Servant Leadership

Recently, as I've been thinking more and more about The Tide, I've been wondering about what makes for a good leader. I've occupied several small leadership roles in the past, but if the hope is, at some point in the future, to lead an organization, it seems prudent to figure out what made great leaders great. So I've been doing some reading and some thinking and there's a pattern that keeps cropping up. And it starts, as with many things that come out of my mind, with categories of action.

Broadly, I've noticed that there seems to be five things great leaders do. The first four are:

1. Energize - drum up motivation, excitement, and energy in the people around them

2. Actualize - open up the pathways to allow that energy and motivation to turn into action

3. Drive Coherence - find ways to create synergies between people's actions in order to achieve great things

4. Stem Incoherence - root out and expunge activities that would obstruct progress and synergy

While certainly not comprehensive there's a kind of completeness to these four that I find lovely. It all begins with building up the energy and motivation required to take on the narrative any particular group might pursue. Great leaders have always been the kind of people who can stoke a fire in peoples' souls. While there is usually a nugget of that passion already present, it takes leadership to really light that tinder into something more. But once that fire has been stoked, without more fuel it will just burn out quickly. This then brings us to the second of the categories above - people need to have a means to actualize their energy. Good leaders have this laid out and ready to go. They don't leave people waiting but rather point them straight toward the gates. The best of leaders go even further and ensure that the path forward supplies all of the necessary ingredients for flow because they know that by creating manageably challenging work that provides people with a consistent cadence of success they'll be able to get the very best out of their followers and keep that fire stoked in their hearts. Sometimes this will include the training required to prepare people for the work. With these two categories of action they are able to stoke the fire within and then give it the fuel needed to burn steadily and consistently. As such, they create the individuals who, fundamentally, form the organization.

With people active and playing their part, a good leader's attention then turns to ensuring that nothing their followers do is done in vain. Indeed they want to make sure that the work done has the greatest impact possible. This is where our last two categories come in - by nurturing coherence and weeding out incoherence a leader is able to weave the work of many individuals into a rich and meaningful fabric. In contrast to the first two categories which focused on the individual, these two focus on the health of the group as a whole. By keeping a healthy eye on both of these levels the leader can ensure that the organization continues to progress and grow.

Now each of these four categories are really just a means to an end. So where is the end? Well, remember that I said that I've noticed five broad categories of action in great leadership. The fifth and final of these is narrative creation - great leaders craft a rich and meaningful narrative and it is this narrative that is the end to our means. I believe great leaders do this because they recognize two things:

1. Every other player in an organization has their hands full becoming an expert on their part to play and therefore must depend on someone else to become an expert on the whole.

2. They are the only ones receiving inputs from all parts of the organization and therefore are best placed to form drive consensus.

Therefore great leaders realize that their followers depend on them for the narrative. This leaves leaders with a moral imperative to build and maintain the best narrative they can because people are staking no small part of themselves in that narrative. In much the same way that we depend vitally on farmers for food, those in the organization depend vitally on their leaders for the narrative that will ensure their work was not in vain. This, in my mind, places a requirement on the leader that they be a servant to their people and not the other way around. For how else can they ensure that they are looking out for the best interests of all those involved?

Indeed this servant leadership idea extends beyond just the creation of narrative. Think back to our four categories above. When energizing people, is it more effective to energize out of fear or belief? Obviously working to motivate people positively is going to be far more effective at creating meaningful, long term energy. What about actualization? As already mentioned, people do their best work when they feel like they can have sustainable flow. Burning people out, putting them in bad working conditions, these kinds of things are simply counterproductive. Even promoting coherence and stemming incoherence fall into this line of thought. By working to make the group as coherent as possible (both internally and externally) they are preventing disappointment, uplifting people, and generally providing an environment in which people can thrive. All in all, the best leaders do their utmost to make sure that they've built a world that uplifts the individuals within it.

And indeed this is the best summarization of a great leader that I can think of - someone who works to build and actively grow an environment in which people can thrive by taking the role of servant leader. The narrative, the energizing, the actuation, the nurturing of synergies; all of these things are really just to serve the greater purpose of providing an opportunity for people to thrive and do great things. And that, at least to me, seems to jive pretty well with the whole spirit and intention of The Tide.