What’s in a Name?

If you’re new here, welcome! If you’ve been reading these reflections, thanks! Either way, it’s time for a proper introduction.

I love when people ask why I call my practice “The Serving Way.” Most coaching firms lead with the coach’s name or some promised payoff. I lead with a claim about the leader’s path when the tectonic plates start to pull apart.

There’s a way through the reality we’re facing, and it requires serving as the organizing principle.

Not servant as a function but serving as a fundamental orientation to power and purpose.

Why “serving”?

Robert Greenleaf posed “the best test” of leadership fifty-five years ago, and it still cuts through the noise today: Do those entrusted to our leading grow as persons, becoming healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous?

Not just if they’re happy with you or they think you’re effective; not even if your team makes all their KPIs and everyone gets a bonus! Those are important, for sure. But what's critical is whether you cultivate conditions for people to stretch their capabilities and become serving leaders themselves.

Ron Heifetz named the crux of the role that most leaders don’t want to face: Disappointing people at a rate they can absorb for a purpose.

We mobilize people to tackle worthy challenges with no known or easy answers, letting go of what used to work to make room for what the future needs. There's going to be loss and grief, so, of course, there's disappointment along the way!

Think living systems evolving in harsh conditions, not machines fine-tuned by engineers.

Also, of course, people deserve good 'dope': direction, order, protection, and expertise from you. the leader. Your rightful authority requires it. But when challenges are adaptive, not just technical—when what used to work only makes things worse—giving people the comfort they crave creates dependency. You've become a dealer, not a leader.

Serving leadership isn’t soft. It takes courage and character not to play the Leader-as-Hero game. Leading through serving means developing and deploying folks for the best work they’re capable of.

Robert Kelley raises the flip side of leadership in his book, The Power of Followership. The subtitle says it all: how to create leaders people want to follow and followers who lead themselves.

Exemplary leaders co-create and tend the conditions for thriving at work, measured by the engagement folks bring every day as whole persons. Not from compliance, or even loyalty, but with passion and purpose.

Engaged followers show up with consistent high performance along mission-critical paths. They weave productive webs of organizational relationships. And they stand with courageous conscience, staying true to principles, calling out gaps between stated values and actual behavior.

Performance, relationships, values-in-action. These are the dimensions in which engaged followers excel. These are the dimensions in which exemplary leaders serve.

Three senses of “way”

Better ways of Doing leadership: The leader's craft includes crucial conversations, strategic visioning, making hard choices, delegation that sets people up to succeed, and more. We’re talking about observable competencies that demonstrate excellent performance.

Think branches and fruit, visible results from teachable methods.

Better ways of Being a leader: This is where most leaders hit the ceiling. Not what you do but who you are when the pressure mounts. These are capacities for perceiving what’s actually happening and making sense of what you see, individually, and increasing the sense-making capabilities of the whole enterprise.

Think soil and roots, the living structure that determines what the tree can support.

Better ways of Making your leadership journey: Being the leader is not a position you hold. It’s not an office you reach or a title you frame. It’s all about ongoing development as a maturing human over a lifetime of leadership, pursuing your own path of leading at work, at home, in your community, in the world one leadership moment at a time.

Think leader as gardener.

Lead yourself well, serve your great purpose

The Serving Way’s first tagline was lead from within. Sounds good, but look around and see how many leaders are serving themselves from within the prison of their egos.

This new tagline isn’t marketing copy. It’s the organizing logic for becoming the kind of leader people want to follow, who deserves to be followed, because they are always looking at their own act first in service to something bigger than power and prestige.

Lead yourself well: the first order

Jim Dethmer describes leading “above the line” versus “below the line.” Below the line is reacting unconsciously to what we’re experiencing as threats. Our nervous system activates for survival. Above the line is responding consciously in service of future thriving we want to create.

Great leaders notice when they’ve fallen below the line and, without self-judgment, lead themselves back above it. Only then can they help the whole team shift from reactive to creative.

This isn’t bubble-baths and rainbows. Leading ourselves courageously, consciously, toward wholeness—head, heart, body, spirit—takes rigorous practice, and it’s worth it.

Serve your great purpose: the second order

Not “find your purpose” as if it’s hiding under a rock. We're talking about a calling: the vocation only you can follow, given your particular gifts, in this context, for this season of leadership.

GREAT means it’s bigger than you. It pulls you forward into territory you haven’t mastered. It makes claims on you that you can’t dismiss. Not climbing or accumulating but serving something that matters enough to demand your growth, and through your growth, to cultivate the growth of those you lead.

Why trust, why now?

Conditions have intensified beyond the original VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity.

I’m seeing four forces roiling current leadership.

Volcanic eruptions that change everything overnight. Unknowable conditions you can’t predict your way through. Chaotic destruction tearing down what you’re trying to build. Adversarial forces working against shared vision, values, and purpose. No wonder the world seems on fire.

We can torch trust in a flash, but it’s also what holds everything together as nothing else does. It’s what lets teams move nimbly when conditions demand agility while staying oriented towards True North. Trust makes real collaboration possible when we don’t know the variables, much less how to control the outcomes.

You can’t build trust from scratch in crisis. You have to create and tend it before you need it.

Cultivating teams that trust

In Q1, we’re exploring trust, the foundation that makes everything else possible:

Intro: Why trust holds when nothing else does

Issue 2: Capability trust — helping your people show you what they've got

Issue 3: Character trust — what it costs when it breaks

Issue 4: Communication trust — finding your voice, helping others find theirs

Coda: After the break — what trust repair requires and how to let go what can't be fixed

Trust doesn’t happen by accident. It grows out of promises kept, mistakes owned, hard truths told, credit shared, appreciation offered.

The way forward

Throughout the year, I’ll share frameworks from my coaching practice alongside stories of real leaders navigating real challenges. Not theory—rather, what actually works when the ground is shifting underneath you.The serving way isn’t for everyone. It’s for leaders who sense something has to change. Who suspect the answer isn’t another competency but something deeper about who they are. Who are willing to do uncomfortable work for impact that matters.

Three things to consider:

• Where are you giving people what they want when they need you to develop them?
• Of the three senses of way—doing, being, journeying—which has your attention right now?
• Trust holds everything together when nothing else does. How well are you modeling what it means to be trustworthy?

Two questions to sit with:

• What’s your biggest trust challenge right now? Building it from scratch, rebuilding after it’s been broken, or sensing when to extend it up front versus wait for it to be earned?
• Which feels most urgent: the relational foundation, old scripts running you, or growing your people?

One practice to try:

• Notice this week when you’re demanding from others what you haven’t done yourself, when your old patterns are running the show. Don’t try to fix it yet. Just notice. That’s where the real work begins.

What I want to hear from you

These themes have emerged from working fifteen years with leaders hitting their growing edge—that uncomfortable place where what got you here won’t get you there. But I want to know what’s urgent for you.

Hit reply and share your thoughts. I read every response. Your input shapes what we explore together.

Until the next issue of Lead Yourself Well, here’s to the great leader you’re becoming!

 ~ ~ ~ worth reading  ~ ~ ~

• The Servant as Leader, Robert K. Greenleaf
• Leadership on the Line, Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky
• The Power of Followership, Robert Kelley
• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership, Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Warner Klemp
• Trust and Betrayal in the Workplace, Dennis and Michelle Reina

 ~ ~ ~ let’s connect! ~ ~ ~

Chris Thyberg, Founder and Principal Coach, The Serving Way

thinking partner | outfitter | guide

TheServingWay.com

Chris.Thyberg@TheServingWay.com