Comment by marcus_holmes

Came here to say this. What he describes is not really servant leadership.

Servant leadership is more or less just the concept that the leader's job is to make sure the team are working to their full capacity. This is in contrast to authoritarian leadership which says that the team's job is to do whatever the leader tells them to do.

A lot of leaders have a problem with the "servant" in servant leadership, there's an ego hit in the title that doesn't sit well with people who have more authoritarian ideas about what leadership is. That doesn't seem to be the author's problem, though.

The author's idea of transparent leadership seems centred around the idea that the team doesn't need a leader, in that the leader should be trying to make themselves redundant and should be training everyone else to be able to function without them. I agree that this is an absent manager.

If they succeed in making themselves redundant, the team will have selected another, informal, leader. Possibly a dynamic set of leaders who each take up leadership in different circumstances. Humans just do this, it's how we work together.

I think the author just doesn't want to be a leader at all, and would prefer it if they could go back to solving technical problems. This is perfectly valid. Management isn't for everyone.

I suggest the author looks at Dyad Leadership [0] where the management role is split into two parts; one part provides the leadership role (setting the vision, coaching, quality, behaviours, etc) and the other provides the administration function (approving holidays, organising events, handling HR, etc). This is used in the healthcare industry a lot, and works in the right situation. It might work for the author because they're obviously providing leadership but don't seem keen about the management part.