Sameer Dholakia, CEO of email delivery platform SendGrid, is one of the most highly rated chief executives in tech. His Glassdoor approval rating is 98%, the same level Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg garner among their ranks. Users of careers site Comparably recently rated Dholakia the number-one tech CEO among companies with fewer than 1,500 employees — he even beat out Slack’s widely revered CEO, Stewart Butterfield.
So what’s Dholakia’s secret? A management style called servant leadership.
The term was coined in 1970 by Robert Greenleaf. Greenleaf worked at AT&T for nearly four decades, once serving as its director of management development. In his first essay on servant leadership, Greenleaf wrote, “It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.” Anyone who was more motivated by power or financial gain wasn’t a servant leader, he explained. And the best way to determine if someone fit the mold lay in a simple question: “Do those served grow as persons?”
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