You know that feeling you get after you have a great intellectually stimulating conversation with someone on a topic about which you're incredibly passionate? It's kind of like this weird combination of optimism, invincibility, and smugness all wrapped up in one. That's exactly how I felt today after a wonderful conversation with a colleague over lunch on the subject of Servant Leadership.
I won't give the whole background to the conversation, but I will mention a few interesting takeaways that I had from it. If you're not familiar with Servant Leadership, I'll provide a couple of links for you to understand the theory/philosophy. The wikipedia page for servant leadership leaves much to be desired, although it does have some good external links. Robert Greenleaf was the founder of the philosophy and ensuing modern-day movement, mostly defined in his seminal work called "Servant Leadership" published in 1970. Since then, the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership was established and numerous leadership programs throughout the US have tried to implement this philosophy in their curriculum.
I've read books referencing the Servant Leadership theory and have heard it spoken about and have even spoken about it myself enough that I'm familiar with the concepts of it... essentially that we are servants first. This great quote sums it up: "The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead." That's straight out of Greenleaf's book and on one of the pages of the Center's website. But the fact of it is, I've never actually read the book. It is amazing how much we can talk about something and hear others talk about something and even consider ourselves well informed about something without even having ever read the single primary source from which all information on that subject has been derived. It's like trying to describe what American democracy looks like without having ever read the Constitution and Bill of Rights. I did a very fast skim of the book, stopping to pay more attention in the chapters where Greenleaf described the theory specifically in the context of the university. I did this all in an effort to better prepare myself for what I knew would be an intellectually stimulating conversation (the professor I was talking with is probably the smartest man I've ever met), and through the process of reading and talking about it, I came to some interesting realizations.
ONE. The Servant Leadership theory is in incredibly powerful one but unfortunately the version we see in present-day programs implemented on US college campuses is an incredibly watered down version of what Greenleaf describes in his book. There is a very real and understandable reason for this. Greenleaf didn't write his book for college students. He wrote it for 3 different institutions: businesses, churches, and universities. And when he wrote to an audience of "the university" really he was writing to the trustee and directors of the university, not to the general student body or even staff and faculty. He gave no real suggestions or insights as to how you DO servant leadership, no model for application or process of implementation. Leadership educators know that students much better grasp and internalize theories and ideas about leadership if they are given a chance to practice them somehow. In fact two major assumptions behind leadership education is that 1) it can be taught and 2) that getting better at leadership means having more experience with it. But that's a whole different blog post. The problem for servant leadership comes in the fact that since Greenleaf didn't provide practical ways of teaching or practicing this philosophy or theory (at least for students), leadership educators have had to "make stuff up," often without fully grasping the concepts of the theory itself. Most programs claiming to teach servant leadership are completely watered-down versions of the theory, mostly comprised of a little bit of service, a little bit of leadership, and some reflection to try to figure out the connection between the two. But that totally misses the point. If we are to serve first as a product of understanding our deepest self and conviction about how the world should work, and THEN lead because our faith compels us to do something about that conviction, that's a totally different process than throwing a group of students into a service project and asking them to reflect. It completely looses the inner-work aspect of the theory.
TWO. Most US universities are unable or unwilling to go deep with the Servant Leadership model because of their fear of committing to an explicitly spiritual, nay Christian, perspective. I love Carnegie Mellon and I spent my most formative years there as an undergraduate, but that university, the one I currently work for, is a very long way from being able to embrace the Christian principles behind the Servant Leadership theory. Most universities are. In fact, I would say the only ones able to embrace the theory in its fullest sense - complete with the belief that ultimately Jesus was and still is the best and only example of a true Servant Leader in every fiber of their being - is the small, religiously affiliated, liberal arts college. And even that's a stretch given how many university are "religiously affiliated" but don't take that seriously. Greenleaf is pretty explicit about the role that Christian values play in his theory. He often quotes scripture from the Bible and various other 20th century Christian scholars, particularly apologetics, like Chesterton and Bonhoeffer. This is not because Greenleaf was a zealot of some sorts. The inherent religio-spiritual values give significant clout, meaning, and strength to the theory. To strip the theory of these values would strip it of its core meaning. That's closely connected to my first observation. Because universities are scared of the overtly Christian aspects of the theory, they try to ignore them and instead offer a sickly, uninspiring diluted version of Servant Leadership that makes it okay for students to try to do "servant leadership" without doing the deep inner work. Sounds vaguely like Ron Heifetz's caution against work avoidance. Doing deep inner work is hard and often very uncomfortable for people, especially college age students, and are enabled to avoid that work by using a theory of Servant Leadership which largely leaves out that more difficult inner work.
Now, don't get me wrong. There are plenty of programs which do a great job of drawing connections between service and leadership, particularly in the realm of social change, engaged citizenship, and working towards a better world. All these endeavors are powerful, valiant, and needed for college students. Programs like this exist at universities across the country like Duke, Butler, UCLA, Georgia Tech, and dozens of liberal arts colleges like I mentioned before. All of them make a significant impact on students and create meaningful learning opportunities. I don't even have an answer for what a program would look like that dealt more seriously with the theory in terms of implementing the Christian values piece. I guess what I'm saying is that there's so much more these program COULD be if Greenleaf's philosophy was more accurately portrayed in them. I welcome feedback and ideas on how better to do this.
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