#Work

What is servant leadership anyway? What does it have to do with motivation, alignment, and purpose? I’ve been reading and thinking about that lately.

When I first heard the term “servant leader” I immediately thought I understood where it came from. Many of the worst managers I’ve seen seem to gravitate towards the role because of ego and a desire to be seen as better or more successful than others.

Boiled Frog Syndrome is a lie.

The story goes that if you put a frog in scalding hot water it will immediately jump out, but if you put the frog in a pan of cool water on the stove, and gradually raise the temperature it will just sit there and think happy froggy thoughts until it boils to death.

I wondered if that was actually true. Rather than conduct an experiment myself (much to the relief of neighborhood frogs and everyone else, except perhaps my cats), I looked it up. It turns out to be, as Dr. George R. Zug put it (a curator of reptiles and amphibians at the National Museum of Natural History) “bull****”. Frogs jump out of the water when it gets uncomfortably warm.