Servants, Not Rulers

Dan Springer

07.27.20

Dan Springer doesn't ascribe to the typical "pyramid" model of leadership, with a benevolent CEO sitting on the highest level. Instead, he inverts the model, applying servant leadership to lift his employees up and empower them to do good work.

Summary:

Dan Springer doesn’t ascribe to the typical “pyramid” model of leadership, with a benevolent CEO sitting on the highest level. Instead, he inverts the model, applying servant leadership to lift his employees up and empower them to do good work.

Dan Springer doesn’t ascribe to the typical “pyramid” model of leadership, with a benevolent CEO sitting on the highest level. Instead, he inverts the model, applying servant leadership to lift his employees up and empower them to do good work.

Thuy

I want to ask you about your philosophy around leadership as well you've been quoted as saying the best leaders recognize that they are servants not rulers of their business can you elaborate on that?
Dan_Springer

Dan Springer

Yeah, I mean, the servant leadership model I wish I could say I came up with that term and actually I don't even know who did but it really resonated with me and the way I always describe it to people is most times when you describe an organization we tend to think in this hierarchical way and if you're the CEO of a company we tend to say oh you're at the top of the pyramid here's your team and I think about it the other way around and I try to invert it and say I'm sort of at the bottom of the pyramid and my job is to make all those we have about 4,000 employees at DocuSign my job is to make those 4,000 people successful cuz me by myself I don't think I'm a pretty good guy and I'm a hard worker and I'm bright but you can only do so much but if I can make those 4,000 people effective that's really what I try to do so that's how I think about the servant leadership model.