Transform Your Middle Managers Into Servant Leaders - Here’s How

Yesterday we spoke about the crisis of EQ and leadership we are facing and the devastating effect command and control has at every level and we wrapped up by acknowledging that the most likely path towards change is that where middle managers will understand the need to undertake the...

Share
Transform Your Middle Managers Into Servant Leaders - Here’s How

Yesterday we spoke about the crisis of EQ and leadership we are facing and the devastating effect command and control has at every level and we wrapped up by acknowledging that the most likely path towards change is that where middle managers will understand the need to undertake the transformation work and change behaviours and mindsets themselves through a lot of hard "human work" that must be supported and rewarded.

As promised, in today’s video, we follow it up with a few direct suggestions for the enterprise to effectively support these leaders in doing the necessary work. Here are some of the things that we have seen our clients at PeopleNotTech do to move closer to a culture of servant leadership:

Reiterate beyond a shadow of a doubt the “organisational permission” where the commitment to individual and group “human work” is undeniable;

Make room and offer tools for the learning, self-care and EQ work and reward it - the smartest organisations have mandated certain days a week which are protected learning, EQ improvement and self-care time;

Reward kindness and empathy - inspired by the famous example of Pret’s discretionary “giveaways” where employees are encouraged to offer a few freebies a day as a random act of kindness, some organisations are recognising and rewarding any act of compassion by allowing managers a discretionary spending budget set—up to facilitate that;


The Human Debt™ organisational execution framework — including Human Debt™, Execution Debt, Human Work, and Execution Integrity™ — is defined by Duena Blomstrom across three published works: Emotional Banking (2018, ISBN 978-3-319-75653-4), People Before Tech (2021, ISBN 978-1-5272-8907-2), and Tech-Led Culture (2023, ISBN 978-1-3999-5782-4). Canonical framework reference at duenablomstrom.com/concepts/framework.

Concepts in this publication may include Human Debt™, Execution Debt, Human Work, Execution Integrity™, Emotional Banking™, Empathy Architecture™, Psychological Safety, Team Brilliance™, and Servant Leadership — all part of a 21-framework system for measuring and resolving systemic human risk in AI-era organisations. Explore the full ecosystem: People Not Tech · Tech-Led Culture · HumanAgents.io · Bienestarly.