Servant Leadership Without the Slogans: Leading by Giving

If you searched for servant leadership examples, you've probably already seen the slogans. Leaders serve. Leaders eat last. The upside-down pyramid.

I don't have a problem with any of those ideas. My problem is that slogans don't change behavior. A manager can nod along to "leaders serve" in the morning and guard every scrap of credit by the afternoon.

So I want to come at this from a different place. In my experience, the thing standing between most managers and generous leadership isn't a missing technique. It's a belief. And once you see that belief clearly, giving stops being a nice value on a slide and becomes a skill you can actually build.

The belief that quietly kills servant leadership

In the workshops I run, sooner or later someone brings up the idea that to lead, you have to be a little corrupt. That good people don't get to the top, and the ones who do got there by being immoral.

It happens every single time.

For years I was sure I knew why. It's convenient. If leading requires corruption, then I don't have to grow. I don't have to put in the hard work of making my vision real. I don't have to share that vision with someone and risk hearing no. And on top of all that, I get to feel morally superior to the people who do try. I'm not avoiding responsibility. I'm keeping my hands clean.

That's a very comfortable story. And it has a price. Some of the people with the highest standards, the ones who could bring the most good to a team, step away from leadership exactly because of it. Their morals become the reason they never take the seat.

"I'll give more when I have more"

Later I noticed a second thing feeding the belief. I call it the distance bias.

Most people have never carried serious leadership responsibility, so they judge it from far away. And from far away, generosity looks easy. Someone gives one percent of their income and is sure that if they earned much more, they'd give ninety. Meanwhile their last two raises came and went and the percentage didn't move. The same amount of money, which means they're actually giving less.

It's easy to believe that giving $30,000 out of $300,000 is simple while giving $300 out of $3,000 is hard. You can only believe that if you've never earned the $300,000.

Money is just the clearest illustration. The same thing happens with time, energy and attention. The manager who says "once this quarter calms down, I'll really invest in my people" is making the same promise.

I made it too. Years ago an idea from Jim Rohn hit me hard: if giving a thousand out of ten thousand feels hard, giving a hundred thousand out of a million won't feel any easier. My private lie had always been "first I take care of myself, then I'll be generous." And even when things objectively got better, the feeling of not having enough stayed. There was always another rung to reach first.

Taking care of yourself is too small a goal

Long before that, there was an evening that taught me how little I actually need.

I was walking home with a friend after a two-hour mixed martial arts session, every muscle aching. We stopped at the corner store like we did almost every day, bought a big bottle of orange juice, and split it into two plastic cups. After the first sip he said something like, "This is pure happiness." I said that happiness really doesn't take much.

Then we did the math. Trainer, competitions, gear, and a bottle of juice after every workout. We landed on about $150 a month and named it "$150 for Maximum Pleasure."

Obviously we ignored rent, bills and everything else adult life brings. But the idea stuck with me to this day: getting to the point where your own needs are covered well enough is not that hard.

Since then I've had months when I couldn't make rent, and a day when my card was declined on a six-dollar lunch. The conclusion still holds. Looking after yourself is a goal that's too small. It doesn't inspire you, and it doesn't inspire anyone who follows you.

A servant leadership example I'm not proud of

This next part is where I got it wrong the longest.

As a kid, if anyone asked for half my sandwich, they got it. Friend or stranger, didn't matter. But that instinct never reached the things I felt short of as an adult. Recognition. Status. Being heard.

For years I wouldn't share the stage with anyone. I wouldn't feature other people in my newsletter or on social media. I wouldn't even put an article by someone else on my website. The one thing I felt I never had enough of, people who listen to me, was the one thing I refused to hand out.

What I learned is almost annoying in how simple it is. Generosity has to be practiced exactly in the area where you feel scarcity. Not where it's easy. There.

The moment I started letting other people lead courses and stand on stage in my name, in front of tens of thousands of people, the scarcity disappeared. I felt free. I got to help other people live out what they were meant to do. And I finally had people to share the whole experience with.

This matters for teams because scarcity is contagious. A leader who's focused on what he lacks tends, often without noticing, to make the people around him feel the same lack. In that state nobody spots opportunities and nobody has energy. The way out is to put your attention on what you already have, and insist on sharing it.

Giving is not giving in

Now the obvious objection. "I already give too much. I'm exhausted."

Fair. Generosity that loses its balance turns into people-pleasing, and a people-pleaser eventually has nothing left. Drained, without meaning, without resources, and with a feeling that nothing can change.

I hear the swing that follows again and again, in courses and in coaching. Someone who has spent years pleasing everyone tells me, "Sometimes I wish I could be like the guy who only looks out for himself." Most people live their whole lives moving between those two poles: pleasing everyone, then bursts of selfishness.

I worked with a business owner who was going through a family crisis that took most of his time. I told him that what he was doing deserved real appreciation. Then I told him what I see so often in hard periods: people serve everyone except themselves. They answer every customer and stop selling. They do everything for others and nothing for their own work, and when the crisis ends they're completely empty. My suggestion was to decide, on purpose and ahead of time, what his few available hours were for, instead of letting them get swallowed.

Giving isn't erasing yourself. There's a more mature position: knowing the tree has more than enough apples, so you can pick for yourself and for others without fear. That's the place I'd want every manager to lead from.

What a leader actually gives

So what do people on a team need a leader to give them?

Mostly, a feeling. That they're okay. That they're respected. At its highest level, a leader can make people genuinely feel special, significant, and a real part of something big and worth building.

Think about watching something really funny on your own. You laugh, and your eyes automatically look to the side for someone to laugh with. When you remember nobody's there, the laugh fades. People who have enough of something almost always want to share it. That's the natural direction. Scarcity is what blocks it.

And a lot of giving isn't spoken at all. After more than ten years as a vegan, I've never asked anyone to stop eating animal products. Many people around me cut back or stopped anyway, because they saw someone living it. Leading by example is a gift, too.

One more piece: gratitude. When a leader stops seeing reality as something that happens to him and starts seeing it as something that happens for him, "thank you" becomes a natural part of how he leads.

Train it like any other muscle

The main thing I'd tell an HR or L&D lead about servant leadership is this: generosity isn't a personality trait some managers are born with. Just like responsibility and self-discipline, giving is something you develop deliberately.

My Purpose-Driven Management workshop is one practical place to start. Its starting point is that people already carry their own sense of purpose, so a manager doesn't need to invent one for them. The job is to discover what really drives each person, beginning with the interview and onboarding and continuing through every weekly one-on-one, and then tie that to the team's goals. Managers also learn how small changes in wording can turn a frustrated employee into a motivated one. For a manager who wants to lead by giving, that's what giving looks like on a Tuesday afternoon.