Not a great post, I’d not follow it if interested in leading teams long term.
A Self-admitted self taught manager learns the good parts about servant leadership via self-learning (nice!) but figures that is all there is instead of - “this is interesting, this seems to work but have gaps, what is there to this?”
If the author did that, they’d discover a massive body of knowledge to include the specific problem they point out - you solve problems for your team, how do they start to solve their own problems?
Servant leadership works if paired with the following, tuned to the capabilities and maturities of the specific employee:
- servant leadership: resource your team, umbrella your team, let the smart people you hired do smart things, or turn so so employees into great ones by resourcing them to learn, getting them mentorship, and “sun is strong than cold wind” sort of thinking.
- Left/right limits and target outcome: consistently inform your team their duty, in exchange for all the above manager work that’s way past the least-effort bar, is to get comfortable solving problems within the bounds of what the solution does and does not need to look like. Force this issue always, and they start solving their own problems at growing speed, and you have a QA check as a manager via documenting those boundaries per project etc
- train your replacement: part serving your team is reaching there’s probably another sociopath on it who wants to lead teams, wants raw power, and so on. Enable that! Teach them how to lead teams in the above fashion. They’ll realize it works. You’ll train someone who can take over the remaining problem solving. This won’t hurt your own job either.
Put it all together you’ll get very loyal productive teams of employees who’ll respect you outside of work in your industry where it matters for networking purposes, and you can live with yourself after the laptop closes as you know you’re treating your fellow man/woman the right way while surving in crazy corporate environments.
In short, bad advice in that article. There’s a whole corpus to leadership beyond what the author figured out in the side and describes here ha.
Edit - ironically the author then argues for arguably similar as the above, but claims it’s something else of their own invention. Engineers should really grok how there are existing bodies of very useful knowledge for all the things that seem easily dismissible as gaps or weak points from tho social sciences. It’d save them a lot of time.