More than a decade ago, I accepted an operational consulting role with a small retirement & financial services agency in Las Vegas. My wife told me plainly not to take it. She did not hedge, and she did not soften it. She had read the situation clearly based on my description, weighed what it would mean for our family, and counseled me against it. I heard her. I just did not actively listen. I took the role anyway, and within three months I came home to Utah, having left the whole thing behind with my resignation.

She was right. That part is easy to say now. But the lesson I needed was bigger than the fact that she was right, and it took me a long time to see it. It has to do with Responsibility, which is one of my top five Clifton Strengthfinder strengths and the one I promised at the end of the last issue I would come back to. Most of us assume Responsibility just means owning our tasks and delivering what we said we would deliver. That is part of it. But there is a deeper part. Responsibility also means weighing the judgment of the people closest to you before you act, and then owning the decision fully when you override them and it costs you. I overrode the clearest voice in my life, and I paid for it with a three-month job on my career track and a good deal of trust I had to earn back with her. I also had to grapple with how to explain that blip in my career path to future potential employers.

I am opening with this story because it points at something I believe sits at the center of servant leadership, and it is the theme of this issue. A project or program manager who cannot listen to and elevate the judgment of the people around him will struggle to develop anyone into a future leader.

Developing others starts with taking their judgment seriously, and it starts at home long before it ever shows up on a project. So here is the thesis I want to hand you. The real measure of your leadership is not the authority you hold, title in the organization or the projects you close. It is the future leaders you leave behind. And you cannot grow a servant leader while you ignore or disregard the people in your own inner circle whose judgment you refuse to fully trust.

Let me name the reality most of us live in, because I have lived in it too. The project or group of interrelated projects are behind in the established timeline. The project sponsor wants a status update by end of day. The risk log is growing, and there is a key stakeholder who is not yet convinced. In the middle of all that, developing your people feels like the thing you get to later, once there is time. It feels like a luxury you simply cannot afford this week.

I want to push back on that directly. Developing people is not a luxury you get to after delivery. It is the mechanism of delivery. A team that grows in judgment ships faster with less oversight, catches its own mistakes earlier, and stops routing every small decision back through you. The hours you think you are saving by doing the work yourself are hours you are borrowing against next quarter, when the same people still cannot make the call without you. This is a dependency that is probably a blind spot for most Project and Program Managers.

This connects to something I wrote about on LinkedIn last week. Accountability runs in a sequence, and the sequence starts with the project leader. You own your part first. You model the standard before you ask anyone else to meet it. When your team watches you take ownership of a missed deadline without deflecting, you are not just being honest in the moment. You are teaching them what ownership looks like, which is the first thing any future project leader has to learn. Development is not a separate activity you pass on as a low priority when the schedule loosens. It is happening in every decision your team watches you make.

So, what does this look like in the real world of a project or program manager, past the rhetoric or future project outcome slogans? For most of us the honest starting point is that we were trained to do the work, not to develop the people doing it. Moving from doing to developing is a deliberate shift, and it shows up in a few concrete behaviors.

The first is that you delegate the outcome rather than the task. Handing someone a checklist keeps them focused on left-brained, task related management activities. Handing them a result you would normally own, along with the reason it matters, asks them to really think. It forces them to make the judgment calls you would have made, which is the only way judgment ever actually grows.

The second is that you answer questions with questions. When a team member brings you a problem, the fastest thing to do is hand them the answer. It is also the thing that keeps them dependent on you. Asking what are you leaning toward and why trains them to trust their own reasoning, and often they already know the best answer to solve the pressing project problems and just needed permission to say it out loud.

The third is that you hand over visibility. When the important work requiring judgement is done well, make sure the person who did it is the one seen by the stakeholders and celebrated publicly. Let them present it. Let them take the credit in the room that matters. Development does not happen only in a private coaching conversation. It happens in front of the people whose opinion shapes that person's next opportunity to grow and become a future project leader.

This is emotional intelligence in action, and it runs as a holistic circle. It begins with social awareness, which is reading what your people really need to grow into leadership. It moves to relationship management, which is building enough trust that they will take the risk of deciding for themselves. And it ends in intentional influence, which is shaping the environment so their judgment can develop safely.

Robert Greenleaf named the ordering that makes all this work when he wrote that the servant leader is servant first, and that the choice to lead grows out of the desire to serve. Serving your people comes before directing them to take on more responsibility for important outcomes.

Stephen M. R. Covey gives us the practical reason this pays off, in his work on the speed of trust. Trust is not a soft virtue that we get to when the hard work is done. Trust is what makes work fast. A team you have deliberately grown is a team you can trust, and a team you can trust is a team you do not have to double check at every step. Trust is speed. The time you invest in developing judgment comes back to you as velocity you did not have before you made this deliberate effort to serve project team members.

There is data underneath this too. Gallup has found that roughly 70 percent of the variance in team engagement traces directly back to the direct people manager. The person leading the team is the single largest factor in whether that team is engaged enough to grow. So even without formal organizational authority, you can develop your cross functional project team members, regardless of how effective their functional supervisor is. You are operating the biggest lever you have as a growing project leader.

How do you know if any of this is taking hold once implemented in your daily behavior? Greenleaf gave us the standard, and I have put it in the Voice from the Field below. But here is what it means for the way we keep score.

Most of us measure a project or group of projects by whether they hit their valued outcome, and that matters. But it is not the whole scorecard. The deeper question is whether the project team members assigned to those projects became more capable, more autonomous, and more likely to lead their own project assignments and teams well. Did they leave the projects stronger leaders than they arrived?

I will name the honest tension in this, because it is real. Developing people this way is slower and less visible than being the hero who swoops in and saves the day by controlling key project judgement and tasks. It does not feel as tangible in the moment, and it does not get you the immediate public credit. But it is the whole job. The PM or Program Manager assigned gets a good story and praise for one project or group of projects. The developer of people builds future leaders behind the scenes who go on to build others, and that is a legacy that outlasts any single delivery in the short term.

Robert K. Greenleaf, from his 1970 essay The Servant as Leader, offered what he called his best test of servant leadership.

The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?

Sit with that for a moment as a project or program manager. Your weekly status reports, KPIs and your Gantt charts cannot answer that question. They can tell you whether the work got done. They cannot tell you whether the people got stronger. The people you led are the only honest scorecard for the kind of real leadership that lasts over the long haul.

I do not want you to just agree with this. I want you to try it over the next two weeks. Here are three deliberate steps you can run with a real person on your real team, starting now.

1.   Pick one person on your project team and delegate an outcome, not a task. Choose a team member and hand them a project result you would normally own, along with the why behind it, and then let them choose the path to get there. Resist stepping in unless they ask. Ownership is where judgment grows, and you cannot develop someone you keep rescuing, keep controlling, or keep handling all the highly visible work yourself.

2.  Run one conversation entirely in questions. In your next one on one conversation, when a team member brings you a problem, answer with what you leaning toward and why instead of giving the answer. Actively listen to what they have to say. Notice how often they already know. You are training both their judgment and their trust in it, and you are doing it by getting out of the way.

3.  Give away one moment of visibility. In your next status meeting or stakeholder update, have the person who did the real work you delegated to them present it and take the credit for it. Development happens in front of the people who matter, not only in private coaching sessions where no one else can see it.

The leaders you develop on the project team become the real legacy of your career. Long after your projects are a single line on a resume, the people you grew will be leading their own teams and developing others, carrying forward the way you served them. That is the compounding return no status report will ever capture. You can do this!

Now I would like to hear from you. Reply to this issue with the story of one person you are deliberately developing right now. I read every reply, and the stories you send may become material for a future Voice from the Field, so we can learn from each other.

One more thing. I am writing a book on servant leadership for project and program managers, and I am building the launch team now. If you want to help with the book launch or simply get updates on my writing milestones along the way, send me a direct message and I will bring you in.

Serve well, lead well, and grow new leaders around you.

Mark

On Becoming a Servant Leader is a bi-weekly newsletter on servant leadership and emotional intelligence for project managers who want to deliver valued outcomes for their teams and the people they serve.