About halfway through a recent session, my party’s newest “hire”—an underpaid goblin intern named Crispy—stopped dead in the doorway of a suspiciously damp corridor and said, “Boss, with all due respect, this hallway smells like it eats people.”
The party leader, a paladin who manages fear the same way some managers handle PTO requests (by ignoring the words and hoping the problem goes away), clapped Crispy on the shoulder and said, “Come on, buddy. Growth happens outside your comfort zone.” Then he shoved the little guy forward like he was tossing a pork chop to a guard dog.
The hallway did, in fact, eat people. Crispy survived, but only because the ‘hallway’ turned out to be a Corridor Maw—an enormous aberration that impersonates architecture—and spat him back out once it realized he was mostly made of fear and pocket lint. The paladin congratulated him on “learning resilience,” and Crispy quit ten minutes later, declaring he’d rather be unemployed than be the sad little mascot on a motivational poster about “embracing discomfort.”
Watching that scene unfold, I realized I’d seen this exact thing happen at actual jobs. Swap the Corridor Maw for a broken pallet jack or a toxic customer, and it’s the same story: the person with the title thinks leading means pushing others into danger, then acting surprised when people stop trusting you.
If you strip away the fantasy monsters and questionable choices, the paladin’s real mistake wasn’t just the act of shoving Cripsy down the hallway. It was the belief that leadership is something. It was the belief that leadership is something you do to people. That’s the entire philosophical gap Servant Leadership tries to bridge.
Robert Greenleaf—the guy who coined the term back in the 1970s—looked at the usual command-and-control approach and basically asked, “What if the leader’s job isn’t to stand at the top of the pyramid shouting orders, but to stand at the bottom holding the whole thing up?” It’s a simple idea that keeps getting treated like witchcraft in the modern workplace.
In Greenleaf’s model, the leader’s power comes from serving the growth, well-being, and autonomy of the people they’re responsible for. Peter G. Northouse puts it even more plainly: a servant leader focuses first on the needs of others and then on the organization’s goals, trusting that long-term results follow when people feel supported rather than managed like a barcode.
This isn’t “be nice to everyone” or “let the loudest voice win.” Servant Leadership has more backbone than that. It’s a deliberate choice to center empathy, listening, ethical judgment, and shared responsibility. If traditional leadership is about directing traffic from a tower, servant leadership is walking into the intersection with a lantern and saying, “I’m here—tell me what you need so we can get all of us through this chaos in one piece.”
And unlike the shove-happy paladin, servant leaders actually stop to ask why someone’s afraid before tossing them into danger.
The reason Servant Leadership keeps showing up in management books, HR seminars, and every halfway-decent leadership course isn’t because it just sounds wholesome. It’s because it works. At its core (and as I’ve written about before), it’s built on Amy Edmondson’s concept of psychological safety—the idea that people learn, speak up, and take smart risks when they don’t feel like every mistake is a trapdoor under their feet. A servant leader builds that environment on purpose. They listen before they act. They check assumptions before they hand out blame. They understand that fear might get people moving, but trust is what gets them moving well.
When teams feel safe enough to tell the truth, everything gets easier. You hear about the broken process before it becomes a catastrophe. You find out someone is drowning long before they quit in a blaze of Slack messages. And people start solving problems with you, not in spite of you. That’s the operational magic. Nothing mystical—just humans doing better work because they’re treated like humans.
But here’s the catch: Servant Leadership falls apart fast when someone treats it like a personality makeover instead of a discipline. Every workplace has seen the knockoff version—the boss who tries to “serve their team” by avoiding conflict until the whole department is on fire. Or the manager who thinks listening means nodding sympathetically and then doing whatever they were going to do in the first place.
Servant Leadership isn’t martyrdom, people-pleasing, or being everyone’s emotional support wizard. It requires boundaries. It requires accountability. It requires telling hard truths in ways that don’t humiliate the person hearing them. Greenleaf himself warned that service without responsibility doesn’t make you noble—it just leaves you holding the torch while everything burns behind you.
The real servant leaders aren’t the ones who kneel dramatically and declare their devotion. They’re the ones quietly removing obstacles, clearing paths, and building the kind of team where even the goblin interns feel safe saying, “Hey, this hallway wants to eat me.”
If you’ve ever run a game for more than five minutes, you already know how fast a table can turn into a small-scale civilization teetering on the brink of collapse. Somebody starts arguing about spell duration, someone else is stress-eating pretzels, and your barbarian has decided now is the right time to start interrogating a shopkeeper who you absolutely did not write a backstory for.
Trying to muscle your way through that chaos with pure authority never works. At best, you get temporary compliance; at worst, you get the same energy my goblin intern had when he announced he’d rather look for a new job than be shoved into one more Corridor Maw wearing its ‘totally normal hallway costume.’
Servant Leadership fits the GM role surprisingly well because your real job isn’t being the boss—it’s being the foundation. You listen to what your players actually enjoy. You adapt your prep when the table veers off the rails. You hold firm boundaries when needed (“No, Derek, you cannot seduce the gelatinous cube”), but you do it in a way that keeps the game safe and fun rather than punitive.
A good GM clears obstacles, not autonomy. They design challenges, not punishments. They ask, “What will help this group have a great session?” instead of “How do I make them follow the story I wrote?”
This mirrors what Greenleaf describes as the leader who grows people rather than directing them. It’s the same leadership cycle I try to teach: reflect, communicate, adapt, connect, care.
A servant-leader GM doesn’t drag players down a predetermined hallway. They light both ends so people can see where they’re going—and choose to walk with you instead of away from you.
Servant Leadership sounds noble right up until you’re in a real workplace, staring down a broken workflow, a short-staffed shift, and someone who’s on the verge of walking out because they haven’t eaten since sunrise. That’s where theory either falls apart or turns into muscle memory.
In practice, it starts with listening—real listening, not the corporate theater version where someone pretends to take notes and then proceeds to do exactly what they were planning to do before you opened your mouth. You ask better questions. You check your assumptions. You make it safe for people to tell you the thing that’s hard for you to hear.
You also hold the line in a way that doesn’t turn accountability into a public flogging. A servant leader doesn’t hide behind the phrase “We’re a family here”; they say, “Here’s what needs to happen; how can I help you make it happen?”
When I trained new drivers, the ones who came in terrified didn’t need a pep talk—they needed someone to stand with them, walk them through the process, and stay curious rather than judgmental. Most people grow fast when you stop treating fear as laziness and start treating it as information.
The longer I do this, the more I think Servant Leadership is basically deciding you won’t be the Paladin who shoves the goblin into the traps. You carry the torch because someone has to, but you don’t cling to it like a relic of your authority. You hold it up so everyone can see where they’re going. Some days you’re lighting the path. Some days you’re doubling back for the person who fell behind. Either way, you’re in the treacherous hallway with them—not yelling instructions from the comfort of safety.
If you like this nonsense, good news: I’m turning all of this into a much bigger thing. Roll for Insight is where the book, the blog, and the workshops all live. Come take a look.