By Luigi Morsa and Richard Maltzman
February 26, 2026
Leadership comes in many forms, and — as noted in the Forbes article “Servant Leadership Isn’t Self-Sacrifice — It’s A Self-Aware Strategy” — effective leaders know how to adapt their style to the needs of each situation. In recent years, servant leadership has gained significant traction. This philosophy challenged traditional hierarchical models by positioning leaders as supporters of their teams. At its core, servant leadership emphasizes attentive listening and prioritizing the needs of others [1].
For many years, we have witnessed the socalled topdown leadership, a model based on a rigid hierarchy in which decisions, direction, and strategy flow from senior leaders to the rest of the organization. Executives set the goals and define the processes, while employees at lower levels are expected to follow and execute. In recent years, there have been many voices promoting a shift away from command and control [2], but the shift to servant leadership has been anemic and slow.
Most recently, others have espoused servant leadership, exemplified by an article in Harvard Business Review entitled “How Humble Leadership Really Works” that argues topdown leadership has become outdated and even counterproductive. When leaders focus too heavily on control and outcomes—and not enough on their people—they inadvertently make it harder to achieve the results they want. The real key is helping individuals feel purposeful, motivated, and energized so they can bring their best selves to work [3].
It is worth noting that in removing obstacles, servant leaders often demonstrate their communications, negotiation, conflict management capabilities (all components of leadership – or Power Skills as PMI calls them [4]) because the obstacles (at least as seen by their followers) are often higher-level managers. This means the servant leader must speak truth to power and let them know they may be ‘hovering’ excessively.
Why Servant Leadership
Adopting the humility and mindset of a servant leader is one of the most effective ways to help individuals feel motivated and to remove obstacles. Servant leaders see their primary role as supporting employees as they learn and grow, offering both practical and emotional guidance. They actively seek out ideas and value the unique contributions of each team member. In doing so, they cultivate a learningoriented culture that empowers people to reach their full potential [3].
Importantly, research published on ScienceDirect (“The relationship between servant leadership and team innovation performance: Mediating effect of self-efficacy”) shows that organizations practicing servant leadership outperform others in employee engagement and retention. The study also found that servant leadership significantly enhances innovation selfefficacy, underscoring its vital role in fostering a culture of innovation [5].
Origin of Servant Leader (The Concept)
Robert K. Greenleaf first introduced and popularized the term servant leadership in his 1970 essay The Servant as Leader [6]. In this foundational work, Greenleaf describes the origins of the concept, explains what inspired him, and outlines the defining qualities of a servant leader.
As Larry Spears, CEO of the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, noted in an interview [7]: “Greenleaf credited his reading of Hesse’s 1932 book, Journey to the East, as the personal source of inspiration for coining the term ‘servantleader’ in his 1970 essay The Servant as Leader”.
In Journey to the East, the character Leo is an ordinary servant among many. The group functions well under his quiet presence—until the day he disappears. Only then do the others realize that Leo had been far more than a servant; he had been their true leader all along [8].
Servant Leadership in the Age of AI
Becoming a servant leader requires certain personal character strengths, but it also undeniably demands training, study, and a developmental journey that is strengthened through experience. It is worth noting, however, that some of the tools made available today through artificial intelligence—such as the one presented below—can certainly support this process.
Leo the Servant Leader is an AI-driven leadership advisor providing services in the format of AI Chat Online. This tool is designed by Phoenix Asset Management Partners Ltd (PAMP) to offers guidance and strategies grounded in servant leadership principles, strategic management, and adaptive learning [9].
The name Leo was explicitly inspired by the character in Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East, as stated by Gary Channon, CIO at PAMP [10]. Leo can provide tailored advice on managing organizational change, creating a customer-centric culture, or developing sustainable growth strategies by synthesizing knowledge from a wide range of leadership resources like Peter F. Drucker’s ‘Managing Oneself’ and Robert Greenleaf’s ‘Servant Leadership’ [9].
For completeness, it is interesting to highlight that “Managing Oneself” is a seminal essay first published in 1999, where Drucker argues that in the modern knowledge economy, individuals—not companies—are responsible for managing their own careers and development. Success comes from understanding yourself deeply: your strengths, how you work, what you value, and where you can make the greatest contribution [11].
We personally tested Leo the Servant Leader 5.2” [12] and we asked it directly: “How can Leo help a project manager who would like to act as a servant leader?” Below is the full answer by Leo:
A project manager who wants to act as a servant leader is shifting from “driving tasks” to enabling people to succeed. As Leo the Servant Leader, here is how I can practically help a PM make that shift—day-to-day, not just philosophically.
From our experience applying the “Leo the Servant Leader” approach, the following practical techniques can help translate servant leadership into everyday project management practices.
1. Reframe the Role: From Controller to Enabler
How Leo Helps
- Clarify the servant-leader mindset: “My job is to remove obstacles, grow people, and create clarity.”
- Translate this into PM language: scope, risk, timelines, and governance still matter—but they serve the team, not the other way around.
Practical Shift
- Instead of “Are you on track?” → “What’s slowing you down, and how can I help?”
- Instead of owning all decisions → create clear decision rights and empower ownership.
Rooted in Greenleaf’s The Servant as Leader: leadership begins with serving first.
2. Design Projects Around People, Not Just Plans
How Leo Helps
- Coach the PM to build plans that reflect human reality, not just Gantt logic.
- Balance delivery discipline with empathy and psychological safety.
Tools and Practices
- Stakeholder maps that include team energy, skill growth, and motivation
- Risk logs that explicitly track organizational and behavioral risks
- Capacity planning that accounts for learning curves and burnout
Aligned with Flyvbjerg’s How Big Things Get Done: realism beats optimism.
3. Enable High-Quality Decision-Making
How Leo Helps
- Introduce structured thinking tools so the PM does not become a bottleneck.
- Teach when to facilitate decisions rather than make them.
Examples
- Use Six Thinking Hats to depersonalize conflict and speed alignment.
- Apply “disagree and commit” principles without eroding trust.
- Coach the PM on when to slow decisions (irreversible) vs. speed them up (reversible).
This builds credibility and maturity in the team.
4. Build Trust Through Clarity and Integrity
How Leo Helps
- Guide the PM in setting clear expectations, not micromanagement.
- Reinforce ethical leadership: transparency on trade-offs, risks, and constraints.
Servant-Leader Behaviors
- Share bad news early.
- Protect the team from unnecessary noise and politics.
- Give credit publicly, address issues privately.
Echoes Drucker’s Managing Oneself and HBR leadership principles.
5. Coach for Growth, Not Just Performance
How Leo Helps
- Help the PM shift from “resource management” to talent development.
- Encourage short feedback loops and learning moments within the project.
Practical Habits
- End retros with: “What did we learn about how we work?”
- Match stretch tasks to individual development goals.
- Normalize experimentation and learning from small failures.
Inspired by Peak and Trillion Dollar Coach: performance follows growth.
6. Anchor Delivery to Purpose and Value
How Leo Helps
- Help the PM constantly reconnect tasks to customer and business value.
- Prevent teams from drowning in process while losing sight of impact.
Techniques
- Simple Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) or outcome statements per phase
- Regular “value check-ins”: Who benefits from this, and how?
Aligned with “measure what matters” and customer-centric leadership.
7. Provide a Personal Operating System for the PM
How Leo Helps
Work with the PM to define their:
- Leadership values
- Default stress responses
- Decision-making strengths and blind spots
This allows the PM to lead with self-awareness, a cornerstone of servant leadership.
In Short:
Leo helps a project manager act as a servant leader by:
- Shifting mindset from control to service
- Turning servant leadership into concrete project management practices
- Strengthening decision-making, trust, and learning
- Balancing delivery discipline with human-centered leadership
If you would like, I can:
- Create a servant leader project manager checklist
- Help design a servant-leadership project kickoff
- Coach through a real project challenge you are facing
Just tell me where you would like to start.
Final Thoughts
What is the Best Leadership Style?
The only honest answer—it depends on the situation! This will always remain true. The complexity of today’s working environments makes it impossible to define a single leadership approach that fits every context or every moment. It is the manager’s experience that determines which style is most appropriate, and transitional phases are not only possible but often necessary.
What truly matters is developing awareness—studying, exploring, and understanding the strategies that can support us. In this regard, servant leadership stands out as a powerful approach with significant advantages. It is also closely aligned with Agile principles, representing an ideal leadership model for Agile environments because it emphasizes team support, collaboration, and autonomy.
The benefits of servant leadership are clear, but they can only be realized if the approach is implemented effectively and in the right context.
Potential Challenges of Servant Leadership
When applied without clear boundaries or in the wrong environment, several leadership can present challenges such as:
- Ambiguity in leadership. A leader who is overly serviceoriented may appear insufficiently directive, and in times of crisis, the team may perceive lack of clear guidance or timely decisions.
- Slower decision-making processes. Seeking consensus and practicing active listening can slow down urgent decisions, the implementation of changes, and responses to critical situations [13].
In highly hierarchical or competitive environments, servant leadership may be perceived as a sign of weakness, a lack of assertiveness, and insufficient command authority [14].
That is why the choice to adopt servant leadership must be carefully considered. It may require time, and in certain moments it might even be necessary to pause or temporarily suspend it. In any case, as we have seen, today there are tools— including AI—that can offer valuable support.
References
[1] Robinson, Cheryl. “Servant Leadership Isn’t Self-Sacrifice—It’s a Self-Aware Strategy.” Forbes. May 5, 2025. https://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylrobinson/2025/05/05/servant-leadership-isnt-self-sacrifice-its-a-self-aware-strategy/
[2] MacKay, Gordon. Evolving Project Leadership: From Command and Control to Engage and Empower. Association for Project Management, 2021
[3] Cable, Dan. “How Humble Leadership Really Works.” Harward Business Review. Apr 23, 2018. https://hbsp.harvard.edu/product/H04AJO-PDF-ENG
[4] Project Management Institute. Pulse of the Profession® 2023: Power Skills—Redefining Project Success. 2023, https://www.pmi.org/learning/thought-leadership/power-skills-redefining-project-success
[5] Zhang, X., Y. Li, and J. Wang. 2024. “Servant Leadership and Employees’ Innovation Self-Efficacy: The Mediating Role of Psychological Empowerment.” Heliyon 10 (3): e23754. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e23754
[6] Greenleaf, Robert K. 1970. The Servant as Leader. Indianapolis: The Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Applied Ethics
[7] Dittmar, James K. 2006. “An Interview with Larry Spears: President & CEO for the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.” Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies 13, no. 1: 108–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/10717919070130010101
[8] Frost, Natasha. 2019. “The Roots of ‘Servant Leadership’ Management Culture Date Back to Hermann Hesse and a Young Hillary Clinton.” Quartz, February 11, 2019
[9] “Leo the Servant Leader.” AI Chat Online. Accessed December 29, 2025 https://aichatonline.org/gpts-2OToJOWsoa-leo-the-servant-leader
[10] Channon, Gary. “Leo the Servant Leader an AI CEO Advisor.” LinkedIn. December 2024 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/gary-channon-1902821a_chatgpt-leo-the-servant-leader-activity-7155918243730243586–XIu/
[11] Drucker, Peter F. “Managing Oneself.” *Harvard Business Review*, January 2005. https://hbr.org/2005/01/managing-oneself
[12] https://lnkd.in/eCu7gyCy, link provided by Channon, Gary in his LinkedIn post (see Ref. [8])
[13] Murphy, M., 2024. The negatives of servant leadership. Leadership IQ https://www.leadershipiq.com/blogs/leadershipiq/the-negatives-of-servant-leadership
[14] Uhlir, K., 2024. What is the main criticism of servant leadership? KurtUhlir.com https://kurtuhlir.com/what-is-the-main-criticism-of-servant-leadership/
Luigi Morsa is a Team Leader, Project Manager, and Aerospace Engineer who has been working in the aircraft industry in Germany since 2012. He holds a Ph.D. in Space Fluid Dynamics from the University of Naples and was a Visiting Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan (2011). Over the course of his career, he has gained substantial experience in leading teams within highly challenging and demanding environments.
His passion for project management has led him to contribute chapters and case studies to several books by Dr. Harold Kerzner, the globally recognized pioneer in the field. These include Project Management Case Studies (Wiley, 2017, 2022), Innovation Project Management (Wiley, 2019, 2023), and Global Project Management (Wiley, 2026).
Together with Richard Maltzman, PMP and Master Lecturer at Boston University Metropolitan College, Luigi co-authored the chapter 10 Lessons Learnt from Irresponsibility in Project Management for the De Gruyter Handbook of Responsible Project Management (De Gruyter, 2023).
In April and June 2023, Luigi delivered online lectures on the “Boeing 737-Max Case Study” for the courses Portfolio and Program Management and Project Value Strategies at Boston University.
In 2018, Luigi was a speaker at the Project Management Institute EMEA Congress in Berlin, where he discussed the complexity of the aircraft industry market, with particular emphasis on aligning product development with customer needs. He also presented at the 18th Annual Project Management in Practice Conference in Boston (2024), showcasing the latest advancements in artificial intelligence software for project and innovation management. In November 2024, he spoke alongside Richard Maltzman at the International Project Management Day hosted by International Institute for Learning, delivering a talk titled Human-AI Synergy in Practice: From Traditional to Innovation Project Management.
Since 2019, Luigi has been a regular contributor to the IIL Blog, publishing articles on topics such as employee engagement, innovation, team management, risk management, conflict resolution, Agile methodologies, and artificial intelligence.
Richard Maltzman considers himself a ‘pracademic’ – currently (and for the past 10 years or so) Master Lecturer at Boston University, an author, and a consultant, providing clients with deep learning experiences and improved results. Richard “retired” from a 40-year career in telecom, mainly in engineering and project management. At the University level, and in consulting, his focus is always on converting weaknesses into strengths while teaching clients/students how to apply learned skills to everyday situations. In 2010, he co-founded EarthPM, LLC, a company devoted to integrating sustainability thinking into project management. His integration of a holistic, global view of project management has resulted in international consulting and worldwide speaking engagements (Costa Rica, South Africa, Malaysia, China, Mexico, Canada, India, Italy, The Netherlands) in which the focus is the long-term success of projects, with an eye towards ecological and social systems. His blog at PMI’s projectmanagement.com (People, Planet, Profits, and Projects) site has become very popular, and he has also started a podcast, “B’yond PM” on Spotify.
A co-author of seven books on project leadership, including the recent Great Meetings Build Great Teams, and the upcoming GreenPMO, He is a former VP of Professional Development for PMI Mass Bay (the Boston area PMI Chapter), and was on the Review Committee for the 7th Edition PMBOK® Guide, helping to assure that sustainability thinking finally made it into the Standard and the Body of Knowledge.
Rich has presented on Sustainability, Project Meetings, Change Management, and PM Competency in Italy, Malaysia, Canada, South Africa, Costa Rica, China, recently keynoting at the PMI Summit Bulgaria in Sofia.
Published Works (co-authored): Green Project Management (2011 – Winner of PMI’s Cleland Award for Literature). Project Workflow Management: A Business Process Approach (2014), Driving Project, Program, and Portfolio Success: The Sustainability Wheel (2015), Bridging the PM Competency Gap (2017), How to Facilitate Productive Project Planning Meetings, with Jim Stewart (2018), Great Meetings Build Great Teams, with Jim Stewart (2023). In 2025, Rich is publishing two co-authored works, AI Powered Leadership, with Vijay Kanabar, Dave Silberman, and Loredana Abramo, and a Kindle workbook called Planning Your Project: An Hands-On Guide to AI Integration, with Vijay Kanabar and Keyur Hindocha.
