Leaders and Servants

“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you. In between, the leader is a servant.” ― Max De Pree

I bumped into an unhappy former colleague at an industry meeting a while back. He told me that the insurance world had changed, and that now claims executives were expected to practice something called “servant leadership.” He rolled his eyes as he emphasized “servant.” He seemed genuinely concerned but I suspected he, like most people, probably wasn’t entirely clear on what the term “servant leadership” meant. So I asked him to tell me more.

His CEO, fretting over lackluster results, decided it was time to transform the company’s operating culture and improve results by reducing the employee turnover rate and increasing customer satisfaction and persistency. He had hired a consulting firm to engineer a leadership team makeover, to move the group away from a “transactional” leadership mindset and into a “servant” leadership mindset. The firm was scheduled to be on site the following month.

“What exactly are you concerned about?” I asked.

“I don’t want to be a servant. I am a senior executive, a leader. My job involves establishing strategy, securing resources, attracting and developing good people, setting performance objectives, measuring performance, and delivering results.”

Of course, he had done some research and discovered Robert K. Greenleaf, who launched the modern servant leadership movement in 1970 when he published The Servant as Leader. He showed me Greenleaf’s paper on his phone, but at 27 pages long it was too onerous to be immediately useful. He read somewhere else that servant leaders believe in the concept of an inverted pyramid organization in which top management “reports” upward to lower levels of management and ultimately to front line employees.

“Imagine that—30 years in this business and now I am supposed to report to my employees? That’s ridiculous.”

He had another commitment, so we agreed to get together later that day to talk further. Curious, I pulled up the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership site:

A servant-leader focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong. While traditional leadership generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power by one at the “top of the pyramid,” servant leadership is different. The servant-leader shares power, puts the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible.

Larry Spears, CEO of the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, identified ten servant leader characteristics:

• Listening
• Empathy
• Healing
• Awareness
• Persuasion
• Conceptualization
• Foresight
• Stewardship
• Commitment to personal growth
• Building Community

Dr. Kent Keith, the former CEO of the Greenleaf Center, offered a definition of servant leadership that includes this explanation:

Greenleaf said that "the servant-leader is servant first." By that he meant that that the desire to serve, the "servant's heart," is a fundamental characteristic of a servant-leader. It is not about being servile, it is about wanting to help others. It is about identifying and meeting the needs of colleagues, customers, and communities.

Nothing particularly nettlesome so far, but what about the inverted pyramid?

Ken Blanchard, in Servant Leadership Revisited, argued the pyramid should be right side up for matters such as vision, mission, values and goals, but inverted when it comes to implementation or execution. His inverted pyramid has customers at the top and customer contact people right below them. The customer contact people are responsible for meeting customer needs, and the managers and executives below them on the inverted pyramid are responsible for helping the customer contact people succeed in doing that.

When I got back together with my former colleague later that day, I asked him to think about the ways in which he was responsible to his employees. In other words, what did he provide that they expected and needed from him? His list included strategic clarity, adequate tools and resources, fair and measurable performance objectives, timely and accurate communication, feedback opportunities, inspiration, trust, integrity, honesty, accountability, coaching and career development. We talked about the pyramid, and how responsibilities and expectations flow both ways, so he made a similar list of the things he expected and needed from his employees.

Finally, we looked at the Oxford Dictionary definitions of servant:

• A person who performs duties for others, especially a person employed in a house on domestic duties or as a personal attendant.
• A person employed in the service of a government. 
• A devoted and helpful follower or supporter

The first definition bothered him, the second didn’t apply, but he liked the third and agreed he definitely had a responsibility to be a devoted and helpful supporter of his employees.

I told him I thought he would probably have an easy time of it with the consultants because it appeared he was already thinking like a servant leader—even though he had never thought of himself in those terms.

“We’ll see,” he said. “Unfortunate choice of terms, though. Why couldn’t they have called it something less provocative?”

“Ask the consultants,” I suggested.



Dean K. Harring, CPCU, is a retired insurance executive who now enjoys his time as an advisor, board member, educator and watercolor artist.  He can be reached at dean.harring@gmail.com or through LinkedIn or Twitter or Harring Watercolors

The Consultants Your Boss Hired Are Here to See You...

If you are running an insurance claims operation, and your boss or the board brings in outside consulting experts to evaluate it, chances are you have a problem. Not just the problem the consultants are being called in to examine, but a pricklier, more personal problem--a perception problem. Someone with some clout in your organization apparently doesn't believe you are capable of doing whatever it is the consultants are going to be doing.

That puts you in a tricky situation, one that demands thoughtful action. First of all, don't try to convince your boss or the board that you are an expert and that you don't need outside assistance to handle the situation. Don't waste time arguing that your training and years of experience managing claims qualify you for the challenge. Do understand that the decision has already gone the other way, and any attempt you make to reverse it looks like resistance, concealment, perhaps even cluelessness.

Think about it. If you argue that there is no problem, or the problem is outside of claims, or that every claims operation has the same problem, you risk being classified as stubborn, change averse, and overly comfortable with the status quo. If you protest that you have already diagnosed the problem and designed a solution, realize that others don't see it that way. They want another opinion, another perspective. Maybe they don't like your plan, or perhaps it conflicts with some other course of action they want to pursue. It could be they don't quite know what the problem is, but there's something troublesome in the loss numbers, and they want to understand why it is happening and what to do about it. Or, worst case for you, they might just be looking for evidence and justification for overhauling your organization and/or escorting you out the door.

The reason really doesn't matter, but your response does. As activist and author Jerry Rubin once said: "The power to define the situation is the ultimate power." You have the power to assist in framing the inquiry and shaping the outcome by being visible and playing an active, cooperative role with the experts during the engagement. Take advantage of that power.

First, welcome the consultants and make arrangements to provide them with whatever help and information they need. Brief them fully on your organization, your strategy, and your operating procedures. Impress them with the dashboards and controls you use to manage risks and results. Talk to them about process efficiency, effectiveness, and loss cost management techniques. Show them how you establish and monitor key performance indicators and how you interact and communicate with your stakeholders. Demonstrate how you identify and incorporate best practices in your claims handling processes. If some of the consultants lack industry knowledge and have no background in claims--don't be dismayed. Instead, patiently take the time to make sure they fully grasp how your company functions and how your operation contributes to results. In other words, do whatever you can to provide the experts with plenty of evidence supporting the proposition that when it comes to running an insurance claims operation: 1) you know what to do, 2) you know how to do it, and 3) you are doing it, quite well.

The consultants' job is to identify performance gaps and root causes, and propose actions to close those gaps. Your objective should be to provide them with the information, the insights and the support they need to do that job well. People who hire consultants usually believe the consultants will bring very high levels of knowledge, objectivity, credibility and perceptiveness to the engagement. While that belief might not always be accurate, the reality is that consultants' findings are accepted as authoritative in most cases. That means their recommendations will impact you and your organization, so it makes sense for you to invest your time and effort into framing the inquiry and shaping the outcome. Give it your best shot--you might even learn something in the process.

The downside is that in tricky, prickly situations like this there is no guarantee things will turn out well even if you do everything right. Sometimes there are hidden operating agendas, foregone conclusions and predetermined outcomes underlying the consulting engagement, and unless you know about those factors going in, there's not much you can do to manage their impact.

Dean K. Harring, CPCU, CIC is a retired Chief Claims Officer and an expert and advisor on property casualty insurance claims and operations. He can be reached at dean.harring@theclm.org or through LinkedIn