The Gargantuan Servant Leadership Effort We Need

Ok y’all - let’s be clear: we all collectively need a gargantuan Learning&Development effort to get to servant leadership if we want hybrid and the new reality to succeed and we need it YESTERDAY.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t plan to be up in arms for my first article of the year when we should be all goodness-and-light and preoccupied with resolutions and team kickoffs but here we are - something I read last week really got my goat. “The Era of Empathy” was heralded as having arrived for leaders and much self-congratulation and navel-gazing ensued.

Following this FT article entitled “Turbulence ahead new leaders required” there was a myriad of positive reactions towards how leadership needs to change and become more human - all indisputably true. The kicker? All framed as an empathy exercise.

Yes, Servant Leadership takes empathy but saying we are “welcoming the era of empathy” feels like we are doing our employees a favour when really all we are doing, is course-correct to what the economical imperative is now in the hybrid and Agile reality - which is that command and control is not working and to course-correct, we have to get more serious and do a real gargantuan L&D push not simply advise micro-managers to become a bit more compassionate.

The article is borderline in its framing but the LinkedIn polls around it feel, quite frankly just plain condescending “Do you feel your leader is a bit more empathic? Are they more understanding? More permissive?”