I have been formally trained in a leadership style called servant leadership. It’s a method of leadership that focuses on supporting the individuals being lead. I have a strong affinity for this style of leadership and I like to think that I’ve established a good bit of success through it. My general notion is that your business is only as healthy as your team. Consistent, long term success can only be achieved by a consistently supported team.

With that said, I’ve found that I’ve been acting more as a transformational leader for the last year. This feels appropriate given how my team has grown, but I had to shift my role so that I could continue to serve my team. I thought I’d take a moment to document my need to transition to a new leadership style to address a very specific risk to my team: burnout.

The need for a new leadership style

I’ve found that Servant Leadership is a great style that’s usable in many contexts. You almost never go wrong with building up your team. They are the ones that do the real work that creates value. Listening to them and empowering them and their growth directly leads to the realization of greater value creation in the future.

Servant Leadership is also generally a pretty obvious means of leadership. Once you’ve created rapport with your team and learned how to listen to them, many of your tasks are bound up in accurately identifying needs and responding. When you’re listening and responding, you’re not only empowering your team, you’re also creating new leaders.

However, the business goals changed and I needed my team to change with it. I recognized that my team needed to buy-in to our short, middle, and long term goals to be successful. I could recognize that because of my conversations with them in my role as a servant leader. But how do I create that buy-in?

Business Change as a Catalyst for Leadership Change

In the last two years, I grew a team of three engineers into a team of nearly thirty. Our increase in workload was greater than the growth in staff numbers. Servant leadership was the right type of leadership to grow our capacity without having to keep our numbers aligned with increased load. However, somewhere around the point that we grew to fifteen engineers, we saw a potential for additional business opportunities that were fueled by increased team growth.

Let’s just mention that there are differences between growing a team and growing a business. Both may be organic, but business goals can frequently be directly aligned with team goals – “You’re doing great! Let’s do more of it!”. When business goals grow, they can depart from team goals. This misalignment can lead to burnout.

Burnout in a team is often a result of team members feeling like they aren’t contributing to a larger goal. The misalignment of the individual expectation and larger work often results in feelings of inadequacy or feeling unseen. Burnout is a sincerely difficult problem that can destroy teams. It should be addressed head on.

Transformational leadership is one approach that can address certain forms of burnout. It focuses not necessarily and the service to the individual but in alignment of the individuals expectations and the business goals. This can be hugely beneficial to a team in the midst of change.

When the business goals shift, the team needs to be brought along. As mentioned above, you run a risk of team burnout when they begin to feel the disconnect between what they want to do and what the team needs them to do. Transformational leadership directly addresses this risk by attempting to guide teammates to understanding and internal motivation.

In the end, I felt that the best service I could give to my team was to help them continue to grow their careers. I didn’t want any of them to feel like we were leaving them behind. Their success allowed us to grow our company and goals; they deserve to share in that growth. However, I had to grow into a different leadership style to create the space for my team to feel like they were growing along with the business. Transformational leadership felt like the appropriate response. It’s worked out so far.