The Understanding and Practice of Servant-Leadership
Larry C. Spears
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?
—Robert K. Greenleaf
The mightiest of rivers are first fed by many small trickles of water, and an apt way of conveying my belief that the growing number of individuals and organizations practicing servant-leadership has increased from a trickle to a river. Servant-leadership is also an expanding river, and one that carries with it a deep current of meaning and passion.
The servant-leader concept continues to grow in its influence and impact. In fact, we have witnessed an unparalleled explosion of interest and practice of servant-leadership in the past fifteen years. In many ways, it can truly be said that the times are only now beginning to catch up with Robert Greenleaf’s visionary call to servant-leadership.
The idea of servant-leadership, now in its fifth decade as a concept bearing that name, continues to create a quiet revolution in workplaces around the world. This article is intended to provide a broad overview of the growing influence this inspiring idea is having on people and their workplaces.
In countless for-profit and not-for-profit organizations today we are seeing traditional, autocratic, and hierarchical modes of leadership yielding to a different way of working—one based on teamwork and community, one that seeks to involve others in decision making, one strongly based in ethical and caring behavior, and one that is attempting to enhance the personal growth of workers while improving the caring and quality of our many institutions. This emerging approach to leadership and service is called servant-leadership.
The words servant and leader are usually thought of as being opposites. When two opposites are brought together in a creative and meaningful way, a paradox emerges. And so the words servant and leader have been brought together to create the paradoxical idea of servant-leadership. The basic idea of servant-leadership is both logical and intuitive. Since the time of the industrial revolution, managers have tended to view people as objects; institutions have considered workers as cogs within a machine. In the past few decades, we have witnessed a shift in that long-held view. Standard practices are rapidly shifting toward the ideas put forward by Robert Greenleaf, Stephen Covey, Peter Senge, Max DePree, Margaret Wheatley, Ken Blanchard, and many others who suggest that there is a better way to lead and manage our organizations. Robert Greenleaf’s writings on the subject of servant-leadership helped to get this movement started, and his views have had a profound and growing effect on many.
Robert K. Greenleaf
Despite all the buzz about modern leadership techniques, no one knows better than Greenleaf what really matters.
—Working Woman Magazine
The term servant-leadership was first coined in a 1970 essay by Robert K. Greenleaf (1904-1990), entitled The Servant as Leader. Greenleaf, born in Terre Haute, Indiana, spent most of his organizational life in the field of management research, development, and education at AT&T. Following a 40-year career at AT&T, Greenleaf enjoyed a second career that lasted 25 years, during which time he served as an influential consultant to a number of major institutions, including Ohio University, MIT, Ford Foundation, R. K. Mellon Foundation, the Mead Corporation, the American Foundation for Management Research, and Lilly Endowment Inc. In 1964 Greenleaf also founded the Center for Applied Ethics, which was renamed the Robert K. Greenleaf Center in 1985 and is now headquartered in Indianapolis.
As a lifelong student of how things get done in organizations, Greenleaf distilled his observations in a series of essays and books on the theme of “The Servant as Leader”—the objective of which was to stimulate thought and action for building a better, more caring society.
The Servant as Leader Idea
The idea of the servant as leader came partly out of Greenleaf’s half century of experience in working to shape large institutions. However, the event that crystallized Greenleaf’s thinking came in the 1960s, when he read Hermann Hesse’s short novel Journey to the East—an account of a mythical journey by a group of people on a spiritual quest.
After reading this story, Greenleaf concluded that the central meaning of it was that the great leader is first experienced as a servant to others, and that this simple fact is central to his or her greatness. True leadership emerges from those whose primary motivation is a deep desire to help others.
In 1970, at the age of 66, Greenleaf published The Servant as Leader, the first of a dozen essays and books on servant-leadership. Since that time, more than a half-million copies of his books and essays have been sold worldwide. Slowly but surely, Greenleaf’s servant-leadership writings have made a deep, lasting impression on leaders, educators, and many others who are concerned with issues of leadership, management, service, and personal growth.
What is Servant-Leadership
In his works, Greenleaf discusses the need for a better approach to leadership, one that puts serving others—including employees, customers, and community—as the number one priority. Servant-leadership emphasizes increased service to others, a holistic approach to work, promoting a sense of community, and the sharing of power in decision-making.
Who is a servant-leader? Greenleaf said that the servant-leader is one who is a servant first. In The Servant as Leader he wrote, “It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant—first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. 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? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?”
It is important to stress that servant-leadership is not a “quick-fix” approach. Nor is it something that can be quickly instilled within an institution. At its core, servant-leadership is a long-term, transformational approach to life and work—in essence, a way of being—that has the potential for creating positive change throughout our society.
Characteristics of the Servant-Leader
Servant leadership deals with the reality of power in everyday life—its legitimacy, the ethical restraints upon it and the beneficial results that can be attained through the appropriate use of power.
—The New York Times
After some years of carefully considering Greenleaf’s original writings, I have extracted a set of 10 characteristics of the servant-leader that I view as being of critical importance. The following characteristics are central to the development of servant-leaders:
- Listening: Leaders have traditionally been valued for their communication and decision-making skills. While these are also important skills for the servant-leader, they need to be reinforced by a deep commitment to listening intently to others. The servant-leader seeks to identify the will of a group and helps clarify that will. He or she seeks to listen receptively to what is being said (and not said!). Listening also encompasses getting in touch with one’s own inner voice and seeking to understand what one’s body, spirit, and mind are communicating. Listening, coupled with regular periods of reflection, is essential to the growth of the servant-leader.
- Empathy: The servant-leader strives to understand and empathize with others. People need to be accepted and recognized for their special and unique spirits. One assumes the good intentions of co-workers and does not reject them as people, even while refusing to accept their behavior or performance. The most successful servant-leaders are those who have become skilled empathetic listeners.
- Healing: Learning to heal is a powerful force for transformation and integration. One of the great strengths of servant-leadership is the potential for healing one’s self and others. Many people have broken spirits and have suffered from a variety of emotional hurts. Although this is a part of being human, servant-leaders recognize that they have an opportunity to “help make whole” those with whom they come in contact. In The Servant as Leader Greenleaf writes: “There is something subtle communicated to one who is being served and led if, implicit in the compact between servant-leader and led, is the understanding that the search for wholeness is something they share.”
- Awareness: General awareness, and especially self-awareness, strengthens the servant-leader. Making a commitment to foster awareness can be scary—you never know what you may discover. Awareness also aids one in understanding issues involving ethics and values. It lends itself to being able to view most situations from a more integrated, holistic position. As Greenleaf observed: “Awareness is not a giver of solace—it is just the opposite. It is a disturber and an awakener. Able leaders are usually sharply awake and reasonably disturbed. They are not seekers after solace. They have their own inner serenity.”
- Persuasion: Another characteristic of servant-leaders is a primary reliance on persuasion, rather than using one’s positional authority, in making decisions within an organization. The servant-leader seeks to convince others, rather than coerce compliance. This particular element offers one of the clearest distinctions between the traditional authoritarian model and that of servant-leadership. The servant-leader is effective at building consensus within groups. This emphasis on persuasion over coercion probably has its roots within the beliefs of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), the denomination with which Robert Greenleaf himself was most closely allied.
- Conceptualization: Servant-leaders seek to nurture their abilities to “dream great dreams.” The ability to look at a problem (or an organization) from a conceptualizing perspective means that one must think beyond day-to-day realities. For many managers this is a characteristic that requires discipline and practice. The traditional manager is focused on the need to achieve short-term operational goals. The manager who also wishes to be a servant-leader must stretch his or her thinking to encompass broader-based conceptual thinking. Within organizations, conceptualization is also the proper role of boards of trustees or directors. Unfortunately, boards can sometimes become involved in the day-today operations (something that should always be discouraged!) and fail to provide the visionary concept for an institution. Trustees need to be mostly conceptual in their orientation, staffs need to be mostly operational in their perspective, and the most effective CEOs and leaders probably need to develop both perspectives. Servant-leaders are called to seek a delicate balance between conceptual thinking and a day-to-day focused approach.
- Foresight: Closely related to conceptualization, the ability to foresee the likely outcome of a situation is hard to define, but easy to identify. One knows it when one sees it. Foresight is a characteristic that enables the servant-leader to understand the lessons from the past, the realities of the present, and the likely consequence of a decision for the future. It is also deeply rooted within the intuitive mind. As such, one can conjecture that foresight is the one servant-leader characteristic with which one may be born. All other characteristics can be consciously developed. There hasn’t been a great deal written on foresight. It remains a largely unexplored area in leadership studies, but one most deserving of careful attention.
- Stewardship: Peter Block (author of Stewardship and The Empowered Manager) has defined stewardship as “holding something in trust for another.”Robert Greenleaf’s view of all institutions was one in which CEOs, staffs, and trustees all played significant roles in holding their institutions in trust for the greater good of society. Servant-leadership, like stewardship, assumes first and foremost a commitment to serving the needs of others. It also emphasizes the use of openness and persuasion rather than control.
- Commitment to the growth of people: Servant-leaders believe that people have an intrinsic value beyond their tangible contributions as workers. As such, the servant-leader is deeply committed to the growth of each and every individual within his or her institution. The servant-leader recognizes the tremendous responsibility to do everything within his or her power to nurture the personal, professional, and spiritual growth of employees. In practice, this can include (but is not limited to) concrete actions such as making available funds for personal and professional development, taking a personal interest in the ideas and suggestions from everyone, encouraging worker involvement in decision making, and actively assisting laid-off workers to find other employment.
- Building community: The servant-leader senses that much has been lost in recent human history as a result of the shift from local communities to large institutions as the primary shaper of human lives. This awareness causes the servant-leader to seek to identify some means for building community among those who work within a given institution. Servant-leadership suggests that true community can be created among those who work in businesses and other institutions. Greenleaf said: “All that is needed to rebuild community as a viable life form for large numbers of people is for enough servant-leaders to show the way, not by mass movements, but by each servant-leader demonstrating his own unlimited liability for a quite specific community-related group.”
These ten characteristics of servant-leadership are by no means exhaustive. However, I believe that the ones listed serve to communicate the power and promise that this concept offers to those who are open to its invitation and challenge.
Tracing the Growing Impact of Servant-Leadership
Servant leadership has emerged as one of the dominant philosophies being discussed in the world today.
—Indianapolis Business Journal
Servant-Leadership as an Institutional Model
Servant-leadership principles are being applied in significant ways in a half-dozen major areas. The first area has to do with servant-leadership as an institutional philosophy and model. Servant-leadership crosses all boundaries and is being applied by a wide variety of people working with for-profit businesses; not-for-profit corporations; and churches, universities, health care, and foundations.
Servant-leadership advocates a group-oriented approach to analysis and decision making as a means of strengthening institutions and improving society. It also emphasizes the power of persuasion and seeking consensus, over the old top-down form of leadership. Some people have likened this to turning the hierarchical pyramid upside down. Servant-leadership holds that the primary purpose of a business should be to create a positive impact on its employees and community, rather than using profit as the sole motive.
Many individuals within institutions have adopted servant-leadership as a guiding philosophy. An increasing number of companies have adopted servant-leadership as part of their corporate philosophy or as a foundation for their mission statement. Among these are The Toro Company (Minneapolis, Minnesota), Synovus Financial Corporation (Columbus, Georgia), ServiceMaster Company (Downers Grove, Illinois), The Men’s Wearhouse (Fremont, California), Southwest Airlines (Dallas, Texas), Starbucks (Seattle, Washington), and TDIndustries (Dallas, Texas).
TDlndustries (TD), one of the earliest practitioners of servant-leadership in the corporate setting, is a Dallas-based heating and plumbing contracting firm that has consistently ranked in the top ten of Fortune magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work for in America. TD’s founder, Jack Lowe, Sr., came upon The Servant as Leader essay in the early 1970s and began to distribute copies of it to his employees. They were invited to read the essay and then to gather in small groups to discuss its meaning. The belief that managers should serve their employees became an important value for TDlndustries.
Forty years later, TDIndustries continues to use servant-leadership as the guiding philosophy for TD. Even today, any TDPartner who supervises at least one person must go through training in servant-leadership. In addition, all new employees continue to receive a copy of The Servant as Leader essay; and TD has developed elaborate training modules designed to encourage the understanding and practice of servant-leadership.
Some businesses have begun to view servant-leadership as an important framework that is helpful (and necessary) for ensuring the long-term effects of related management and leadership approaches such as continuous quality improvement and systems thinking. It is suggested that institutions that want to create meaningful change may be best served in starting with servant-leadership as the foundational understanding and then building on it through any number of related approaches.
Servant-leadership has influenced many noted writers, thinkers, and leaders. Max DePree, former chairman of the Herman Miller Company and author of Leadership Is an Art and Leadership Jazz has said, “The servanthood of leadership needs to be felt, understood, believed, and practiced.”And Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, has said that he tells people “not to bother reading any other book about leadership until you first read Robert Greenleaf’s book, Servant-Leadership. I believe it is the most singular and useful statement on leadership I’ve come across.” In recent years, a growing number of leaders and readers have “rediscovered” Robert Greenleaf’s own writings through books by DePree, Senge, Leider, Covey, Wheatley, Autry, and many other popular writers.
Education and Training of Not-for-Profit Trustees
A second major application of servant-leadership is its pivotal role as the theoretical and ethical basis for “trustee education.” Greenleaf wrote extensively on servant-leadership as it applies to the roles of boards of directors and trustees within institutions. His essays on these applications are widely distributed among directors of for-profit and nonprofit organizations. In his essay, Trustees as Servants Greenleaf urged trustees to ask themselves two central questions: “Whom do you serve?” and “For what purpose?”
Servant-leadership suggests that boards of trustees need to undergo a radical shift in how they approach their roles. Trustees who seek to act as servant-leaders can help to create institutions of great depth and quality. Over the past twenty years, two of America’s largest grant-making foundations (Lilly Endowment Inc. and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation) have sought to encourage the development of programs designed to educate and train not-for-profit boards of trustees to function as servant-leaders. John Carver, the noted author on board governance, has cited servant-leadership as the philosophical foundation upon which his Policy Governance Model © may best operate.
Community Leadership Programs
A third application of servant-leadership concerns its deepening role in community leadership organizations across the country. A growing number of community leadership groups are using servant-leadership resources as part of their own education and training efforts. Some have been doing so for more than thirty years.
M. Scott Peck, who has written about the importance of building true community, says the following in A World Waiting to Be Born: “In his work on servant-leadership, Greenleaf posited that the world will be saved if it can develop just three truly well-managed, large institutions—one in the private sector, one in the public sector, and one in the nonprofit sector. He believed—and I know—that such excellence in management will be achieved through an organizational culture of civility routinely utilizing the mode of community.”
Service-Learning Programs
A fourth application involves servant-leadership and experiential education. During the past thirty years experiential education programs of all sorts have sprung up in virtually every college and university—and, increasingly, in secondary schools, too. Experiential education, or “learning by doing,” is now a part of most students’ educational experience.
Around 1980, a number of educators began to write about the linkage between the servant-leader concept and experiential learning under a new term called “service-learning.” It is service-learning that has become a major focus for some experiential education programs in the past two decades.
The National Society for Experiential Education (NSEE) has adopted service-learning as one of its major program areas. In 1990, NSEE published a massive three-volume work called Combining Service and Learning, which brought together many articles and papers about service-learning—several dozen of which discuss servant-leadership as the philosophical basis for experiential learning programs.
Leadership Education
A fifth application of servant-leadership concerns its use in both formal and informal education and training programs. This is taking place through leadership and management courses in colleges and universities, as well as through corporate training programs. A number of undergraduate and graduate courses on management and leadership incorporate servant-leadership within their course curricula. Several colleges and universities now offer specific courses on servant-leadership. Also, a number of noted leadership authors, including Peter Block, Ken Blanchard, Max DePree, and Peter Senge, have acclaimed the servant-leader concept as an overarching framework that is compatible with, and enhancing of, other leadership and management models such as total quality management, systems thinking, and community-building.
In the area of corporate education and training programs, dozens of management and leadership consultants now utilize servant-leadership materials as part of their ongoing work with corporations. Among these companies are U.S.Cellular, Synovus Financial, and Southwest Airlines. A number of consultants and educators are now touting the benefits to be gained in building a total quality management approach upon a servant-leadership foundation. Through internal training and education, institutions are discovering that servant-leadership can truly improve how business is developed and conducted, while still successfully turning a profit.
Personal Transformation
A sixth application of servant-leadership involves its use in programs relating to personal growth and transformation. Servant-leadership operates at both the institutional and personal levels. For individuals it offers a means to personal growth—spiritually, professionally, emotionally, and intellectually. It has ties to the ideas of M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled), Parker Palmer (The Active Life), Ann McGee-Cooper (You Don’t Have to Go Home from Work Exhausted!), and others who have written on expanding human potential. A particular strength of servant-leadership is that it encourages everyone to actively seek opportunities to both serve and lead others, thereby setting up the potential for raising the quality of life throughout society.
Servant-Leadership and Cultural Tradition
For some people, the word servant may prompt an initial negative connotation due to the oppression that many people—especially women and people of color—have historically endured. For others, the word leader may also carry with it a great deal of unfavorable historical baggage. However, upon closer analysis many come to appreciate the inherent spiritual nature of what Greenleaf intended by the pairing of servant and leader. The startling paradox of the term servant-leadership serves to prompt new insights.
In an article titled, “Pluralistic Reflections on Servant-Leadership,” Juana Bordas has written: “Many women, minorities and people of color have long traditions of servant-leadership in their cultures. Servant-leadership has very old roots in many of the indigenous cultures. Cultures that were holistic, cooperative, communal, intuitive and spiritual. These cultures centered on being guardians of the future and respecting the ancestors who walked before.”
Women leaders and authors are writing and speaking about servant-leadership as a leadership philosophy that is most appropriate for both women and men to embrace. Patsy Sampson, former president of Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, was one such person. In an essay on women and servant-leadership, she wrote: “So-called (service-oriented) feminine characteristics are exactly those which are consonant with the very best qualities of servant-leadership.”
A Growing Movement
Servant-leadership works like the consensus building that the Japanese are famous for. Yes, it takes a while on the front end; everyone’s view is solicited, though everyone also understands that his view may not ultimately prevail. But once the consensus is forged, watch out: With everybody on board, your so called implementation proceeds wham-bam.
—Fortune Magazine
Interest in the philosophy and practice of servant-leadership is now at an all-time high. Hundreds of articles on servant-leadership have appeared in various magazines, journals, and newspapers over the past decade. Many books on the general subject of leadership have been published that recommend servant-leadership as a more holistic way of being. And, there is a growing body of literature available on the understanding and practice of servant-leadership.
Both the Robert K. Greenleaf Center (www.greenleaf.org) and the Spears Center for Servant-Leadership (www.spearscenter.org) are not-for-profit educational organization that seeks to encourage the understanding and practice of servant-leadership.
Life is full of curious and meaningful paradoxes. Servant-leadership is one such paradox that has slowly but surely gained countless adherents over the past four decades. The seeds that have been planted have begun to sprout in many institutions, as well as in the hearts of many who long to improve the human condition. Servant-leadership is providing a framework from which many thousands of known and unknown individuals are helping to improve how we treat those who do the work within our many institutions. Servant-leadership truly offers hope and guidance for a new era in human development, and for the creation of better, more caring institutions.
About the Author
LARRY C. SPEARS is President & CEO of The Spears Center for Servant-Leadership. He also serves as Servant-Leadership Scholar at Gonzaga University (Spokane) where he designs and teaches graduate courses in servant-leadership. From 1990-2007 he served as President & CEO of the Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership. Before that, he held positions with the Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium, the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s Philadelphia Center, and Friends Journal. He has edited or co-edited 13 books on servant-leadership, including Insights on Leadership (1998) and The Spirit of Servant-Leadership (2011). Larry has published several hundred articles on servant-leadership in a variety of books, journals, and in other publications. He has 35 years of experience in organizational leadership, entrepreneurial development, non-profit management, and grantwriting, having envisioned and authored over thirty successful grant projects totaling several million dollars.