Stephan Schmidt - October 12, 2025

No Servant Leader

Be a leader, not a servant

A term I dislike a lot is servant leader. Not that serving is bad, neither is leader, but the combination leads managers astray and down the wrong path—especially in technology, managers like CTOs, VPs Engineering, and tech and team leads.

I was drawing upside-down org charts for a long time. I believe as a manager you should help everyone with their work, those that do the real work creating value for the customers, and those managing them. As a CTO, I was down in the trenches with the teams: all-nighters, 2 a.m. incident calls, hot fixes, servers that didn’t restart, tight deadlines because someone had threatened to sue us.

As a manager I have helped employees, put lots of effort into development, and enabled people inside my departments, direct reports, and others. People should be satisfied; they spend the majority of their time at work. Employees should be able to grow. And managers are responsible for making that happen.

Over the last years, more and more of my CTO clients see themselves as servant leaders. When working with them for some time, I recognize they are not leaders at all but servants. They do the job of their employees. They fill the gap if their employees are overloaded. They look out for every obstacle developers could stumble over. They are up to their necks stuck in operational work, not leadership.

Leadership is simple. A leader has a vision that is compelling, self-explanatory, and where people want to be. She weaves a story around her vision and then leads people towards it. Leadership is about leading people.

Many technology managers have difficulty leading. On one hand because they are too operational, on the other because they think leadership is bad. Telling people where to go is bad they think. People should make their own decisions based on facts, whereever they lead. They don’t want to tell people which direction to go. They might be introverts who do not enjoy jumping on a table telling people about their vision. Then the servant leadership meme comes along. And they are happy, because they can be a leader by being a servant, without leading, without telling people, in silence, and a servant they become.

The downside: they don’t lead and think this is great—because servant leader. The department zigzags, people feel disoriented and don’t know where to go and what to do. Everyone has their own idea about where technology should move. New technologies are introduced just to be discarded six months later. Rewrites happen. There is friction and the “leader” is drawn even deeper into decisions and meetings to align people. And they wonder why this is the case because they see themselves as leaders.

Leadership is simple. You have a vision and lead people there. You can help them go along, you can remove obstacles—or help them remove those themselves!—the important thing is to lead. Be a leader, not a servant.