Examples of servant leadership in action

Servant leadership is one of the best leadership styles that you can draw inspiration from and apply. Traditionally, servant leadership is perceived as a solution to employee satisfaction and cultural improvement, and that is true. Listening to your stakeholders and making their needs your highest priority makes a great recipe for turning poor cultures good, and good cultures great.

Servant leadership can offer so much more to a company in addition to that, including revenue increases, increased stock prices and higher earnings per share, and general performance. Today, we’re going to look at a couple people who turned around unprecedented results and created titans in their respective industries through servant leadership.

Cheryl Bachelder

Cheryl Bachelder is the former CEO of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen (2007-2017) and author of Dare to Serve: How To Drive Superior Results While Serving Others. She is best known for how she applied servant leadership to turn a then-dying brand into a thriving success story. On the brink of bankruptcy, Cheryl took over at a time where the company needed results, and she got them with haste. A case study on Bachelder’s tenure at Popeyes explains exactly how she did it.

One of Bachelder’s first actions as CEO was to embark on a listening tour, in which she visited seven cities to talk to both customers, employees, and franchise owners alike. Following this listening tour, Bachelder developed a list of the company’s seven biggest issues and created roadmaps to solving each of them.

She followed this up by reforming how the company treated and interacted with their franchise owners, starting to treat them more like partners. Bachelder and the company would establish lines of communication with franchisees across the country with the purpose of shortening timelines for problem solving, improving resource allocation, providing what they would need to forward their bottom line. Outside of working with franchise owners, Bachelder personally mentored her direct reports, influential leaders within the company, to strengthen their leadership skills for 90 minutes every other week.

The servant leader approach Bachelder implemented yielded incredible results for Popeyes:

She raked in over $1 billion dollars in sales during her tenure

The company’s stock price went from $13 at the time of her hiring to $79 at the time of her departure

She earned Popeyes the rank of number one franchise partner in the restaurant industry with satisfaction levels reaching as high as 95%

Profits doubled, while revenues grew by 45%

Bachelder’s time at Popeyes is an outstanding example of how a servant leadership approach can completely transform an organization.

Herb Kelleher

The late Herb Kelleher is the founder and former CEO of Air Southwest (which became Southwest Airlines) and represents another shining example of a person who practiced servant leadership to great effect. His vision, in his own words, was to keep Southwest Airlines job secure for his people.

Southwest Airlines, under Kelleher’s leadership, never went through a bankruptcy or conducted major layoffs, making them a standout in the airline industry. Kelleher went out of his way to prioritize the company’s employees as individuals at every level of the company, from executive leaders to line workers. He intently listened to what his people had to say, no matter their position or status.

Southwest was a titan as far back as 2011, putting up the highest productivity in the airline industry for that year on the back of significantly better compensation in comparison to their competitors. They improved operational performance at the companies they acquired. Kelleher constantly expressed his gratitude for the hard work of the employees and unions that allowed Southwest to perform so well.

Some famous quotes from Kelleher include:

“Leading an organization is as much about soul as it is about systems. Effective leadership finds its source in understanding.”

“If the employees come first, then they’re happy…. A motivated employee treats the customer well. The customer is happy so they keep coming back, which pleases the shareholders. It’s not one of the enduring great mysteries of all time, it is just the way it works.”

“If you create an environment where the people truly participate, you don’t need control.”

The bottom line

The successes of Cheryl Bachelder and Herb Kelleher demonstrate that servant leadership is an approach that drives outstanding business outcomes. Servant leaders can create environments where people thrive, leading to increased satisfaction, innovation, and financial performance. Bachelder’s turnaround of Popeyes and Kelleher’s long-standing success with Southwest Airlines serve as compelling case studies that clearly illustrate how servant leadership not only boosts morale but also translates into strong growth and profitability. Servant leadership proves that focusing on people is the foundation of sustainable success.