Servant leadership and Robert Greenleaf

Back in 1978 I was given a book that profoundly influenced my life. The book, Servant Leadership, was written by Robert Greenleaf. Throughout his writings Greenleaf's burden is to demonstrate the clear superiority of servant leadership in contradistinction to the more self-serving forms of leadership. (See the sidebar for a biographical sketch of Greenleaf. This article is based on the whole corpus of his writings.)

How do you tell if you are a servant leader? The answer lies in whether you give highest priority to meeting your own needs or the needs of other people. Greenleaf asks: "Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to be come servants? And what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will he/she benefit, or, at least, will he/she not be further deprived?"

Greenleaf believes that when Jethro advised Moses on how to organize the Israelites, he led him down the wrong track. The hierarchical principle that places a single individual on top of a pyramid contains within it the seeds of corruption and misuse. It is very lonely sitting on top of the pyramid. Those who do so no longer have colleagues, only subordinates. They are no longer plugged into the grapevine. As a result they tend as would any other human being to reach for more and more power.

To replace the pyramid structure, Greenleaf proposes a Roman model primus inter pares. (The diagrams on the opposite page compare these two models.) Instead of a team with one chief, this structure comprises a team of equals with a primus, a first among equals. Leadership is by persuasion rather than coercion. In the pyramid structure, on the other hand, since the chief holds much of the power, he or she finds it difficult to use persuasion. Those who work with the chief tend to regard what he or she says as an order rather than as an attempt to persuade.

Religious leaders

The piece of Greenleaf's writing that I found most influential appeared in 1982 under the title The Servant as Religious Leader. I have read this piece over and over again. While Greenleaf says that he writes as a student of organizations rather than as a theologian, his insights are thoroughly biblical.

 He defines religious leadership by posing a series of questions: What are the consequences of this person's leadership? Does it have a healing or civilizing influence ? Does it encourage people to serve others, favor their growth as persons, and help them distinguish those who serve from those who destroy? Does this leadership effectively build faith even in the face, of the powerful forces that work to destroy it?

The goal of religious leaders is to recover alienated people and to build institutions that serve; such a goal gives pur pose and meaning to life. Those whose leadership follows some other model than servant leadership often aspire to the position out of a desire for power or to acquire material possessions.

 Greenleaf suggests three key characteristics strong servant leaders have: they have a sense of the unknowable, they are prepared for the unexpected, and they can foresee the unforeseeable. Servant leaders who are good leaders have an intuitive sense of where to go and what decision needs to be made. Their followers have confidence in them because they believe that such leaders will not be surprised by the unusual and will act promptly in response to it. This kind of leader senses what is about to happen before it happens, and controls the events rather than letting the events control her or him.

Greenleaf speaks highly of John Woolman, an American Quaker who lived during the eighteenth century. Woolman spent 30 of his adult years traveling from one Quaker farm to another raising questions about the morality of slavery. He did not argue or storm about. He did not confront or censure the farmers. He simply asked such questions as What does the owning of slaves do to you as a moral person ? and What kind of an institution are you leaving for your children? Because of his gentle persuasion Quakers became the first religious group to forbid the holding of slaves by its members this some 100 years before the civil war.

Greenleaf wonders what America would have been like if there had been 50, or even five, John Woolmans presenting their gentle, nonjudgmental arguments. A few such people might have brought an end to slavery without the Civil War. Leadership by persuasion has the virtue of depending upon conviction rather than coercion. Its advantages are obvious.

Failure's virtue

Greenleaf studied the top 12 leaders of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). He found that each of them could look back to a significant mentor who influenced his growth. Four of the 12 were influenced by the same middle manager one among 900 who held such a position!

 What made this middle manager so influential? He had a passionate interest in young people. He was a good judge of potential he did not waste his time on people who stood little chance of learning from him. He was friendly and always available for consultation. And perhaps his most unusual characteristic, he firmly believed in the importance of error in the learning experience.

His conviction as to the importance of learning from one's mistakes was so strong that if one of his students was getting along too well he would contrive a situation in which the student would err. Then this mentor would discuss the experience with the student, asking him what he had learned from it. He would not censure error unless it was repeated; in that case, he would come down hard on the offender. But all this was done in a supportive atmosphere that encouraged growth.

Greenleaf suggests that too much time is spent on organizational gimmicks rather than on developing servant leaders and servant institutions: The formal organization is not nearly as important as the informal one that grows up around the top leader. People soon learn what works. Almost any kind of organization can function adequately if people believe that the leader accepts and trusts them. People who sense that their leader is genuinely interested in them as persons and that their leader is putting their interest before his or hers will do almost anything for that leader.

Greenleaf believes that the greatest danger facing leaders is the temptation to grab hold of too much power. To guard against that danger he recommends surrounding the holder of power with strong equals and adding close oversight by a monitoring group. Religious leaders in particular find such controls hard to accept because they tend to think in terms of the ideal and believe that if God has called a person to a position of leadership, then God will take care of the situation. But a monitoring group is necessary because of the humanity of the leader, not because the leader is untrustworthy.

Finally, the servant leader must have a dream and must have the ability to portray it in vivid language. For anything to happen there must be a dream, and for great things to happen there must be a great dream. Dreams are what lift people. The greatest leaders are those who can so describe the dream that it becomes crys tal clear to the listeners.

Not only must the servant leader paint a great dream, but the institution, the church, must be living out a great dream. Greenleaf describes how, near the end of his career, he and a group of other individuals tried unsuccessfully to convince AT&T's top leaders that their organization needed a new goal. The great dream on which it had been built had lost its force, and, as seems the plight of so many contemporary institutions, it was struggling to survive.

Greenleaf said that these leaders were honest, dedicated, and caring. But they were no longer guided by a great dream; they had no dream to convey to those who followed. There was no powerful goal to inspire and unify. The leader was no longer seen as the servant of the dream; consequently, the constituents' trust in the institution diminished.

By way of summary, Greenleaf says that great institutions, whether religious, business, or educational, are a fusion of great ideas and great people. Neither will suffice without the other.

Every pastor, every church leader, likes to think that he or she is a servant leader. It may just be that the true servant leader is a rare species. Let's decide to make it a common species as we look forward to Christ's return.