Servant Leadership Isn’t About Being a Doormat, It’s About Being the Door

Somewhere along the way, servant leadership picked up a reputation for being soft. Not thoughtful. Not strategic. Just soft. 

People hear “servant” and picture someone running for coffee while everyone else gets to lead. Like the goal is to be so helpful that your own spine turns to Jello and your DMs become a dumping ground for everyone else’s problems. 

That’s not servant leadership. It’s self-erasure with a to-do list. 

When I was working on my Master’s, I ran into the same confusion. The term seemed cringe. It sounded like corporate double-speak for “do all of the emotional labor and never ask for a raise.” But then I read Leadership: Theory and Practice by Peter Northouse, and it started to make sense. The model isn’t about letting people walk all over you. It’s about helping them move forward without making yourself the center of every decision. 

Servant leadership works because it’s built on actual accountability. You’re still responsible for the outcomes, you just don’t accomplish them by barking orders or hoarding control like a middle manager afraid of being replaced by someone with better time management and a decent pair of headphones. 

Robert Greenleaf, who coined the term, said the real test of servant leadership is whether the people you’re leading grow. Not whether they hit their quarterly metrics or zero out their inbox. Whether they grow as people. That’s a hell of a bar, but it’s also the only one that matters if your leadership is supposed to mean anything after you’re gone. 

When I owned a bike shop, I didn’t know Greenleaf from a bottom bracket. What I knew was that yelling never made a kid faster at fixing a flat, and micromanaging every tune-up left me too burnt out to deal with the stuff that actually mattered. So I taught. I handed people tools. I explained stuff once and then backed off. If they got it wrong, I coached. If they got it right, I said thank you and let them keep doing it. 

I didn’t do that because I’m some visionary leader. I did it because it was the only way to make the chaos sustainable. It turns out that’s what servant leadership looks like in the wild. Not theory. Practice. 

The same thing shows up behind the DM screen. You ever try to wedge your party through your genius three-act structure, only for them to adopt a stray grung, burn down your main plot hook, and spend an entire session trying to steal coins from innocent NPCs in a bar? That’s what happens when you treat leadership like control instead of support. 

Good DMs build a world Great ones build a space where players feel like their decisions matter. They guide without choking the life out of the table. They create momentum, not mandates. 

That’s servant leadership, too. 

So no, it’s not about being a doormat, it’s about being the door. You dont get applause. You don’t get to be center stage. But you hold the frame. You let people move forward. And that matters. 

If you’re leading because you want to be the smartest person in the room, servant leadership will frustrate the hell out of you. But if you’re in it to build people up and leave things better than you found them, then this is how you do it without turning yourself into a puddle of resentment and unpaid overtime. 

And yeah, sometimes they forget to say thank you. Doors don’t get credit. 

They just work.