Thoughts on Servant-Leadership
17th November 2005
In corporate America today, servant leadership is tauted as the key to revolutionizing the way American corporations manage their people. Specifically, servant leadership is taught as the way the new manager needs to learn to relate to their reports. No longer are they to structure the organization heirarchically in the traditional manner, but they are encouraged to collaborate, to involve, to engage, and to serve their consituencies, their stakeholders. This new way of relating to each other in the corporation will ensure that everyone buys into the corporate vision, and that the corporation will be faster able to achieve its goals.
Several times in the gospels, Jesus also admonished His followers that those who would lead are to be the servants of all. Often I hear that this means that a leader must first be the servant. One is first a servant, says one consultant, and then he or she is chosen to lead. Somehow, I think that is not exactly what the Master Servant said. Nor is it what Robert K. Greenleaf, the father of the contemporary Servant Leadership movement had in mind when he penned the words of the seminal article, “The Servant as Leader.”
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