The most powerful leader is a servant leader

"Even in our post-modern 21st century, the phrase "servant leadership" sounds like an oxymoron, a contradiction in the terms. We're conditioned in cultures that divide the world between masters and slaves, masters being there to tell slaves what to do, and slaves just having to execute – to serve the masters. Indeed, if the terms have changed, from masters to managers and from slaves to employees, team members, followers or just "people", we can't refrain from thinking that leaders are not here to serve, but to be served. However, this oxymoron might represent the key for developing successful firms not in the future, but right now. What the most rigorous academic research discovers study after study for the past 30 years is that servant leadership is associated with organizational performance in all dimensions, from innovation to sales growth, and from people well-being to, ultimately, profit growth – all that above and beyond all other forms of leadership. We may want to embrace those findings sooner rather than later. As a participant in an executive course told me recently, "with people older than 30, conventional leadership may work, but with millennials, servant leadership is not just an option, it's the only way to go". Accordingly, this chapter aims to offer a primer on servant leadership, starting from its origins, debunking a few myths, and detailing what it is really about and how it works. This chapter builds not only on decades of academic literature, including some research of my own, but also on a managerial experience in a variety of contexts."