servant leader, peer leader

People who go for leadership...may be viewed as one of two extreme types. There are those who are so constituted physically and emotionally that they like pressure — seek it out — and they perform best when they are totally intense. And there are those who do not like pressure, do not thrive under it, but who want to lead and are willing to endure the pressure in order to have the opportunity. The former welcome a happy exhaustion and the latter are constantly in defense against that state.

- The Servant as Leader, Robert K. Greenleaf

Back when we lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, over 10 years ago and in what now feels like a separate lifetime, my wife and I used to volunteer at the Green Gulch Farm of the San Francisco Zen Center. We'd wake up at 4:30am, jump on our Vespa, and brave the cold, misty ride north into the Marin headlands to bake large quantities of muffins. After the baking was done, we'd join the morning meditation session: 40 minutes of silent sitting meditation in the upper hall. After that, there was usually - not a sermon, exactly; more of a guest lecture.

It may seem strange for a couple of avowed secular humanists to spend early weekend mornings baking muffins for a Zen Buddhist monastery. It was strange. I could explain how West Coast-style Zen Buddhism was largely an exercise in secular practical philosophy, stripped of concepts like Dharma and the various highly specific hells. The truth is, we found something useful in this: a chance to escape the hectic hustle culture of Silicon Valley, slow down, touch grass, and bake (and eat!) some goddamn delicious muffins.

And there were the lectures. I remember one in particular, discussing selfish and selfless acts. You might say: OK, I know where this is going; of course the Buddhist monk is going to extol the virtues of selflessness, and that's going to somehow lead into discussing servant leadership which is what I came here for, and why am I reading an anecdote about West Coast Zen Buddhism again?

That's not what happened. I distinctly remember one sentence from that lecture:

No true act is completely selfless.

The monk argued that if you perform a completely selfless act, it by definition has none of your self in it - and if that's the case, why are you doing it? It could just as easily be anyone else, and that's a shame; in denying your self as a valid part of your actions, you also offer none of that self, make no space for that self. Put another way, the person who only performs selfless acts is no longer living in the present moment: they are not there, not truly.

The idea of servant leadership, a central theme of Greenleaf's 1973 essay, is now widespread. Most tech leaders I know reference servant leadership frequently, and aspire to practice it to some degree, regardless of whether they have formal management responsibilities or not.

Here I'll explore servant leadership through a different lens - is it sustainable for the leader? We live in difficult times for those who view their work in more selfless, altruistic ways. Open source burnout is real and endemic, now more than ever as core maintainers drown under heaps of AI slop. (This is a serious enough problem that some projects now ban AI-generated pull requests altogether.) Leaders at US-based non-profit organisations identify burnout as a key operational risk.

I've seen this problem firsthand, both in my professional life and in my capacity as a board member of a local sports club. There is something alluring in the servant leadership dynamic, both to me and to other leaders I've worked and volunteered with: a sense that what you do matters to others, that your work directly contributes to helping those around you thrive and grow. But there is also something pernicious in that dynamic. If you spend all your time, effort, and cognitive resources serving others - will you thrive and grow yourself? What is left for not just your own basic needs, but your own goals and visions? Do you have the space to create goals and visions for yourself, separate from your organisational context, and to decide for yourself how those goals and visions can align with that context?

This leads me to ask: what does a healthier dynamic look like, one that balances what you give to others with what you give to yourself, and enables those you help to help you out in return when you inevitably need it?

One reference point I've found for this is peer leadership: the practice of leadership by those without formal leadership remit. Some examples that come to mind:

• The mid-level engineer who pushes for a key improvement to testing tools and process, taking the time to explain the benefits not just to other engineers but to their design and product colleagues. This person believes that improving test practices will enable product and design to help out more with QA testing, while reducing overall effort.
• The junior engineer who has been experimenting with AI-assisted engineering, and is always sharing their knowledge and learning journey with others. This person believes that, as they share what they learn, they will in turn learn from others and accelerate their own progress.
• The senior engineer who takes charge on a larger feature or architectural improvement: leading planning sessions and task breakdowns; helping assign work to teammates, and pairing with them to get them up to speed; seeing delivery through to launch. This person believes that this will achieve a better and faster result than doing all the work themselves, and that it will also show they're ready for more responsibility.
• The designer who works closely with engineers, and explains why they make the decisions they do in their design process - pointing engineers to best practices guidelines and helpful articles on usability. This person believes that this up-front investment in teaching will equip engineers to make better on-the-spot decisions around UX.

These examples have one common thread: they feature peer leaders who believe that their goals and visions are equally valuable as those of others around them. Not more valuable, not less: simply as valuable. They are part of the team, neither above or below it. They see an opportunity to use their knowledge, their energy, their drive, their self for mutual benefit, lifting the whole team up in the process - including themselves.

Back to the quote at top from Greenleaf's essay, The Servant as Leader: he identifies two types of leaders. The first welcomes pressure, and hews closer to the "natural leader" archetype. The second endures pressure for the chance to lead, which is closer to the "reluctant leader" archetype.

Even though popular portrayals of leadership often draw from this first category, in my experience as a leader (and observing leaders around me) by far most leaders are in this second category. Most people - including those in this second category - do not enjoy pressure, and respond to it with stress and eventual burnout. The research is unequivocal on this point:

Burnout results from chronic work-related stress.

Prolonged stress is terrible for our physical health, and also reduces our ability to act in a focused, creative, and collaborative manner. No wonder these reluctant leaders are "constantly in defense against that state".

This leads me to suspect that The Servant as Leader is written primarily with that first group in mind. For "natural leaders", the pressure is less of a danger. The real danger is that they become too wrapped up in chasing high-pressure situations, too self-absorbed in their own goals and visions, too distanced from their reports and peers. Servant leadership is an effective antidote to these tendencies.

We can think of leadership as having four focus areas:

Our natural leaders excel at leading up: this is often where the pressure comes from, and they seek it out like flowers seeking the sun. They're also often quite adept at leading in, being highly attuned to their own motivations and goals. Servant leadership balances out these inclinations, reminding these power-driven type-A extroverts (insert more stereotypes here) to think about others.

Reluctant leaders, by contrast, often excel at leading down. They feel pressure as a Bad Thing, and in this way are more like the people they lead. Leaders in this group either evolve ways to protect themselves and those they lead from this pressure, or they get out of the game (e.g. individual contributors turned managers turned individual contributors again). These evolved defense mechanisms become a kind of leading in: an awareness of what makes them thrive, and what doesn't.

These are broad generalisations, of course, but it explains something I've noticed. Reluctant leaders are often servant leaders by default - not because someone told them to be, not because they read it somewhere, but because that's how they exercise leadership if left to their own devices.

As a corollary: telling these reluctant leaders to be servant leaders further unbalances their inclinations.

Let's explore some failure modes of unbalanced servant leadership.

only down, not in / out / up

From Greenleaf:

[Servant leadership] begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first.

It's easy to take this too far: to only serve, and in doing so only focus on downwards leadership. This ignores the other three quadrants:

• in: the most important, in a "put your own oxygen mask on first" sort of way. You cannot lead effectively if your own basic needs are not being met. If you've ever lost sleep over work decisions / outcomes, felt like you can't keep on top of everything, snapped at someone in an off moment - you know what I'm talking about. (Spoiler alert: everyone in leadership has experienced all of these at some point. I've experienced all of them. It's what you do next that matters: setting boundaries, negotiating expectations, doing better by yourself and others.)
• out: peer leadership. Sharing lessons learned, getting those around you to agree on a direction, mentoring others (and receiving mentorship). This builds influence, equally as much as upwards leadership. You become known as an expert in some area, the go-to person for, I don't know, rapid prototyping or GenAI adoption or navigating difficult conversations. You learn from others, and show a willingness to learn.
• up: career-building and shit-shielding leadership. You can get by without doing this, maybe, but you won't grow. You'll also fail to protect your team from the gyrations of the beast above, and they won't like the resulting surprises.

Quick litmus test: when was the last time you took time to reflect on the week, shared a lesson learned / demo / presentation with your peers, or successfully challenged your manager?

compassion fatigue

Serving others means caring about them as people: not just as pawns in organisational politics, not as units of work or "resources" or whatever. People. Living, breathing, complex, full of weird motivations and hobbies and surprises - and occasional issues.

And issues will come up. Life events: births, deaths, kids getting sick, family tensions, medical surprises. Stress around that one offhand comment you made about an upcoming deadline, which they took completely seriously and now have been fretting about for a week. Being thrown onto a project with that one person who has an annoying habit that reminds them of the worst colleague they've ever had two jobs ago.

The servant leader's tendency to care, and to make caring the central part of their identity as a leader, can lead to compassion fatigue. This has mainly been studied in relation to mental health and trauma response professions, but really is applicable to any situation where you have responsibility for others going through tough times. If it happens frequently enough, and for long enough, it leads to burnout resulting from tension between:

• your perceived responsibility to care for those you lead;
• your exhausted mental / emotional capacity to care for those you lead.

Quick litmus test: do you frequently feel like you should care more than you do? Do you dread dealing with someone who's going through non-work difficulties, just because you don't want to hear about it anymore?

autonomy and support

There's often a different kind of tension between two concepts:

• autonomy: those you lead feel empowered to own definable parts of the work, and trusted to execute on those parts to the best of their judgment and ability.
• support: those you lead feel that they have clear direction in their work, and that they can come to you for advice and discussion.

In my experience, servant leaders - and especially new servant leaders - are prone to taking support too far. Giving direction and advice is one thing. Stepping in to take over the work when it's not going "fast enough"? Spelling out that direction in exhaustive detail to be "helpful"? Another thing entirely.

Quick litmus test: do you feel like you always have to step in to fix things or move them forward? Do people feel they have to clear every decision with you?

I've personally experienced these pitfalls at various points in my career. While I still appreciate the framing of servant leadership, I've come to understand it less as something I need to strive towards and more as something I already practice.

As I've started to work more with peer leadership techniques, it's already come with a sense of having more room. Room to grow myself; room to let those I lead take on more responsibility; room to let things fail and learn from it; room to pull some attention away from the team and put it towards the broader organisation. That's not to say I consider myself a "peer leader" now: it's another tool in the toolbox, to use as the situation calls for (or when I need a break from "servant leader" mode).

It's also just a different mindset. Leading as a peer means seeing your needs as equally valuable to the needs of those you lead: not more (as in our "natural leaders"), not less (as in our "servant leaders"), just equal. This often points to more creative solutions to problems: ones that create win-win situations, where you and those you lead all benefit. Compassion fatigue, starving teammates of autonomy in a desire to help, constantly putting out fires instead of trusting teammates to take charge: these are zero-sum games. Find better games to play. Make space for your self in the work.