On servant leadership
I’m a pretty big fan of the concept of servant leadership, so I’ve been really enjoying the relatively new Servant Leadership Blog from Viterbo University. They recently posted a link to another site which is critical of the servant leadership concept. I love that they ask, "How would you articulate a vision of servant-leadership that would be helpful for the author[of the critical piece]?" rather than simply trying to blast away at the arguments.
It’s hard to "articulate a vision of servant-leadership" that hasn’t already been addressed by the likes of Warren Bennis, Frances Hesselbein, Dee Hock, Peter Senge and others. I know it’s poor logic to rest my arguments upon the opinions of others, so I’ll just leave it there.
The author of the critique seems to have a pretty good grasp of the distinction between management and leadership. In fact, much of their website is devoted to such distinctions. The author is quite adamant about leadership being restricted to "vision" types of activities. Servant leadership, by any reasonable definition, includes both a vision component and an implementation component (Ken Blanchard, Insights on Leadership, p.22). A focus on servant leadership doesn’t equate to an abandonment of visionary thinking and direction. Quite the opposite.
In a typical hierarchical way of thinking, servant leadership makes no sense–just as the article noted. Who’s running the show if the bosses are asking their reports what to do next? It’d be chaotic and a short road to disaster. But when you flip the hierarchy upside-down, the customers are on the top. Now servant leadership makes sense–senior leadership sets the vision that says, for example, "take care of the customer." Servant leaders make sure that their people are rightly empowered to do just that. If someone runs into trouble serving a customer, they take care of the customer and let their manager know about the problems, along with possible solutions. The servant leader serves by taking away roadblocks. None of this, of course, implies that the servant leader abandons all critical thinking skills. As Blanchard notes in the essay mentioned earlier, even a seeing eye dog won’t walk their master out into traffic, even if the master commands it.
One gripe in particular that I have with the critique is that it’s setting up straw men. Check out this quote:
Consider carefully what it means to be a servant. A servant must be unquestioningly dedicated to serving his master’s every whim. If his master wants to be a drug addict, it is the servant’s duty to supply any drugs his master requests. A true servant should do precisely what his master requests regardless of whether it is good for his master. Is this a useful metaphor for a leader?
Let’s consult our old friend Mr. Dictionary, shall we?
servant |ˈsərvənt| noun
a person who performs duties for others, esp. a person employed in a house on domestic duties or as a personal attendant.
slave |slāv| noun
a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them.
Which one of these two definitions sounds most like what the critique describes? Which one is free to leave when asked to do something unlawful? I think you probably see my point.
I’m not quite done yet, though. Can you think of an organization in which no leadership is necessary? Yeah, neither can I. The critique thinks differently, though:
[The leader’s] focus must be primarily external, not so much internal on the needs of followers. But if an organization’s direction is more or less fixed, little or no leadership is necessary. It is mainly good management that is required.
If an organization’s direction is more or less fixed, little or no leadership is necessary? I’m pretty sure that earlier in the same critique I read the following charateristics of a leader: challenge the status quo - strive to find new directions, popular or otherwise; make others uncomfortable by rejecting the familiar. But not in an organization with a fixed direction, though, eh?
I’ve got to say, my overall impression of the "critique" is confusion. I don’t get the sense that the author made any substantive attempt to understand servant leadership. In fact, someone familiar with servant leadership might even come away feeling that the critique was intentionally misleading.
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7 opinions for On servant leadership
Tom
Oct 18, 2005 at 6:55 am
Bren, you know where this is going… Those who knock Servant Leadership do so because they think it is not cool to show concern for their people. The concept, to them, means weakness and they are tough. To say…as you quoted above, that if an organization’s direction is fixed what is needed is management, not leadership…the writer then does not value the organization. If people are hurting, personally, professionally, or are left to fend for themselves, then the organization hurts. Organizations are organic and to get an organism to prosper it must be nurtured. Servant leaders do that.
Michael Langford
Oct 18, 2005 at 7:16 am
Your description of the difference between slave and servant is very similar to the description in the book “The Servant”[1] by James C. Hunter. It was a good intro to the servant leader idea for me. It was a dramatized account of a businessman going to a retreat at an abbey. I’m not a religious person, and I still liked it.
[1] http://tinyurl.com/992cy
Dan Oestreich
Oct 18, 2005 at 6:48 pm
For me this is the core problem of the critique:
“The danger of the Servant Leadership concept is that it can prevent us from seeing that anyone at any level can be a leader and that to do so they have to be competitive high achievers who are determined to excel and differentiate themselves from others.”
Could there be a statement that is more false or more destructive to the nature of organizations as communities. We’ve got plenty of cowboys and alpha male “achievers” out there who sure know how to “differentiate themselves” at the expense of others — both colleagues and customers. Insular and wholly unable to receive feedback, highly critical, dismissive of others’ views, full of abstractions and high politics. Nah, that ain’t leadership yet!
Cassy
Oct 18, 2005 at 10:35 pm
I am their leader
they are my people
which way did they go?
I must follow them ….
Chris Newham
Oct 21, 2005 at 4:20 pm
Language provides us a lot of room for creativity. Servant leadership is about as useful a concept as military intelligence. I suspect we can kid ourselves we have a better appreciation of something we don’t really understand when two familiar ideas are conflated, however erroneously. A servant can only be a follower, the whole idea of service being to satisfy the needs of another.
A problem which appears to be ignored is that leadership has positive connotations and, despite the impossibility of having a leader without a follower, followership has negative associations. In a competitive, closed systems, leading is equated with winning and following with loosing. Tribalism has been such a dominant and consciously perpetuated aspect of our culture that it is only in recent years that ‘followership’ has begun to be legitimized and appeared in dictionaries.
When we acknowledge that we are all both leaders and followers and we respect both roles, the problems exemplified in Katrina or The Apprentice fall away. Maybe it is not as simple as that but it is surely a more productive start than allowing ourselves to be misled by, i.e. following, language that conceals the truth.
terry storch >>>>>
Oct 22, 2005 at 6:56 pm
Servant Leadership
Brendon Connelly, aka Slacker Manager is one of my favorite bloggers. Tonight, I was catching up on Bloglines and ran across his post about the Servant-Leadership Blog. I look forward to reading this… tags technorati : leadership slacker manager
Max Leibman
Oct 23, 2005 at 10:41 pm
Thanks for pointing out the great SL blog. I had the oppurtunity to hear a local professor keynote on the subject of servant leadership at a youth conference here last June; it put in words a lot of what I’d felt, thought, and even said (clumsily) about leadership for a while now.