Servant Leadership

From Guest Author Jim Brown

Legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden once wrote: “I worry that businessleaders are more interested in material gain than they are in having the patience to build up a strong organization, and a strong organization starts with caring for their people.”

Eric Schmidt was the CEO for 10 years at Google. Today he is executive chairman of a company voted #1 among the top 100 companies to work for in the U.S.A. At 46 he became the CEO of a company of mostly 20-somethings. In a radio interview in 2014, he indicated how much he valued their being better prepared, having a sense of social purpose, being more collaborative, and having a social conscious with a desire to make the world a better place.

The poet Walt Whitman once wrote: “We convince by our presence.”

Ken Blanchard, author of The One Minute Manager and numerous other books on leadership and management has consistently called for a shift in mindset from the traditional command and control management philosophy to one stressing the role of the cheerleader, encourager, listening, facilitator “boss.”

A university vice-president welcomes members in his college attending a leadership academy that he started with these words: “Thank you for being here. We are together on a journey. I am investing in you. I want you to thrive in your various positions. I want each of you to be leaders, no matter your position. And my responsibility and commitment to you is to do all that I can to help you be successful.”

Each of these people reflects the mind and spirit of the “servant-leader.” For the father of “servant-leadership,” Robert K. Greenleaf wrote some forty-five years ago:

The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. The best test is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?

I myself came across the writings of Greenleaf some thirty-five years ago while serving as a department director for a large nonprofit organization. I can attest to the fact that practicing the characteristics of listening, caring, presence, collaborating, encouraging, empathizing, walking with, persuading people to be healthy, wise, have balance in their personal and work lives, and indeed take on the spirit of a servant-leader – no matter their position in the organization – can be very rewarding, yet is no easy task.

One can google the companies that practice Servant Leadership who consistently rank in the “Fortune 100 Best Companies to work for.” One can discover the high return on investment by servant-led companies. One can peruse the many practitioners and business writers who espouse the practice of servant-leadership and its benefits, both for the organization and the people who work for it. In the end though, it comes down to a choice, a conscious decision by a person to practice this style of leadership: one that emphasizes teamwork and community, decision making that involves others, one that stresses ethical and caring behavior, and one that encourages people to “become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely to become servants themselves.” (It is also a choice for the followers in the department, office, or organization to have the mind of a servant-leader.)

The practice of servant leadership certainly rests upon a deep desire to serve others. Quoting former CEO for the Girl Scouts of America and current – in her mid-90’s – President and CEO of The Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute, founded as The Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, to serve is to live. It’s a journey, one full of challenges and setbacks. It involves a long term commitment to set priorities, to be self-reflective, to be flexible, to be able to function within the complexities of human and organizational dynamics and to live with the paradox: servant-leader.

An early disciple of Greenleaf, James Autry, past CEO and president of the Fortune 500 company, The Meredith Corporation, wrote in a poem Threads, found in his seminal work Love and Profit: The Art of Caring Leadership about connecting with people who worked for him and the “stuff” of their daily lives (“of love and joy and fear and guilt”). He ends the poem with these lines:

“and somehow you know that connecting those

threads is what you are supposed to do

and business takes care of itself.”

BIO NOTE

Over the past 45 years, Jim Brown has served in leadership. As an organization development consultant he has taught, consulted with and advised leaders in mostly educational and nonprofit arenas. His greatest leadership accomplishment: partnering with his wife of 42 years in guiding two young adult children to be themselves caring leaders.