Servant Leader meets Benevolent Dictator

Today I found myself in a bit of a discussion. An online debate on the topic of leadership styles – what could possibly go wrong? Why would I even join? Maybe it’s because I enjoy the topic of leadership styles, maybe I was bored. But nonetheless, it turned out to be quite an interesting 30 minutes.

Servant Leaders are cowards

Or so this particular online person claimed – let’s call them Joe, for sake of anonymity. I firmly disagree with this statement, as I tend to identify as a Servant Leader myself. I strongly believe that as a leader or manager, your main objective is to make your mentees succeed. Not vice versa. I believe Servant Leadership works because leaders don’t scale, but people do. I believe that Servant Leadership creates commitment, buy-in, and gives people a true sense of ownership. And as such, people tend to bring the best versions of themselves, and will keep growing.

But I decided not to bite just yet. I was curious about Joe’s perspective, too.

Leaders don’t have to be liked

Joe certainly knows how to please an audience. While ‘being liked’ isn’t too high on my list of personal objectives, I find that showing respect and being honest is a pretty surefire way to make people not hate you. So, was Joe just being extremely cynical, was he trolling, or was there more to it? I told him that I didn’t exactly share his perspective, and wondered where he was coming from.

Joe

As it turns out, Joe had just lost his job. The startup he had been with for well over a year simply ran out of runway. He worked his ass off for well over a year, and had nothing to show for it. “Worthless equity and gray hair”, as he claimed. He went on to explain why he thought the startup failed.

“I joined the slowest democracy on the planet”, Joe said. He went on to share examples where the Founder/CEO would endlessly try to reach some form of group consensus, trying to make everyone’s opinion matter, and trying to look for compromises. Just to keep everyone happy. But as a result, no decisions would be made. Nothing would happen.

They spent months dealing with conflicting ideas on architecture, neither of which they shipped. Meanwhile things were being reworked because “someone had a new idea”. Joe shared screenshots from their internal chats with me, and they showed utter chaos. No clarity, no direction, no decisions being taken.

“I don’t even care if a decision would be the right one, if he at least made a decision”. I was starting to understand Joe’s point of view here. While I think he was mis-labeling his old Founder/CEO as a Servant Leader, this Founder/CEO was a real people pleaser, and lacked the ability to unilaterally make decisions – something you need to be willing to do as a founder of a startup. Make decisions, make them quickly, learn from them, adjust, pivot, but make decisions.

My internal Benevolent Dictator

Joe said he didn’t think I was really a Servant Leader. I was able to see the need to make decisions, after all. Even at the expense of people ‘feeling empowerd’ or ‘team consensus’. So I couldn’t be a Servant Leader.

I told Joe how I applied my leadership style at various organizations, and how I believe it led people to grow above and beyond, while feeling valued. But I also shared that not everything needs to be a democracy. I’m not the CEO, but even if I were, there will be things that weren’t my decision. Things that just are. Things that just need to happen. And that’s also you role as a leader, Servant Leadership be damned.

No leadership style is perfect, and no leadership style works in every situation. Joe’s old startup clearly needed more of a Benevolent Dictator style. “But could you even do that?”, he asked.

It’s a fair question. Some leadership styles will come easily, some will go against the fabric of who you are as a person. In my case, I’m actually no stranger to the Benevolent Dictator role. If anything, it’s probably the leadership style I learned first. Early in my career, I would often find myself in incident response or other high-stress situations where whoever has the most relevant knowledge or insights gets to make the shots. And you need to make those shots quickly and clearly. I turned out to be good at doing that, and I became the go-to guy for leading incidents at several projects.

It wasn’t until several years (and some life experience) later, that I learned that my Benevolent Dictator needed a friendlier, more people-focused counterpart. A leadership style that works when everything is not on fire. A style that doesn’t put me at the center of a poorly-scalable universe. That’s when I started to discover (and subsequently adopt) other styles.

Flip the switch

I typically don’t operate in “Benevolent Dictator mode” these days. If you don’t end up in some massive outage or pressure-cooker engineering session with me, you’d never know the Benevolent Dictator existed. This raises another issue. If it’s important to be able to adjust your leadership style according to circumstances, it becomes essential to do so explicitly – especially when the switch is quite radical. People will respond a lot better to ‘Dictator You’ if they know it’s coming, and why.

In the end the Servant Leader and the Benevolent Dictator… are the same person.