Nine Habits of Servant-Leaders

1. Listen first.
2. Daily heightened awareness.
3. Withdraw to access intuition.
4. Ask first, “Who do you want to be?” and “What do you want to do?”
5. Understand history.
6. Have fun.
7. Make time count.
8. Lifelong learning.
9. Seeking (“adventuresomeness”).
From the graphic representation “The Evolution of a Servant-Leader” from the book Robert K. Greenleaf – A Life of Servant Leadership
by Don M. Frick

Questions

WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO? It is one of the easiest questions to ask, and one of the most difficult to answer. It is a particularly difficult question for one who heads an institution where achievement results from other people’s efforts. It is much harder in a big place where the top person cannot see all that goes on. And if the head of a large institution wants to pull away from the pack and seek distinction, not just personally but for the institution, answering the questions becomes the most difficult of all.

Robert Greenleaf, Introduction to the essay “The Making of a Distinguished Institution” from the book The Private Writings of Robert K. Greenleaf.

Defining the goal of a project, or failure to do so, is what makes or breaks the success of what we try to do. Often times the goals of our projects seem to be to encourage failure.

At my work this past week, I met with two supervisors of a project who were interested in having the group I worked for assist them with a project. The work would revolve around conducting audits of communities to determine what actions they needed to take to maintain compliance with some particular environmental regulations. The supervisors discussed that they already knew that the communities were not in compliance with the rules, but that they needed to document this so that they could then pursue enforcement actions against a few of the communities so that the rest would then fall into line with the rules.

The ultimate goal of this project was to identify the communities failures so that some of them could be punished, which would scare the rest into compliance. This did not seem like a project destined for success. Instead of asking, “What can we do to find failure?” what we should have been asking is “What can we do to find success?”. The first question is one that will lead to failure; the second is the one that will lead to success. The fist questions is much easier to answer, the second much harder to ask.

Choose the Nobler Belief

Robert Greenleaf concludes his series of essays that appeared in the 1966 AA Grapevine with a discussion that revolves around the definition of faith provided by Dean Inge as “the choice of the nobler hypothesis”. Greenleaf suggested, “Take the nobler, embrace it without reservation; and with all of one’s strength live by it, with enthusiasm and abandon. This is faith; a growing evolving faith.” The six choices Greenleaf laid out for leading a mature life included to be responsible, to be aware and foresee, to grow, to be human, to be ourselves, and to be great. For these to have meaning he recommends we take Robert Frost’s “road less traveled” – in pursuit of a faith to live by. This faith harbors paradox, which he describes as follows,

In answer to the question, who am I? I am two people. I am a unique instrument of creation (and so is each of us). Nothing like any one of us ever was or ever will be. I am an instrument of creation, not a created thing. I am not a thing in any sense. But beyond these differentiated aspects that mark my uniqueness there is another “me”: a timeless, unchanging level of consciousness that is at one with the cosmos; a level at which all is one, where there is no uniqueness. It is that aspect of me that stands in awe and wonder before the mystery and the majesty of all creation while knowing that I am the mystery and the creation of which I stand in awe and wonder. The over-arching choice is to seek to enter this level of consciousness from time to time; it is the choice to withdraw from and then return to the world of finite choices that mark my external image. It is the choice to seek to lose myself in my inward self where I am at one with all creation.

Whether or not I am at the place Greenleaf referred to, there are times when I think I get what he is talking about. Yesterday, I made a choice to drive my fifteen year old daughter and a friend an hour from our home so they could spend the day at the Warp Tour – a music festival of sorts – to spend the day with thousands of other young people listening to music. I had some choices to make that included whether or not I would join my daughter and mingle with the overly tattooed, pierced, festers in the mosh pit or find somewhere else to escape to. Heeding Frost’s advice- I choose the “road less traveled” (at least by people outside of a car) and went for a walk.

I wasn’t sure where I would go, or how long it would take, but I walked and ended up crossing an old bridge over the Minnesota River and then continued up a road that led up the bluffs that lined the river valley. This road crossed an old railroad grade that had been converted to a bike path and so I headed down that path to get away from all the cars. The trail eventually came to another road that passed through a wealthy neighborhood, and then I turned off a downhill road hoping to come out near the river where I had started. Fortunately, it did, and I re-crossed the bridge and returned to where I parked my car.

There were times during the walk where I experienced that sense of awe and wonder that Greenleaf referred to. Walking near the backwaters of the river, I stopped to watch a wood duck hen with her ducklings as they scurried across the weed filled water. A kingfisher landed on a dead branch with a fish in its bill. Chickadees flitted in the brush next to the bike path and I stopped to listen to their song. Hawks soared over the bluffs, circling and seemingly enjoying the moment as much as I did. The walk ended up taking much longer then I thought, but the time did not drag as I took in the surroundings and simply enjoyed being out and about in the cosmos.

It can be tough to come back to the world after these experiences of awe, but it is in the world that the other six chooses: responsibility, awareness, growth, being human, being ourselves, and being great, exist. However, without the seventh choice-the choice of the nobler belief of relating to the cosmos-all the rest in the end will have no meaning, and we will not truly know who we are.

Choosing Greatness

Excerpts from the fifth in a series of six articles from Robert Greenleaf on Mature Living - from the September 1966 Vol. 23 No. 4 AA Grapevine.

Everyone--literally everyone--within his sphere of influence has the chance for true greatness. Whether one makes it or not depends on what one chooses to be, within the circumstances where one now is. The opportunity for true greatness is never in the greener pastures elsewhere. It is always where one now is and within the range of choices available there. Some kinds of achievement are more available in one place than another, but not personal greatness. This is of the moment, where one is at the moment.

Bernard Baruch, who had an unusual perspective from which to view our times, in an interview in 1964 on his ninety-fourth birthday, was asked who he thought to be the greatest man of our age. "The fellow who does his everyday job," he said. "The mother who has children and gets them up and gets them breakfast and keeps them clean and sends them off to school. The fellow who keeps the streets clean--without him we wouldn't have any sanitation. The Unknown Soldier. Millions of men." Any person doing his job well can be great. He may not be widely known; but he can be great in his own eyes and in the eyes of those who know him intimately.

And I tell the story about the old artist who had thought he was too old to paint and was living in idleness when news came of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He realized at once, as many of us did, that this was the end of an era, and that a sinister new force was at large in the world which would test man's endurance, ingenuity and character as it had never been tested before. He felt a strong urge, as so many of us did, to do something. He was thoroughly aroused and a new energy for action overtook him. Now he didn't do what has become the popular fashion; make a cause out of his new-found energy and start a movement to change the world. He got out his paints and his brushes, stretched a big new canvas and said, "I must paint again. I must paint a great picture, my greatest." One to whom painting doesn't mean much may say, "So what--another painting. What difference will that make?" But look at it from the artist's viewpoint. Art has been his life's work; it is his highest value. What more could a true artist contribute to any situation than his greatest painting? And, to one who is sensitive to meaning in art, no message could be more powerful. There are a few great paintings that have literally moved the world. And where is the artist who doesn't think that he might be the one to paint such a picture?

Now I am not saying, "Don't ever have a cause, or join a movement, or set out to reform someone else." But before one does, one should ask oneself, "Have I done what I reasonably can to achieve greatness where I am and with the immediate circumstances over which I have some influence?" A "cause" can be a screen to obscure an inadequacy in something close to home--oneself or something within one's grasp that is manageable if one will only put the effort into it. The Great Society is not an abstract idea. It is not laws on the statute books or programs to meet needs, important as these are. It is the sum of great people and great institutions: churches, schools, governments, businesses, families. More concern for greatness by individuals and institutions in their own lives and affairs will make less needed a general concern for the state of society as a whole.

It is the sustained effort to take whatever sphere of influence one has, whether it be home, workshop, classroom, church, business, neighborhood, government; take whatever it is and work with skill and devotion on it; but also breathe a great dream into it; make something really distinguished out of it.

Choosing To Be Ourselves.

Robert Greenleaf completed his August 1966 AA Grapevine article with the suggestion that we choose to be ourselves if we want to live a mature life. For Greenleaf this meant how does one choose to use his life. To clarify if we are indeed choosing to be ourselves, he asked the following questions:

Does he live his own life or somebody else’s life?

What is the task of each of us?

What are we called to do?

Will it be a convenient stereotype, the popular notion of the day, what suites somebody else’s mission?

Or can each of us find his own unique mission?

It can be difficult to be ourselves. There is much pressure to conform, whether it be in our homes, our work, or our communities. It seems that the secret to being ourselves is to have some faith that who we are is who we are meant to be. Being ourselves is not easy, but when we embrace our diversity, our uniqueness, we find meaning in our lives.

So can each of us embrace who we are?

Choosing to be Human.

Getting back to Robert Greenleaf's series of articles on living life with a purpose that appeared in the 1966 AA Grapevine volumes, I would like to delve into his August suggestion of choosing to be human. Before we make a choice to be human, we need to have some understanding of what it means to be human.

In his cosmic creation story, The Universe Is A Green Dragon, Brian Swimme writes,

“the difference between humans and other primates [is] in the ability of the human to make play its dominant activity throughout a lifetime. Unique among species, the human makes exploration, surprising discoveries, experimentation, and –above-all learning the central activities of life itself.”

I like this idea that as humans our life should be more about play, more about enjoying life, and not so much about working.

Greenleaf reminds us,

“The choice that any of us can make no matter how intolerable our own lot, is to use what little freedom and resources we possess to make the lives of those around us more significant and rewarding. The choice to make life more tolerable for others, in all of our relationships, is open to all of us. Too often, by reacting to the treatment we receive, rather then choosing how we will act when the initiative is ours, we compound someone else’s error rather then creating our own good.”

So how can we make our lives more tolerable, how to we create our own good? I think we achieve this by encouraging more play, creativity, enjoyment; let go of the focus on production, output, profit and simply maximize our playtime.

Practicing Manual Crafts

President McIntosh operating steam shovel during groundbreaking for Helen Reid Hall, August 22, 1960. Credit: Jack Mitchell / Barnard College Archives


In my last post, I included a suggestion that Robert Greenleaf borrowed from Dr. Millicent McIntosh, the former president of Barnard College, on the importance of “Developing excellence in a manual craft.” as a way of ensuring diversity in life. Chris posted a question in response to the post, “any idea what examples of manual craft that Macintosh/Greenleaf were suggesting?”

Here are some possible answers to the question from her January 5, 2001 obituary that appeared in the New York Times. (For an interesting read on the life of a servant leader, I would encourage you to read Dr. McIntosh’s obituary.)

As a college president, she swept her own vestibule and weeded her own garden.

After her retirement in 1962, she and her husband moved to their farm in Tyringham, Mass.

She had five brothers and sisters, and all were taught to mend and darn and market and cook.

And of course, operating a steam shovel can also be considered a manual craft. I think the point is that now and then we create something with our hands, that we do some physical work; and that we exercise our body’s, not just our minds.