image_pdfimage_print

Unit 6. Greenleaf: Concepts and Characteristics

From Greenleaf’s primary publication, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness (SL), this unit reports selected concepts and characteristics of his understanding. Again, these become not merely a reading session but a working and application session for your journey.

Activity 6:

  • Read and re-read this unit with two clear objectives in mind:
  • What immediate leadership functions will I shape by these concepts? (Action Plan)
  • Make an outline (My Notes) of a few selected Greenleaf concepts; print a copy and discuss them with a fellow minister.

1) The Servant Thesis

“A new moral principle is emerging which holds that the only authority deserving one’s allegiance is that which is freely and knowingly granted by the led to the leader in response to, and in proportion to, the clearly evident servant stature of the leader … They will freely respond only to individuals who are chosen as leaders because they are proven and trusted as servants” (SL, 10). “The servant leader is servant first… the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first” (SL, 13). “The best test is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, not be further deprived” (SL, 13-14)?

2) Painting the Dream

  • “Someone in the church must paint the dream … for anything to happen there must be a great dream. The growing edge church will be a painter of great dreams for all ofits people, something to lift their sights above the ordinary and give them a great goal to strive for…something for each person to strive for” (SL, 88).
  • “Pointing the direction: let us go this way” … clearly stating and restating the goal–the overarching purpose, the big dream, the visionary concept” (SL, 15).
  • “The way some great things get done is to choose your own role and keep on doing one thing at a time” (SL pp.30-32).

3) The Power of Communication

  • “Listening and understanding: I have a bias about this which suggests that only true natural servant automatically responds to any problem by listening first … one must not be afraid of a little silence” (SL, 16-17).
  • “Language and Imagination: Nothing is meaningful until it is related to the hearer’s own experience. Meaning in communication requires the hearer to supply that imaginative link” (SL, 18-19).

4) Withdrawal–Finding One’s Optimum

  • “The ability to withdraw and reorient oneself (pacing oneself) if only for a moment, presumes that one has learned the art of systematic neglect, to sort out the more important from the less, the important from the urgent” (SL, 19).
  • “The opening of awareness stocks both the conscious and unconscious minds with a richness of resources for future need … the basis for detachment to see oneself in perspective and context” (SL, 27).

5) Acceptance and Empathy

“Acceptance is receiving what is offered, with approbation, satisfaction … and empathy is the imaginative projection of one’s own consciousness into another being. The opposite of both is to reject, to refuse to hear or receive–to throw out … great leaders include little people” (SL, 20-21).

6) Intuition, Foresight, Faith

  • “The requirements of leadership impose … two intellectual abilities not usually addressed in an academic way: the need to have a sense for the unknowable and to foresee the unforeseeable” (SL, 21-22). “Intuition is a feel for patterns, the ability to generalize based on what has happened previously …. Their hunches are not seen as eternal truths” (SL, 23).
  • “Prescience, or foresight, is a better than average guess about what is going to happen when in the future” (SL, 24). “Living this way is partly a matter of faith …. Foresight is seen as a wholly rational process … a constantly running internal computer” (SL, 25).

7) Conceptualizing and Creative Response

  • History has been remarkably influenced by “prime leadership talent,” conceptualizing, clearly articulating, and passionately communicating a vision of what could be. “Today’s privileged” may often need to “stand aside and serve by helping when asked” as today’s oppressed “effectively assert their claims to stature” (see SL, 32-35).
  • Persuasion, one person at a time: Leadership by persuasion, with gentle, non-judgmental argument “has the virtue of change by convincing rather than coercion” (SL, 30). It is the “power used to create opportunity and alternatives so that individuals may choose and build autonomy” (SL, 41-42).

8) Who is the enemy?

  • Not “evil”, or “stupid”, or “apathetic people”; nor “protestors,” “revolutionaries,” or “reactionaries.” Rather, in the task of “building better institutions … the enemy is strong natural servants who have a potential to lead but do not lead, or who choose to follow a non-servant” (see SL, 44-45).
  • Others have found what the servant leader might also acknowledge: that the motivation for such serving is healing, “to make whole“; the mutual search for the servant and the served (see SL, 36-37).

9) Growing Edge Church (From SL, 80-81.)

  • Greenleaf expresses the hope that many “will move out on the growing edge and seek new opportunities for service … to become the chief nurturing force, conceptualizer of the opportunity, value shaper, and moral sustainer of leadership everywhere: in business, school, government, health and social service, philanthropy–everywhere.”
  • “The dynamics of leadership–the vision, the values, and the staying power–are essentially religious concerns, and fostering them should become the central mission of the growing edge churches.”
  • “What is asked of growing edge churches is that they add to their historic mission of caring for persons, and to their more recent regard for the social order, the mission of caring for institutions–quite specific institutions.”
  • “For the servant who has the capacity to be a builder, the greatest joy in the world is in building. Will not the growing edge church become the chief nurturer of servant leaders, institution builders for the future?” (SL, 248)

10) Church, as a Model Institution

From the chapter on Servant Leadership in Churches, Greenleaf gives his use of the word institution: “An institution is a gathering of persons who have accepted a common purpose, and a common discipline to guide the pursuit of that purpose, to the end that each involved person reaches higher fulfillment as a person, through serving and being served by the common venture” (SL, 237).
“Strategy for building a model institution:

  • First, there must be a goal, a concept of a distinguished serving institution” (SL, 240).
  • Second, “an understanding ofleadership and followership” (SL, 240).
  • Third, “organization-structure-modus-operandi … the ultimate authority should be placed in a balanced team of equals under the leadership of a true servant who serves as primus inter pares, first among equals” (SL, 241).
  • Fourth strategy of institution building: the need for trustees …. The trustee role is to monitor closely the movement of the institution toward its goals and to act both as critic and advocate, defender and court of last resort” (SL, 241).
  • Caring is the essential motive. What we have learned about caring for individual persons we must now learn to give to institutions …. Caring [for institutions], we know, is an exacting and demanding business” (SL, 243).
  • Leadership means that one individual has a better than average sense of what should be done now, and is willing to take the risk to say: Let us do this now .. this leap of faith …. Inspiration is usually received by the best prepared individual who, for this immediate act, is the leader” (SL 244).
  • Followership is an equally responsible role because it means that the individual must take the risk to empower the leader and to say that, in the matter at hand, I will trust your insight. Followership implies another preparation in order that trusting, empowering the leader, will be a strength-giving element in the institution” (SL, 244).

Click here for additional Support Materials. Spend a few minutes on the web to read additional information about Robert Greenleaf and the great work that is being done in his name!

Back to Unit 5/Next to Unit 7/Back to Principles: Exploring the Journey