Servant Leadership -- Robert K. Greenleaf Introduction

Servant Leadership -- Robert K. Greenleaf

Introduction to Robert K. Greenleaf

In order to examine the views and philosophies of Robert K. Greenleaf -- even before reading his book -- it is helpful to review the Web site which fully describes his brainchild, "The Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership." The late Greenleaf, a former executive at AT& T, began his initial career there in management research, development and education. Following his work at AT& T, Greenleaf became a respected lecturer and consultant for MIT, Harvard Business School, and Dartmouth College.

It was during the 1960s, the anti-Vietnam war years when many young people were rejecting traditional American values that Greenleaf began to develop his theory that the institutions in America were not fulfilling their responsibilities in serving the needs of the people. He wrote an essay in 1970 called The Servant as Leader, in which he pointed out that the nation needs a whole new fresh way to look at leadership; he wrote that leaders must be able to serve first, prior to their familiarity and understanding of the pivotal duties and responsibilities of leadership.

"The servant-leader is servant first," according to the Web site for the Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership (originally founded as "Center for Applied Ethics" in 1964), which Greenleaf developed in Indianapolis, Indiana, and which today serves as an important reflection of his legacy. Servant-Leadership, the Web site states, "is a practical philosophy which supports people who choose to serve first, and then lead as a way of expanding service to individuals and institutions."

Servant Leadership

In his book, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power of Greatness, Greenleaf writes that a great leader embraces the theory of prophecy -- "seekers make prophets" -- and he alludes to Hermann Hesse's Journey to the East, as the work that first inspired him to come up with the idea for "servant-leader." In order to learn more about Greenleaf's inspiration and vision it is worth a brief review of Hesse's story.

In Journey to the East, the protagonist (presumed to be Hesse), along with a group of musicians, artist, and poets, called "the League," is going on a mystical journey to Arabia. Among the travelers is a man named Leo, a servant, who carried the luggage and helped out in menial ways. Even though Leo was at the bottom of the ladder, in terms of prestige, he carried out duties happily, singing, whistling, and being a delightful helper. But Leo disappeared, and with his exit from the traveling group, the unity of the members of the group disappeared, faith seemed to vanish, and depression set in.

Some time later, the story continues, Hesse found Leo, and discovered that he was actually an important person, in fact, he was the president of the League; hence, "servant-leader" emerged from the story of on who was carrying out in splendid fashion duties of a servant, but who in truth was actually a true leader.

Greenleaf (page 23) writes that Albert Camus is a prophet worthy of attention because " ... his unrelenting demand that each of us confront the exacting terms of our own existence." And Greenleaf seems himself worthy of designation as a philosopher when he writes, first, on page 35, that "Intuition in a leader is more valued, more trusted, at the conceptual level," and next, on page 62, when he explains that "... caring for persons, the more able and the less able serving each other, is the rock on which a good society is built.

He went on to say that a more just and loving society will emerge from institutions if people " ... raise both the capacity to serve and the very performance as servant of existing major institutions by new regenerative forces operating within them."

Greenleaf is interested in the changing definition of words -- in particular, such a simple word as "good" (page 65) used to mean "rank" within an institution; now it means "doing what is reasonable and possible with available resources." As for the institution of government: "governments rely too much on coercion and too little on persuasion, leadership and example (66)." And "business practice," he continues, "still follows too much the way of huckster-traders of centuries past."

Few institutions get left out of Greenleaf's list of disappointing organizations: governments, churches, universities, health and social service organizations -- all these, he writes (67), are failing to fulfill their obligations to the great number of people who need them. He tries to point out that he is not attacking institutions for the sake of finding scapegoats, but the missions that all these aforementioned institutions once fulfilled honorably have now been lost (or misplaced) in the shuffle of the modern world.

A good explanation for these failings on the part of the institutions is that their trustees have failed to assume responsibility, and have even failed to understand their roles. On page 111, he writes about the three limitations of the role of trustee:

a) "It is the common assumption by trustees that internal officers and staffs, left largely on their own ... will see to it that the institution will perform as it should ... " (and that is an incorrect assumption); b) " ... few of us ... have the ability to perform consistently at a high level of excellence ... And [to] judge our own performance objectively"; and c) there is a consistent failure on the part of trustees to be critical and entirely subjectively familiar with the data supplied by the officers of the institution. So basically, Greenleaf is saying that attention to detail and the push of excellence has been abandoned by trustees -- the very people who once were "trusted" to ensure that the institution was functioning smoothly and fulfilling its mission and vision.

In his critique on education (177), he faults the institution on three key points: one, schools and universities lack the programs to prepare students for leadership; two, education does not provide sufficient opportunities for low-income people to receive the preparation they need to return to their roots and lead the poor in our society; and three, Greenleaf asserts there is too much teaching "about" values, and not enough teaching of precisely what values young people should embrace.