The words servant and leader are usually thought of as being opposites. In 1970, retired AT&T executive Robert K. Greenleaf (1904-1990) deliberately brought those words together in a meaningful way and coined the term servant leadership. In doing so, he launched a quiet revolution in the way in which we view and practice leadership. In the years since that time, many of today’s most creative thinkers are writing and speaking about servant leadership as an emerging leadership paradigm for the 21st century. In fact, we are witnessing today an unparalleled explosion of interest in, and practice of, servant leadership. In her groundbreaking book on quantum sciences and leadership, “Rewiring the Corporate Brain” (1997), Danah Zohar goes so far as to state that “servant-leadership is the essence of quantum thinking and quantum leadership.”
Servant Leadership and Character
Servant leadership seeks to involve others in decision making, is strongly based in ethical and caring behavior, and enhances the growth of workers while improving the caring and quality of organizational life. It is based on two main constructs that speak to the character of the servant leader:
(1) Ethical behavior
(2) Concern for subordinates
Our fundamental understanding of character has much to do with the essential traits exhibited by a person. In recent years there has been a growing interest in the nature of character and character education, based upon a belief that positive character traits can be both taught and learned. The nature of character and its relationship to leaders has also taken on increased significance in recent years. Character refers to deep structures of personality that are particularly resistant to change.
Ten Principles of a Servant Leader
The literature on leadership includes a number of different listings of character traits as practiced by leaders. Much of the leadership literature includes as an implicit assumption of the belief that positive characteristics can-and-should be encouraged and practiced by leaders. Identified in servant leadership is a set of 10 characteristics of the servant leader that are of critical importance. They are listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people, and building community.
Listening
Leaders have traditionally been valued for their communication and decision-making skills. Although 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 to clarify that will. He or she listens receptively to what is being said and unsaid. Listening also encompasses hearing one’s own inner voice. Listening, coupled with periods of reflection, is essential to the growth and well-being 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 colleagues and does not reject them as people, even when one may be forced to refuse to accept certain behaviors or performance. The most successful servant leaders are those who have become skilled empathetic listeners.
Healing
The healing of relationships 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 one’s relationship to 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.
Awareness
General awareness, and especially self-awareness, strengthens the servant leader. Awareness helps one in understanding issues involving ethics, power, and values. It lends itself to being able to view most situations from a more integrated, holistic position.
Persuasion
Another characteristic of servant leaders is reliance on persuasion, rather than on 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 finds its roots in the beliefs of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers)—the denominational body to which Robert Greenleaf belonged.
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 leaders, this is a characteristic that requires discipline and practice. The traditional leader is consumed by the need to achieve short-term operational goals. The leader who wishes to also be a servant leader must stretch his or her thinking to encompass broader-based conceptual thinking. Within organizations, conceptualization is, by its very nature, a key role of boards of trustees or directors. Unfortunately, boards can sometimes become involved in the day-to-day operations—something that should be discouraged—and, thus, 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 executive leaders probably need to develop both perspectives within themselves. Servant leaders are called to seek a delicate balance between conceptual thinking and a day-to-day operational approach.
Foresight
Closely related to conceptualization, the ability to foresee the likely outcome of a situation is hard to define, but easier to identify. One knows foresight when one experiences 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. Foresight remains a largely unexplored area in leadership studies, but one most deserving of careful attention.
Stewardship.
Peter Block (1993)—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 CEO’s, 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 organization. The servant leader recognizes the tremendous responsibility to do everything in his or her power to nurture the personal and professional growth of employees and colleagues. In practice, this can include (but is not limited to) concrete actions such as making funds available 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 employees to find other positions.
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.
Servant leadership characteristics often occur naturally within many individuals; and, like many natural tendencies, they can be enhanced through learning and practice. Servant leadership offers great hope for the future in creating better, more caring, institutions.
Separating People from Their Behavior
If you have ever taken a human resources course on constructive discipline, you've probably heard the instructor make statements that sound silly and nonsensical on the surface. Comments like "When you discipline an employee, you must separate the person from his or her behavior." Usually someone in the audience will respond, "Separate the person from his behavior? How stupid is that? He's the jerk who did it, fire him!" Of course, what the instructor means is that we all do bad things but aren't necessarily bad people. For example, you should not say to an employee, "You're stupid!" Exactly how is an employee supposed to fix that? Do you have some IQ pills in the first aid box? Rather, you should say, "The report you submitted does not meet our standards here." Now that is something the employee can do something about. You don't say to an employee, "You're lazy!" Rather, "You have been tardy four times this month." That is something the employee can do something about. Theologians often refer to this as "separating the sin from the sinner," which I must admit I once believed to be a rather silly distinction. Silly until I realized there was one person on the planet with whom I do that routinely.
Character
Character is a word that has been getting a lot of attention in recent years. Not long ago, there was fierce debate over the importance of character as it relates to leadership. Some even suggested that personal character has nothing to do with leadership. Were you buying into that idea? If you do not believe character is important to leadership, just ask yourself these questions: Do people of low character have influence with you and inspire you to action? Do you have good relationships with people of low character? Character is a much used word, especially around election time, but an often misunderstood concept. To better understand character, we need to first differentiate between character and personality.
Personality
The word personality comes from the Latin word persona, originally used to denote the masks worn by theatrical players in ancient Greek dramas and which came to encompass the actor's role as well. Personality could be described as the mask we wear for the world to see. Most psychologists today agree that one's personality has developed and is pretty well fixed by the age of six. There are many personality profiling systems and other tools available to measure personality and the different temperaments, dispositions, and relational styles. For example, DISC is a well-known tool that measures the four primary relational styles: D for dominance, I for influencing, S for steadiness, and C for conscientious. There is quite a bit of scientific support for these four basic styles, and most of us are a complex combination of all of them with usually two dominant styles.
Personality types range from extroverted to introverted, outgoing to shy, type A to type B, aggressive to passive, humorous to dry, resilient to reactive, charming to boring, challenger to negotiator, et cetera. Personality can include a superficial "social image" that people display, like charm, graciousness, and charisma. However, what you see may not be what you get. We have all known people whose character was not consistent with their personality. As Socrates put it more than twenty three hundred years ago, "The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be the person we pretend to be." Personality has little to do with leadership because leadership is not about style. Rather, leadership is about substance. Personality deals with style while character deals with substance. I have met excellent leaders who were right-brained, left-brained, tall, short, fat, thin, articulate, inarticulate, assertive, timid, charismatic, boring, dressed for success, and dressed for failure. Look at the great leaders in history, and you will find a full spectrum of leadership styles ranging from Tom Landry to Vince Lombardi, from General Bradley to General Patton, from Mary Kay Ash to Lee Iacocca, from FDR to Ronald Reagan, and from Martin Luther King Jr. to Billy Graham. Each had a very different style and personality yet was effective in his or her own unique way.
Character
Dwight Moody, the nineteenth-century lay evangelist, once remarked, "Character is what a man is in the dark." The word character comes from a Greek verb meaning, “to engrave.” A person's character, then, is the visible sign of his inner nature. Character s what we are beneath our personality (mask). As stated earlier, personality is generally set by the age of six, but not so with character. Our character is a moving target that in healthy human beings should continue to grow and develop throughout life, hence the term maturity. Character is of higher importance than personality, as evidenced by the fact that society does not usually hold people accountable for their personality traits but certainly does hold them accountable for their behavior (character). Character, then is something very different from personality.
Character is our moral maturity, which is our willingness to do the right thing even when, perhaps especially when, it costs us something. In fact, I am not sure it can be an act of character unless it costs us something. Indeed, our true character is revealed when the price of doing the right thing is more than we are willing to pay. Character is our moral and ethical strength to behave according to proper values and principles. The difficult part of life is not knowing what is right but doing what is right. Again, our character is our level of commitment to doing the right thing, which explains why leadership is "character in action." Leaders seek to do the right thing. I don't know about the wars and demons you fight every day, but I have to tell you that I have wars going on in my gut every day. I am constantly fighting battles between what I want to do and what I ought to do. I war against what I know I should do and the shortcut I may want to take today. As stated before, I regularly war with that two-year old inside me who wants his way.
Developing character is winning those battles repeatedly, until it begins to become habit. Remember, anyone can love people he or she likes. Anyone can kiss up to the important people. Even the most despicable people on the planet are capable of that. There is an old saying that you can judge people's character by how they treat people who can do nothing for them.
Again, leadership (character) is doing the right thing even when we do not feel like it, perhaps especially when we do not feel like it. Again, the message I hope you will fully internalize is that leadership development and character development are one.
Nurture and Nature
There is little doubt that the good and bad habits that become our character are strongly influenced by both heredity and environment. Influenced, yes; determined, no. We know that identical twins with the same genes and reared in the same environment grow up to become two very different people. Even more dramatic are conjoined twins with the same genes same environment, and even the same body who are often two very unique and surprisingly different people. The "raw materials" of our genetic personalities and the environment we were subjected to growing up vary greatly from one person to the next. For example, the person who has an outgoing personality coupled with a wonderful, loving, and supportive childhood has distinct advantages over the person who is saddled with a more melancholy personality coupled with an abusive, unloving childhood. Yet examples abound of people raised in horrible circumstances who chose to rise far above their circumstances, become excellent leaders, and build wonderful lives for themselves and their families. Examples also abound of people who were given everything in childhood and who had every privilege and advantage yet chose to live shameful lives.
Yes, it is true that some of us will have to work harder than others according to the hand we have been dealt and the raw materials we have to work with. Similarly, "natural" or "gifted" athletes, musicians, students, and leaders may have to put in less practice time than others. We all have predispositions and handicaps that can become obstacles to our character development. Some choose to overcome their obstacles; some choose not to. But in the end, what we are, the person we have become is to a great extent the result of our choices, past and present. To be sure, our future growth and development requires us to be mature enough to accept this responsibility, because if we are unwilling to accept responsibility for our past, we probably will be unwilling to accept responsibility to create our future. Our present state is a product of our past and present choices, but it need not be the dictator of our future state. Our future state, our future character will be determined by the choices we make today and tomorrow. The good news is that we can choose to be something different, starting today.
Character is Habit
Simply put, character is the sum total of our habits, our personal assortment of virtues and vices. Character is knowing the good, doing the good, and loving the good the habits of the mind, the habits of the will, and the habits of the heart. Aristotle wrote, "Moral virtue comes about as a result of habit . . . We become what we repeatedly do. We become just by doing just acts, self-controlled by doing self-controlled acts, brave by doing brave acts." As I stated before, we have been teaching character to our little eight-year-old for seven years now. Over and over and over and over again!
"Be patient, don't interrupt, be nice, be a good listener, don't be arrogant, think about others, forgive, be honest, follow through," and on and on. You think it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks? Those "puppies" are pretty rough, too! In summary, we are creatures of habit, and our choices add up to this being we call "me." The ancient adage says it well: Thoughts become actions, actions become habits, habits become our character, and our character becomes our destiny. Put another way, character may determine our fate (destiny), but character is not determined by fate. Our character is determined by our choices.
Building Character
Traditionally, character was built upon the three-legged stool metaphor. One leg represented the home, where children learned and internalized moral beliefs and moral habits through years of loving discipline. The second and third legs of the stool represented the local school and the local community where students or members were held to high behavior standards. For many decades, it seemed as though everyone was pretty much on the same page.
Getting in trouble at school or next door probably meant getting it worse at home. Teaching and assisting our children in developing their character habits is one of the very best gifts parents can impart to their children. As psychologist William James put it, "Could the young but realize how soon they will become 'mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state . . . Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its ever so little scar." Aristotle agreed: "The habits we form from childhood make no small difference rather, they make all the difference." We praise talent in this country and reward it handsomely.
Yet I am convinced that excellent character is much more to be recognized and praised than talent. Why? Many of the outstanding gifts that people possess are to an extent, sometimes to a great extent, "God-given" or natural talents and abilities. A well-developed character, on the other hand, is a unique person forged out of his or her own raw material, however flawed or damaged, choice by choice, day by day, year by year. A unique person molded through hard work, courage, commitment, and making the right choices even when those choices were difficult or unpopular.
My Friend Elizabeth
I would like to close this section on character by sharing a personal experience I will never forget. One of my favorite people on the planet died a couple of years ago. Her name was Elizabeth Morin, a wonderful elderly woman whom my wife and I chose as our "adopted" grandmother many years ago. Elizabeth was eighty-nine when she died but was one of the most alive people I have ever known. She was not cynical about the world nor did she think she had "arrived" and had everything figured out. She was always open to new ideas and ways of doing things. She was a quiet woman, even shy; but when she did speak, people who knew her well would listen closely because she would often make wise, even profound, comments. The trouble was you had to be listening closely to catch it. I went to visit Elizabeth in the hospital when she was dying, and I was quite sad, to say the least. While she was consoling me, she said she wanted to share something with me that she had learned about character now that she was dying. It was just like Elizabeth to give me a gift before she went home.
The discussion went something like this: “Jim, now that I am dying, my old friends are all coming to see me.” “Yes, I know Elizabeth, people have been waiting in line halfway down the hospital corridor for days now." She thought for a moment and then said something I will never forget: “Jim, you know my older friends are like they were when they were younger, only more so." Did you catch that? Since I had not been listening closely enough either, I had to ask, "What do you mean, Elizabeth?" "Well, those of my friends who were selfish and self-centered thirty years ago, well, you ought to see them now. They come in my room, sit by my bed, talk about themselves and their problems for ninety minutes, and then leave. I am left wondering why they came. "But the ones who were on a good path thirty years ago? The ones who cared about others and gave of themselves? You should see them now Jim, Saints." Green and growing or ripe and rotting. I sure miss Elizabeth. The choices we make on a daily basis have not only determined who we are today but are determining who we will be tomorrow. Again, author C.S. Lewis: "That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible."
Habits
The Anatomy of a Habit
William James called human beings "bundles of habits. “To further understand the forces at work when one is truly committed to change, it is important to understand the dynamics involved in developing and breaking these habits that have such a tight grip on our lives. Habits predictably will travel through four stages before becoming the "default" response in our behavior. Let's take a brief look at these four stages.
Stage One: Unconscious and Unskilled
The first stage is the unconscious and unskilled stage, at which we have no knowledge and are oblivious to the skill or behavior. This is pre-potty training; before that first drink or cigarette; before learning to ski, play basketball, play the piano, type, read, write, or become a better leader. In this stage, you are either unaware or uninterested in the behavior and are therefore unskilled.
Stage Two: Conscious and Unskilled
This is the stage at which we become aware of a new behavior but have not yet developed the skills and habits necessary to perform well on a consistent basis. This is when Mom first starts suggesting we get on that big white commode (how unnatural, Mommy!); when we smoke that first cigarette, drink that first awful alcoholic drink, fall twenty times the first time we try to ski down the slope, begin playing the piano, learn to type, et cetera. Stage two is the awkward stage, and this awkwardness must be resisted when we arc on our path to growth and improvement. If we do not resist the awkward feelings, we will often give up. For the leader, this awkwardness may occur when he or she first starts to hold people accountable, starts appreciating people for their efforts, or begins treating employees with respect rather than just his or her boss. It can feel awkward, uncomfortable, and even intimidating, and those feelings must be resisted and worked through, which is why commitment is so important.
Stage Three: Conscious and Skilled
This is the stage at which we are becoming more and more skilled and comfortable with the new behavior, and it is becoming a skill and even a habit. This is when the child rarely has an accident making it to the bathroom; when the cigarettes or booze are tasting pretty good, snow skiing feels a lot less awkward, and the typist and pianist rarely, if ever, need to look at their fingers on the keyboard anymore. This is the "getting the hang of it" stage. We still have to think about it to some degree, push ourselves to action, continue practicing, but it's becoming more "natural."
Stage Four: Unconscious and Skilled
The final stage is when we don't have to "think" about it anymore because the behavior has become habit and very natural. Indeed, the behavior has become our "second nature." Do we have to "think" about brushing our teeth in the morning? I hope not. Does a skilled typist or pianist "think" about which keys to strike? Stage four is the chain-smoker who has three cigarettes burning in three different ashtrays, the alcoholic, or the skier who goes down the slope as naturally as he or she walks down the street. Stage four is the leader who doesn't have to try to be a good leader because he or she has become a good leader.
Habits, both good and bad, take time to develop, and they take time to break. My experience working with leaders and character change is that it takes a minimum of six months to begin extinguishing an old character habit until the new response has become the "default" response. And this is a minimum. We may even struggle with certain serious habits for many years.
1 This reading is a compilation of three sources:
Hunter, J. (2004). The world’s most powerful leadership principle. New York, NY: Crown Business.
Spears, L.C. (Ed.). (1998). Insights on leadership: Service, stewardship, spirit and servant-leadership. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. Zohar, D. (1997). Rewiring the corporate brain. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.
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