’s Servant Leadership

Covey argues that with the servant leadership concept, it’s all or nothing. You can’t espouse servant leadership and still have your managers running around setting goals and throwing carrots and sticks at people to goad them across a line in the sand.  And forget about performance appraisals.  The huge assumption underlying servant leadership is that the “followers” of the servant leader see the big picture and are committed to improving it.  In other words, they must be good organizational  citizens.  They must have both the work ethic that will prevent them from exploiting free reign, and the intrinsic motivation to function well in the absence of feedback.  I just don’t see these assumptions as being realistic in many industries.   If we are taking a workforce like this as the premise, why have we ever in history had managers in the first place?  I know, I know.  I sound terribly backward.  So Type X.  I love the philosophy of the servant leader, and I agree that leaders must be a resource for their teams, but do we really have to throw all performance measures out the window?  Our economy is extremely complex.  I think it would be very naive to assume that a particular leadership style is going to bring great results in every industry, every task, and every workforce.  I just don’t buy the one size fits all philosophy.

Advertisement