A Sense of Service Starts With How You Lead

If you manage people who serve clients, this one's for you.

An all too true statement: the way your team treats clients is almost always a mirror of the way your team treats each other. And that usually starts with you.

In retrospect, I’ve seen this in my own management history.  When I am engaged and connected with the team I am working with, they generally seem to be more connected to each other and I dealt with less client complaints.  At times in my career when, for whatever reason I became disconnected from the team, I was faced with more conflict between co-workers and client complaints.  It is hard to admit that pattern, but it’s been true more often than not.

In a lot of small service businesses, there's a polite version of service happening behind the scenes. Everyone is agreeable (or worse, silent) in the team meeting, then the real conversation happens in the break room afterward. Lots of nodding. Not a lot of truth. It looks harmonious, but it's quietly wearing everyone down. It's the same surface acting psychologists who study what they call 'emotional labour' talk about pointed at coworkers rather than clients. Alicia Grandey’s research published in the Academy of Management Journal, found that surface acting is linked to emotional exhaustion. This is important to recognize in yourself as well as watch for in your team.

This isn't just a vibe. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, its lowest level since 2020, resulting in lost productivity. And the people feeling it most? Managers. Manager engagement dropped from 27% in 2024 to 22% in 2025. If you've been feeling stretched thin lately, you're not imagining it.

Here in Canada we're doing a little better. Engagement held steady in Canada even as it declined globally. But steady isn't the same as good.

And your clients can feel it. One 2026 survey found 74% of consumers find having to repeat themselves extremely frustrating, and see it as a sign of their time not being valued.  Think about how that translates in a team: people not talking, not trusting each other, not knowing what their colleague already handled.

The two questions

A sense of service inside your team asks the same two questions it asks with clients. Do you actually know your people? And are they free to be themselves with you?

Knowing your people means understanding how they work, not just what they produce. What drains them. What they're brilliant at that nobody's noticed yet. What they're worried about but haven't said out loud. That doesn't come from a personality quiz. It comes from paying attention over time.

In the Empathy Model I use, it is getting curious about yourself, the others and committing to a collective empathy. Behind a team member's frustration, pushback, or quiet withdrawal, there is usually an unmet need: for respect, for clarity, for autonomy in how they work. When you start listening for the need instead of reacting to the behaviour, the whole conversation changes.

Letting your people be themselves means making it safe to bring their real expertise to the table instead of keeping quiet to keep the peace. If someone on your team sees a problem coming and doesn't mention it because they'd rather be easy to work with, that's not service. That's disappearing and calling it being nice. It may be a quiet sign they don't feel safe saying it to you.

What this looks like day to day

It's you stopping the 'How's it going?' on autopilot and asking something specific enough that 'fine' won't cut it.

It's someone on your team saying, 'I see it differently, and here's why,' and you hearing that as care. Because it is.

It's letting go of the because “we’ve always done it that way”. The process that is no longer relevant, the meeting that only exists because it's always existed.

Most of all, it's giving your people room to do things their own way. Remember the autonomy research? This is where it gets really practical. Hand someone a script and hold them to it, and you've pretty much guaranteed they'll fake it. Faking it becomes the job. Instead, get clear on the outcome you need, then trust your people to get there in their own style.

Gallup found the same pattern on a global scale: when employees see their work as intrinsically rewarding and believe it contributes to others' wellbeing, both engagement and life satisfaction rise significantly.

This means you have to actually know your people. See how it comes full circle?

'But without scripts, how do I keep quality consistent?'

This is the question I hear most from managers, and it's a good one.

Here's the shift: set standards, not scripts. A standard describes the outcome you are committed to: Every client leaves feeling heard. Every consultation ends with a clear, agreed plan. Nobody gets handed off without the next person knowing their story. 

Standards give your team something to aim for. Scripts take away their ability to aim. Hold people accountable for the outcome, then let them use their own style, skill and judgment to deliver it. You'll get more consistency, not less, because people are invested in results they had a hand in shaping.

The uncomfortable part

You can't ask your team for a sense of service while running them like a call centre. If every appointment is timed, measured, and scripted, people will perform service and feel nothing. That's not a flaw in your people. That's the system doing exactly what it was built to do.

For a few years we had monthly meetings because it felt like the only way to keep our growing team connected.  What actually happened is there was so much information to deliver that there was no time to listen.  Meetings ended rushed and someone was often cut off mid thought because the meeting had to wrap up. The team didn’t feel heard and the effort I put into the outline and planning wasn’t appreciated.  Everyone was frustrated and it was showing in attendance - causing more frustration for me, and those attending.  We had to come back to the intent - bringing everyone together.
Turned out, what needed to happen was smaller group meetings more often.  More work for me as a leader, but soooo much more impact for all of us, so it was worth it.

The real question isn't 'How do I get my team to care more?' It's 'What have I built that makes caring harder than faking it?'  There's usually an honest answer. And more often than not, there's a script hiding somewhere in it.

Try this at your next team meeting

Before the meeting, pick one thing to drop: a standing agenda item nobody values, a report nobody reads, or a phrase your team has to say to clients that nobody believes in.

Then, in the meeting, ask your team one real question: for example “What's one thing about how we work that makes it harder to take care of clients?' Don't defend. Don't fix it on the spot. Just listen, and thank them.

You'll learn more from that one answer than from any engagement survey.

If you lead a service team and want help building this kind of culture, where people bring their real selves to their clients and to each other, I work with small service-based businesses on exactly this. Let's talk: georgiareynolds.ca