I suspect applying this philosophy was very different back when companies employed secretaries.
Because the times I’ve had leadership roles in companies that practice servant leadership, an awful lot of my time has ended up spent on things like scheduling meetings, discussing the number of cart parking spaces available and similar minutiae - rather than anything that needed technical expertise.
The job of a leader is to schedule meetings, and the good ones actually manage to get people to show up. Leadership is about herding cats, not about technical expertise.
"Herding cats" assumes your team consists of running wild stray cats. I am not sure if that's "servant" either.
Leaders should treat their teams as adults. As an adult I can also accept my leader's decision - disagree and commit.
Cats are highly skilled individuals and you can trust them to catch the mice, but you can't trust them to coordinate with each other. Left to their own devices, they'll just focus on their own technical expertise. The specialized job of a leader is to get the cats to work together.
A leader does not necessarily define the problem to solve. That is the job of an owner. Leaders coordinate people, and objectives are decided by owners. The same person might do both jobs, but they are distinct functions. They are very frequently different people, where a leader is assigned a job and a team with which to do it.
The role of a leader is to be a force multiplier on the rest of the team, regardless of who decides the objective.
It is often the case in contract work that the project owner is the client, and the leader is the head of the contracting team. The leader depends on the project owner to provide clear objectives, so that they may use them to effectively direct their team in accomplishing them. However, it applies within organizations as well, where the owner of a project may be on the business side, whereas the team leader is on the infrastructure side.
Because the times I’ve had leadership roles in companies that practice servant leadership, an awful lot of my time has ended up spent on things like scheduling meetings, discussing the number of cart parking spaces available and similar minutiae - rather than anything that needed technical expertise.