Is Servant Leadership Dead? Service With Standards

Two years ago I wrote that a great delivery lead takes a detour to buy ice creams for their team on a hot day. I stand by the ice creams. But the world has spent the time since deciding that servant leadership is soft, slow and out of fashion, and some of the criticism has a point. So this is the 2026 revision: what I still believe, what I got wrong, and what the research now lets us say more carefully.

What I Wrote in 2024

My original piece was a “good delivery lead, bad delivery lead” essay in the Ben Horowitz style. The heart of it: a good delivery lead serves the team. They remove obstacles, absorb noise from above, credit the team for wins, own the failures, and say “we” where a bad delivery lead says “they”. The ice creams were the closing image because service is often that small and that human.

I also warned about a failure mode a colleague of mine, Phil Parker, named perfectly: saviour leaders. People who serve in order to be needed, who rescue instead of enable, and who leave teams weaker and more dependent. That warning turned out to be the most important paragraph, and I under-developed it.

The Backlash since

The cultural weather has turned. Forbes ran a piece in late 2025 titled “Is Servant Leadership Dead?”, noting the style is publicly out of favour, with authority and speed back in fashion, even while the underlying needs (retention, culture, keeping good people) have not moved.¹

The academy sharpened its knives too. A 2025 exchange in Group & Organization Management put servant leadership on trial: critics argue the theory is fuzzy and its measurement weak, while its defenders point to meta-analytic evidence of robust links to follower performance, citizenship behaviour and trust.² Both sides are right. The evidence that it works is strong. The definition of what “it” is has been allowed to stay soft.

And soft definitions get abused. Servant leadership drifted, in too many teams, into being nice: conflict avoided, standards negotiable, everyone comfortable, nothing shipped.

The Correction: Service is not Niceness

The clearest thinking here comes from Amy Edmondson, whose 2025 work corrects the same drift in her own field. People took psychological safety to mean being nice and protecting comfort. Her response: psychological safety is candour, the ability to speak up about hard things, and it does not trade off against high standards. The two rise together.³

Swap the terms and the correction lands on servant leadership perfectly. Serving a team does not mean protecting it from difficulty. It means making it safe to be honest, and then holding the standard together. Her follow-up research with 27,000 healthcare workers found that this kind of safety mattered most under pressure, cutting burnout and turnover intent when resources were scarcest.⁴ Service, done properly, is a hard-times capability, not a fair-weather perk.

Brené Brown’s 2025 book makes the same argument from the practitioner side: grounded, steady leadership built on connection, discipline and accountability, as the alternative to the bluster currently in fashion.⁵ Note the middle word. Discipline.

What I Would Add now

Serve the outcome first, through the team. The 2024 essay could be read as team comfort above all. Wrong emphasis. The delivery lead serves the mission, and the team is how the mission gets done. Sometimes serving the team means an uncomfortable conversation about a standard that slipped. Saviour leaders duck it. Servants do not.

Enable, never rescue. My working rule now: push the work back to the people who own it, with support. Every problem I solve for someone is a problem they still cannot solve. This is harder than helping. It feels worse and works better. The test I use: before stepping in, ask “what would you do?” and wait. If you find yourself rescuing the same person more than once a week, you are not serving them, you are keeping them.

Serve visibly, lead audibly. I underrated this. A servant leader who only works in the background trains the organisation to believe the team leads itself, then wonders why the team’s obstacles never get executive attention. Speaking up for the team, loudly, is service too.

The evidence case, kept honest. When challenged, do not defend the label; defend the mechanism. Leadership engagement collapsed to 22% globally in Gallup’s latest data, and the organisations bucking the trend hold it near 79%, largely through how leaders are developed and supported.⁶ Teams do not quit styles, they quit relationships. That is the ground the research supports, and it is enough.

Still Buying the Ice Creams

The style wars will cycle. Authority is in fashion this year; it was in fashion in 2005 too. What does not cycle: people do their best work where someone removes their obstacles, tells them the truth, holds the bar, and notices them as humans on a hot day.

Takeaway: keep the service, add the spine. Serve the outcome through the team, make honesty safe, refuse to rescue, and defend your people out loud. And when it is 30 degrees and the sprint is grinding, you know what to do.

1. Is Servant Leadership Dead?, Forbes Books, December 2025. ↩︎
2. Servant Leadership: Strengths, Weaknesses, and a Path Forward, Group & Organization Management, May 2025. ↩︎
3. What People Get Wrong About Psychological Safety, Harvard Business Review, May 2025. ↩︎
4. In Tough Times, Psychological Safety Is a Requirement, Not a Luxury, Harvard Business Review, November 2025 ↩︎
5. Strong Ground: The Lessons of Daring Leadership, Brené Brown, September 2025. ↩︎
6. State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report, Gallup, June 2026 ↩︎