Leadership Levels: Servant Leadership in a Task-Oriented Workplace

Stacy Dreyer

Background

Deserae holds a senior director position at a nonprofit that has seen three different CEOs in the ten years she’s been with the company. Each CEO has employed a different leadership style and implemented various changes at the company, from introducing new product lines intended to better serve the company’s mission to restructuring teams in an effort to deliver more to their customers faster. Throughout all of these changes, the company’s mission has remained the same, and it’s a mission that Deserae and almost everyone else in the company firmly believes in. Furthermore, although the company has seen more than its fair share of upheaval in the last decade, the pay is competitive, and the benefits packages have only gotten stronger over the years as each CEO has introduced new benefits like flex time and tuition assistance to retain talent. But while the mission, salary, and benefits packages keep most people from looking seriously at other jobs, change fatigue has taken its toll on Deserae’s team.

Leadership Levels

The current CEO is very task-oriented, with company goals that trickle down so that each employee has clearly articulated team and individual goals at the start of every fiscal year. Deserae’s team consistently hits most of their goals, but where once they came to meetings excited to share and showed initiative in taking on new work, they now have more of a “punch the clock” mentality. More than one team member has expressed the feeling that they are simply crossing items off a to-do list while waiting for the next round of changes.

Deserae took the free leadership classes the previous CEO had offered, and the servant leadership model really spoke to her. Before she had worked in management, she served as a mentor to new hires, and it had always been one of her favorite parts of the job. She took the mentorship role seriously, and now she feels that servant leadership may allow her to reconnect with the things she loved most, like community building and helping her team members grow in their jobs. She is determined to build her team back up and turn them into leaders themselves. With approval from her direct supervisor, Deserae adopts a servant leadership model for her team.

Over the course of six months, Deserae changes her approach with her team. For the most part, her team seems more energized; she gets high marks during routine surveys to gauge how well the team is adjusting, and the team clearly trusts her. On the flip side, because she has instituted a new openness in an effort to demonstrate empathy and trust, the team never holds back. Meetings sometimes turn into sessions in which grievances with the company are aired freely, and it’s not rare for team members who had entered meetings feeling good to leave those meetings feeling stressed or disgruntled. Moreover, some team members are having difficulty marrying Deserae’s style of leadership, which is all about building up the team and letting them lead, with the CEO’s style, which is much more task-oriented.

Discussion Questions

Is servant leadership a strong or weak option for use in a company that has seen a lot of changes (and experienced a lot of change management) in a relatively short amount of time? Why?

What are some potential benefits and drawbacks to varying leadership styles within an organization?

License

This case study is licensed CC BY-NC 4.0.