Servant Leadership Robert Greenleaf Quotes

Don't assume, because you are intelligent, able, and well-motivated, that you are open to communication, that you know how to listen.

The servant-leader is servant first, it begins with a natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first, as opposed to, wanting power, influence, fame, or wealth.

Ego can’t sleep. It micro-manages. It disempowers. It reduces our capability. It excels in control.

Behind every great achievement is a dreamer of great dreams.

Ego focuses on one’s own survival, pleasure, and enhancement to the exclusion of others; ego is selfishly ambitious. It sees relationships in terms of threat or no threat, like little children who classify all people as “nice” or “mean.” Conscience, on the other hand, both democratizes and elevates ego to a larger sense of the group, the whole, the community, the greater good. It sees life in terms of service and contribution, in terms of others’ security and fulfillment.

Knowledge may be power, but not without the willingness, and the release from inhibiting mind-sets, to use that knowledge.

vision, without which we perish, is required to open us to willingness to use what we know and to work to extract hard reality from a dream.

Moral authority is another way to define servant leadership because it represents a reciprocal choice between leader and follower. If the leader is principle centered, he or she will develop moral authority. If the follower is principle centered, he or she will follow the leader. In this sense, both leaders and followers are followers. Why? They follow truth. They follow natural law. They follow principles. They follow a common, agreed-upon vision. They share values. They grow to trust one another.

Everywhere there is much complaining about too few leaders. We have too few because most institutions are structured so that only a few—only one at the time—can emerge.

I hold that hope, thus defined, is absolutely essential to both sanity and wholeness of life.

Listening, coupled with regular periods of reflection, are essential to the growth of the servant-leader.

But perhaps the greatest threat is that we lack the mechanism of consensus, a way of making up our collective minds.

In the context of religious leadership, tinkering with structure is not a first choice of means for building or sustaining quality in an institution. Leadership is the prime concern!

Rabbi Heschel replied: “I would say: Let them remember that there is a meaning beyond absurdity. Let them be sure that every little deed counts, that every word has power, and that we can—every one—do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments. And above all, remember that the meaning of life is to build a life as if it were a work of art.

One must not be afraid of a little silence. Some find silence awkward or oppressive, but a relaxed approach to dialogue will include the welcoming of some silence. It is often a devastating question to ask oneself-but it is sometimes important to ask it"In saying what I have in mind will I really improve on the silence?

Now you can do as I do, stand outside and criticize, bring pressure if you can, write and argue about it. All of this may do some good. But nothing of substance will happen unless there are people inside these institutions who are able to (and want to) lead them into better performance for the public good. Some of you ought to make careers inside these big institutions and become a force for good—from the inside.

I’m a bottom-up manager who subscribes to the concept of “servant leadership,” as articulated by the late Robert Greenleaf. He believed that organizations are at their most effective when leaders encourage collaboration, trust, foresight, listening, and empowerment. In any hierarchy, it’s clear that the ultimate boss (in my case, me) holds the most power. But a wonderful thing happens when you flip the traditional organizational chart upside down so that it looks like a V with the boss on the bottom. My job is to serve and support the next layer “above” me so that the people on that layer can then serve and support the next layer “above” them, and so on.

with maturity one’s world becomes the limitless sphere of people, ideas, and events which each of us influences by each thought, word, and deed; and each of us, in turn, is open to receive influence

maturity is the capacity to withstand the ego-destroying experiences and not lose one’s perspective in the ego-building experiences: “If

The skill of foresight is crucial. The “lead” that a leader has is his ability to foresee an event that must be dealt with before others see it so that he can act on it his way, the right way, while the initiative is his.

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.

Knowledge is but a tool. The spirit is of the essence.

As entheos grows, one becomes more decisive and emphatic in saying no!

Clearly chairs, or CGOs, have a leading part to play in ensuring that governance boards work in the way the new model outlines. As Carver and Oliver say, "We believe that the chair's role is one of the most important keys to unlocking the potential of boards, and we are therefore going to give it considerable attention." I strongly support the importance that the model gives to the chair's role. This book stresses that the board must speak with one voice and that the CEO takes directions only from the board as a whole. The board will speak with one voice only as a result of directors' commitment to do so and the skill of the chair. I doubt that what is required of a person to serve well on any type of board or committee is a natural form of behavior. The key task of a chair is to enable the members of a board to work together effectively and to get the best out of them. This is what the servant achieved in the story on which Robert Greenleaf's concept of the servant-leader is based. Chairs have a major leadership task. It is they who are responsible for turning a collection of competent individuals into an effective team. The new model is demanding of its chairs, and much will depend on them. Another field in which

Joy is inward, it is generated inside. It is not found outside and brought in. It is for those who accept the world as it is, part good, part bad, and who identify with the good by adding a little island of serenity to it. Hermann

It is no challenge to lead when everybody is with you. Liberal

The grand design of education is to excite, rather than pretend to satisfy, an ardent thirst for information; and to enlarge the capacity of the mind, rather than to store it with knowledge, however useful.

The answer to this question is that trustees need a new view of people at their best in institutional roles. That view can be simply stated: No person is complete; no one is to be entrusted with all. Completeness is to be found only in the complementary talents of several who relate as equals. This flouts one of the time-honored assumptions—almost an axiom—of administrative lore: “You cannot manage by committee! Delegation of authority must be made to an individual.

The new assumption is that delegation of authority from trustees to operating executives is best made to a team of several persons whose exceptional talents are complementary and who relate to one another as equals, under the leadership of a primus inter pares (as discussed in the last chapter).

A New Concept of Trust. Everyone in the institution has a share in building trust. The administrators have the major responsibility for institutional performance that merits trust. However, if there is not enough trust (and the premise stated at the beginning of this chapter is that in most institutions today there is not enough trust) and if the level of trust has been low enough long enough, then it must be assumed that internal administrators, as institutions are now structured, will not deliver an adequate amount of it. It is then the obligation of trustees to fulfill what their title implies and become initiating builders of trust. They should see this as their role. They will not supersede administration in doing this. Rather, they will become strengtheners of administrators in their trust-building roles.

Providing information to trustees on the basis suggested here is both difficult and expensive, and it clearly signals a new initiating role for trustees as contrasted with the usual reacting role in which trustees are nominal. If the transition is to be made in a constructive way, with a minimum of loss of vital force and a maximum gain in institutional strength, all constituencies, particularly internal officers and staffs, will need to want trustees to perform so that trustee judgments will stand on a par with all other judgments by or about the institution.

Trustees have the obligation to oversee the use of power in order to check its corrupting influence on those to whom it is entrusted, and to assure that those affected by its use are positively helped and are not harmed.

A third ambiguity is the need for a healthy tension between belief and criticism as part of the dynamism that makes a high performing institution. Operating officers and staffs need to be mostly believing. Trustees need to be mostly critical. Administrators and staffs need to be mostly believing because the morale of those who do the work of the institution needs to be sustained, and part of the trust of all constituencies rests on a communicated belief in the rightness of what is being done. Trustees need to be mostly critical because it is the scrutiny of a critical attitude that keeps administrators and staffs on a true course.

Some basic principles will need to be explicitly accepted, such as that no one, absolutely no one, is to be entrusted with the operational use of power without the close oversight of fully functioning trustees.

Preparing the young for responsible roles as servants is neither expensive nor difficult to do, but it is not now the focus of much explicit effort. It is assumed to be one of those things that is implicit; it is just supposed to happen. And we have charmed ourselves into believing that it is being done. It is not being done!

Having power (and every trustee has some power) one initiates the means whereby power is used to serve and not to hurt. Serve is used in the sense that all who are touched by the institution or its work become, because of that influence, healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants. Any institution that does not strive with all of its resources, human and material, to achieve the reasonable and the possible in these dimensions is not being adequately cared for by its trustees. That, I believe, is what the times we live in require.

A principle is suggested: When any action is regulated by law, the incentive for individual conscience to govern is diminished—unless the law coincides with almost universally held moral standards.

It comes out better if one persuades rather than compels. Let me suggest to the reader that the assumptions be examined—both about the making of profit and about undertaking to compel service by law. Is all that we want from profit-making business the lowest price we can exact? In my own efforts to help business to become more serving I feel that I am contending with a popular view that price is all.

The sanctions pressing on individuals for good performance are, first, their own pride and conscience framed within adequate information that guides them and tells them how they are doing; second, the social pressure of peers whose own performance is interlinked with theirs and who have access to the common pool of information so that they know how their colleagues are doing; and finally, the last-resort authority of the superior officer, which, in a good institution, is rarely used. The value of coercive power is inverse to its use.

Looking at the two major elements, the work and the person, the new ethic, simply but quite completely stated, will be: The work exists for the person as much as the person exists for the work. Put another way, the business exists as much to provide meaningful work to the person as it exists to provide a product or service to the customer.

Speaking to those in business who presume to manage, it is important that this principle be embraced as an ethic and not simply as a “device” to achieve harmony or increase productivity or reduce turnover. Some popular procedures, such as participation or work enlargement or profit sharing, may be manipulative devices if they do not flow naturally out of a comprehensive ethic.

Whereas “a living” can be dispensed via money through a relief agency, “meaningful work” is likely to be delivered only within an employing institution that is living by a new ethic.

If I were young again, I would again cast my lot with a large American business. I would do it because my country is a business-dominated society (not in a formal power sense but simply by the sheer mass of the business presence) and any social advance will move, in part, from forces generated inside business. From my own experience there is enough integrity in the typical business that I would be more useful and my personal growth would be better nourished by working inside rather than by trying to influence it from the outside. I would choose to join a large business firm because there would be more satisfaction in being where the action is (the action, not just the excitement)—at the point where some of the critical issues of society must be resolved if the work of the world is to be done. And I would do it because I believe that if I accept the challenge to cope with the inevitable manipulation within an institution that is responding sensibly and creatively to issues and situations that require new ethics, I will emerge at the end of my career with a better personal value system than I would have if I had chosen a work where I was more on my own and, therefore, freer from being manipulated.

Reducing mediocrity is a slow, difficult, person-by-person process in which the less able learn to identify and trust the more able who will diligently and honestly serve them. It is also a process in which able and honest, serving people prepare themselves to lead and accept the opportunity to lead when offered. Reducing mediocrity in positions of influence by replacing the less qualified with more able and honest serving people is a manageable task with our available resources. It can be done. And I am confident that it will be done on a substantial scale when the people and institutions that have the good of society at heart bring a clearer focus to their efforts and concentrate on the one thing that will turn us about the quickest: excellence in place of mediocrity.

The problem of doing better in the modern world, as I see it, is this: How can people perform better in, and be better served by, institutions—especially large ones?

Motivation then becomes what people generate for themselves when they experience growth. Whereas the usual assumption about the firm is that it is in business to make a profit and serve its customers and that it does things for and to employees to get them to be productive, the new ethic requires that growth of those who do the work is the primary aim, and the workers then see to it that the customer is served and that the ink on the bottom line is black. It is their game. The art, of course, is how to do this in a firm that employs many thousands.

Too much of the public concern for the quality of society is still devoted to caring directly for individuals and not enough attention goes to caring for institutions and the way they are structured. Structural flaws can cause harm to individuals; conversely, conceptually sound and ably administered institutions can build people and enrich society. All too often we seem to disregard this important influence that institutions can have on people.

Trustees are accountable to all parties at interest for the best possible performance of the institution in the service of the needs of all constituencies—including society at large.

The principal limitation of the conventional trustee role, as it is practiced today, is the common assumption by trustees that internal officers and staffs, left largely on their own and structured as they usually are, will see to it that the institution performs as it should, that is, close to what is reasonable and possible with its resources. The arguments against this assumption are presented in the last chapter in the section “Organization: Some Flaws in the Concept of the Single Chief,” a concept that seems likely to continue in force as long as trustees remain in their conventional nominal roles.

Throughout this chapter I take the cue from this definition—that the role of trustees is to stand outside the active program of the institution and to manage. What they delegate to the inside operating executives is administration

If one accepts the position that, as trustees now commonly function, they satisfy legal requirements and give the cover of legitimacy but little more, is not this arrangement neglect by trustees, administrators, and staffs in which all accept a more limited sense of obligation? Who is being deceived? At whose expense is this carried on? One is inclined to answer, “All of those who are served by, or depend on, the institution,” which, if it is a major one, can be a large number of people. They could be better served. Perhaps, though, the greater cost is the subtle (and in some cases not so subtle) compromise in the integrity of trustees, administrators, and staffs.

To live is to change; to live well is to have changed often.

Some people, a lot of people, in fact, are disqualified to lead because they cannot work through and with the half-people who are available to work with them. And the parents who try to raise perfect children are certain to raise neurotics, with much greater damage possible.

it is the ability to state a goal and reach it, through the efforts of other people, and satisfy those whose judgment one respects, under conditions of stress.

There is very little sustained performance at the level of excellence—of any kind, anywhere—without continuous coaching.

Create Dangerously.” And, as I ponder the fusing of servant and leader, it seems a dangerous creation: dangerous for the natural servant to become a leader, dangerous for the leader to be servant first, and dangerous for a follower to insist on being led by a servant.

Behind what is said in the collection presented here is a twofold concern. My first concern is for the individual in society and his or her seeming bent to deal with the massive problems of our times wholly in terms of systems, ideologies, and movements. These have their place, but they are not basic because they do not make themselves. The basics are the incremental thrusts of individuals who have the ability to serve and lead—the prime movers. My second concern is for the individual as a serving person and the tendency to deny wholeness and creative fulfillment to oneself by failing to lead when there is the opportunity.

Typically, today, somebody in top management meets with a consultant, reads a book, gets excited about a new idea, and begins to talk about it.

To the worldly, servant-leaders may seem naive; and they may not adapt readily to prevailing institutional structures. The

Orthodoxy is a dam that is built by persons who think they have reached the ultimate in human thought, and that there will never be anything as good. They are finding that it is easier to become interested in the dam than in the great current that it is holding back. These

W. Edwards Deming—that arguably, over 90 percent of problems are due to bad systems, not bad people. However, Greenleaf correctly points out that people are the programmers.

I would like to see the opportunity offered, at both secondary and college levels, for the poor to be prepared to return to their roots and become leaders among the disadvantaged. This suggestion rests upon the belief that the situation of the poor, particularly the neglect of their children, is a national disgrace in our affluent country, and that, if this condition is to be made right, the natural leaders who arise among the disadvantaged will find the way and organize the effort themselves. The best service that a school can render to these people may not be to homogenize them into the upper classes but to help those who have a value orientation that favors it to develop their ability to lead their people to secure a better life for many.

The third concern I have for education is the state of confusion I sense regarding the teaching of values. Coincident with the retreat from the posture of schools as the upholders of moral norms there has been a substantial growth, due to student demand, for courses about religion. Along with this, religious services, where religion is practiced, seem to have declined on campuses. This leaves the question: Is it only appropriate to teach about values and make no judgments about what they ought to be? Is this really an adequate role for schools and colleges? Should not schools be importantly concerned with value clarification so that students are given as firm a basis as possible for making the choices they have always made—even when the schools presumed to know what their values ought to be?

What Dr. Cuninggim says about giving is also applicable to teaching or to any helping role for that matter—doctor, nurse, social worker—where the helper presumes to know more of what is in the best interest of the recipients than the recipients know for themselves. I am not saying that the helper does not often, or even usually, know what is best. But if the situation is coercive, either overtly or covertly, then the potentiality for evil is there, just as Dr. Cuninggim says it is with giving. I have done enough foundation staff work to be certain in my own experience that the role of almoner is a corrupting one—for the almoner as well as for the recipient. The recently published Hospital Bill of Rights is an acknowledgment that hospital administrators are sharply aware of the potential evil in the caring role.

How much of the total educational effort is devoted to teaching people who do not have a motivation, other than responding to compulsion, to learn what we are trying to teach them? Is there any way out of this dilemma (if you concede that it is a dilemma) other than Ivan Illich’s revolutionary approach?

The cause of the oppressiveness and the precise circumstances are different, but the pervasive oppressiveness is very similar. And the remedy, I believe, is the same: raise the spirit of young people, help them build their confidence that they can successfully contend with the condition, work with them to find the direction they need to go and the competencies they need to acquire, and send them on their way. This is the task that is right for secondary education—and the time is right.

I believe that you need to assume that work, all work, exists as much for the enrichment of the life of the worker as it does for the service of the one who pays for it. This does not mean that work will not be hard, demanding, and sometimes frustrating. It is just that the workers’ life goals (quite apart from the money they earn) will be served by doing the work, and that is at least half the reason the work is there to be done. The implications of this assumption, if you choose to make it, are enormous, and I will not try to trace all of them.

D. The donors do not trust the governance structure of the typical university in which trustees are in a nominal and reactive role. They believe that if the usual process of university governance were going to produce an answer to the need they clearly see, it would already have done it. The need, as they see it, is not obscure. So if a better way is to be forthcoming, something has to change. The change they are proposing is that trustees shift their role toward more affirmative educational leadership.

But now that 50 percent of the young people are involved in some post-secondary education, the structure of the institution and its impact on values have become a matter of concern.

The faculty members who support these three contentions will tell you that the fundamental flaw in the structure of the university is that the faculty governs the institution, yet the primary loyalty of too many faculty members as individuals is not to their university or even to their students, but to their discipline, their professional expertise and reputation, and their colleagues that share these in universities generally. Perceptive faculty members know this, and the donors know it. And the donors are wise enough to accept that they cannot, and ought not, use their influence to try to change the predominant loyalty of faculty members. Perhaps this is what a good teacher-scholar has to be. The donors also know that the trustees have given the faculty so much power that the administrators cannot lead them in their educational goals. So the trustees must assume more leadership.

Part of the ambiguity that students need to learn to deal with in the course of their preparation to serve and be served by the present society is that it is a high form of art to ask the right questions. But it is also unrealistic to expect that someone else has answers for them. I said at the outset that many of the questions students have asked me during these days I regard as unanswerable except as one ventures into some experience and learns to respond, in the situation, to the immediate problems one confronts. And to do this one must have learned how to open one’s awareness to receive insight, inspiration, in the moment of need. One must accept that only venturing into uncertainty with faith that if one is adequately prepared to deal with the ambiguity, in the situation, the answer to the questions will come. The certainty one needs to face the demanding situations of life does not lie in having answers neatly catalogued in advance of the experience. That, in fact, is a formula for failure—one is surprised, sometimes demoralized, by the unexpected. Dependable certainty (which we all need a lot of) lies in confidence that one’s preparation is adequate so that one may venture into the experience without pre-set answers but with assurance that creative insight will emerge in the situation when needed, and that it will be right for the situation because it is an answer generated in the situation. A liberal education provides the best context I know of for preparing inexperienced people to venture into the unknown, to face the inexactitude and the wildness, with assurance. But, having said that the conventional liberal arts curriculum is the best context for such preparation, I must also say that it usually does not contain the preparation—and it should.

You can see in the way I have stated this that I reject the idea (which I have heard from both faculty and students here at Dickinson) that there is a real world outside beyond these walls and that what you have here is something else—a place where you prepare for the real world. If I hear you correctly, you have accepted a terrible limitation. This place is just as real as anything its students will ever experience. It is real because the ambiguities are here—as rich an assortment as will be found anywhere.

The great asset of a broad liberal arts education, as I know it, is that it does not have much bearing on any vocation in particular but has great relevance to all vocations in general—provided that the college environment within which it is carried out is accepted as real, as real as any chapter in one’s life, and provided that an explicit effort is made to prepare students to serve and be served by the present society, using the college experience as the working laboratory.

A foundation is essentially a group of trustees who manage a pool of uncommitted funds that can be used for a wide range of socially beneficial purposes. This is a very privileged role, not just for what can be accomplished by giving money, but for the opportunity for the foundation to make of itself a model of institutional quality, integrity, and effectiveness.

If, as I have argued, all foundations have the obligation to be creative in the use of a substantial part of their funds, then trustees have the further obligation to set apart some staff members or consultants who are independent of the staff that deals with grant applicants. This separate staff should work on foundation-originated, creative projects exclusively, with complete insulation from involvement with grant applications and the decision process regarding them. In a large foundation this might work best if two wholly separate staffs were to report independently to the trustees.

If foundations were substantially more creative, the first two of these conditions—the sentiment that foundations should be dispensed with and the ease of second-guessing their decisions—might be reduced to insignificance.

The editorial in the current Dickinsonian (which I thought was a very good editorial) quotes a previous president as stating it in these words: “The grand design of education is to excite, rather than pretend to satisfy, an ardent thirst for information; and to enlarge the capacity of the mind, rather than to store it with knowledge, however useful.” My own inclination would be to state the goal in more operational terms: “to prepare students to serve, and be served by, the present society.” By this I mean that a college, operating through the program its faculty chooses to design, will influence its students to be a more constructive building force in society and to do this in a way that helps them find their own legitimate needs, psychic and material, better served, than if they had not participated in the college program.

The world of affairs, as I have experienced it, is a very ambiguous one. The problem of preparing people to serve and be served by this society is, as Chesterton says, that the world is nearly reasonable but not quite. It is not illogical, yet it is a trap for logicians.

But the conventional practice, particularly in a large foundation, is to delegate administration to a hierarchical staff structure, much as a business board would do it. And when bureaucratic inertia takes over, as it does—in time—in all institutions that are so structured, the usual remedy is to install a new top administrator who will build some new life into it.

Foundations are the only category of institution that is wholly without a market test in the sense of clients or customers having immediate and direct sanctions at their disposal. All others—churches, businesses, schools, governments, hospitals, museums—have a market; that is, they have clients or customers whose support, or lack of it, has an immediate effect on the success of the institution. Foundations have only to meet the requirements of the law, and the only recourse of individuals is through the political process.

This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” to me; it is sort of a splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Robert Greenleaf: Caring for persons, the more able and the less able serving each other, is the basis for leadership, the rock upon which a good society is built. In small organizations, caring is largely person to person. But now, most caring is mediated through institutions—often large, complex, powerful, impersonal, and not always competent, sometimes corrupt.

Robert Greenleaf: If caring is needed to protect an institution, what are the requirements necessary to make it work? First, the sense of purpose and objective. Second, the talent to manage the process for reaching new objectives. Finally, and let me surprise you by emphasizing this third need, we need people who care about the institution. A deep sense of caring for the institution is required for its success.

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.

This is an important test of maturity: to seek to avoid error, to accept the consequences of error when it comes (as it surely will), and learn from it and to wipe the slate clean and start afresh, free from feelings of guilt.

The servant-leader is servant first—as Leo was portrayed. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. He is sharply different from the person who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. For such it will be a later choice to serve—after leadership is established.