Leading Through Service

Leading Through Service: Embracing Servant Leadership

In today’s fast-moving, remote-first tech landscape, leadership is no longer about command and control — it’s about support, empowerment, and trust. This is where servant leadership stands out. Originally coined by Robert Greenleaf in the 1970s, the concept emphasizes that the best leaders are those who serve first. They focus on the growth and well-being of their teams, rather than their own authority.

Recent research reinforces this connection. A 2025 case study published in Procedia Computer Science examined the role of servant leadership in agile organizations, showing how it supports autonomy, adaptability, and trust-based team dynamics. These findings are especially relevant to remote and tech teams. Read the full study.

In my 30+ years in tech — and particularly in the past six years leading remote teams — I’ve seen how adopting a servant leadership mindset fundamentally changes a team’s dynamic. It encourages autonomy, psychological safety, and accountability. When people feel supported, not scrutinized, they do their best work.

Servant leadership means flipping the traditional pyramid. Rather than positioning yourself as the one in control, you act as the foundation. Your job becomes clearing obstacles, buffering pressure from above, and creating a stable, encouraging environment. In practice, this can look like shielding your team from unnecessary meetings, advocating for them in leadership discussions, or simply checking in to understand how they’re really doing.

In remote settings, where informal support is often absent, servant leadership fills a vital gap. It helps replace the lost “osmotic” communication of physical offices with intentional structure and presence. By checking in regularly (without micromanaging), encouraging open discussion, and explicitly valuing psychological safety, you create a space where junior and senior developers alike can grow.

That concept of psychological safety — the ability to speak up, ask for help, or admit mistakes without fear — is critical. It’s especially relevant in distributed teams where misunderstandings or silos can easily form. Servant leadership fosters that safety by replacing fear with trust, and ego with empathy.

In future posts, I’ll explore how this mindset informs practical decisions: how we structure meetings, how we handle failure, and how we distribute credit. But it all starts here — with the decision to lead through service.

— James