The Immorality of Giving.

Giving is a potentially immoral act. Its danger lies in the assumption of virtue by the agent, of the virtue of agentry, with an accompanying train of other unvirtuous assumptions. The relatively innocent desire to help is so thinly distinguished from wanting to be the helper. But the latter is capable of all sorts of distortions; wanting to be widely known as the helper, wanting to make some decisions for the helpee, wanting to dictate, to paternalize, to manipulate. It is not likely that a foundation, any more than a person, will escape these faults by thoughtlessness or accident. Only by being conscious of the danger is there a chance to escape. In other words, a foundation must believe in the potential immorality of giving.

Merrimon Cuninggim while President of the Danforth Foundation. Quotation is from Robert Greenleaf’s parable “Teacher As Servant” from the book THE SERVANT-LEADER WITHIN.

Robert Greenleaf wrote the parable “Teacher as Servant” based on his observations from an actual university dormitory that was designed to bring out the natural servant leadership tendencies of the students who lived there. The quote above comes from the retelling of the character Melissa’s experiences while on a summer internship to Africa. Melissa spent two months working with a foundation that conducted aid projects in developing countries. The projects included: agriculture, family planning, education, national planning, and health service.

After her return from Africa, she comes across Merrimon Cunninggim’s warning above on the office wall of the foundation’s president. The president had placed the quote on his wall as a reminder of the challenge he faced in his role as president of the foundation in managing the moral dilemma of basically giving away money. She went on to describe the problems she had observed with the foundations work. One problem she noted was related to the aid that was being provided by nations and foundations “as a lever to build influence for the aid giver” and not because of an interest in really helping the people of the country. Other problems included the lack of skills in the people that came over to do the work, and importing “solutions” that worked in America, but failed in Africa.

As I noted in my recent posts, I spent about three weeks in Africa this past May, working with some university students from a non-profit group that was involved with aid related projects similar to those described in the parable. I had started reading THE SERVANT-LEADER WITHIN while I was on the trip, but did not come across the parable’s discussion of Africa until I returned from the trip. Based on my own experiences, it was evident to me that many of the same fictional problems are still occurring with the real aid process. It is too bad that Merrimon Cuninggim’s advice that “a foundation must believe in the potential immorality of giving”, is not being heeded.

This section of the parable closed with the president lamenting the challenge he faced to Melissa, “The choice I face in this job every day, and it is a painful one, is: shall I stay here and do the best I can with these trustees and this staff, and maybe make a little progress, but not nearly enough? Or shall I quit this post and join those on the outside who denounce the institution in the hope that someone else will emerge inside who will do better than I do?”

Mellisa hoped he would stay where he was and keep trying.

Masks

Living as we do in an unreal world, to some extent we all wear masks. Convenient as it is to let the mask do what only serenity can really do, I submit that all masks chafe; I never saw a well fitting mask. It is a great relief to take them off.
Dr. Broderick, A fictional psychologist from Robert Greenleaf’s parable “Teacher As Servant” from the book THE SERVANT LEADER WITHIN.

Photo: Wooden Masks On Shop Wall, Kigali, Rwanda

Servant Leadership in Rwanda

"Some coercive power is overt and brutal. Some is covert and manipulative. The former is open and acknowledged; the latter is insidious and hard to detect."

"One must be close to both the bitterness and goodness of life to be fully human. The servant must be fully human. "

Quotes from "The Servant as Leader", 1970 Edition, Robert Greenleaf.

I have some time on my return from a trip to Rwandan at the Addis Ababa Ethopia Airport, so decided to write a quick blog about some of my experiences on a trip to Rwanda. One of the dominating events during the visit was the impact that the 1994 Genocide has had on the people of the Country. I suppose that since over 1,000,000 people out of a country of 8,000,000 was killed during the roughly 100 day period, it would dominate the lifes of most people.

When I had some free time during the trip, I have been working my way through Greenleaf's essay. What I have experienced during the visit was the raw, vibrant form of servant leadership that exists in the people of the country. This natural form of leadership likely blossoms here because of the experiences of bitterness and goodness that the people their have experienced.

The people who exemplify servant leadership -- whether it be the two brothers Patrice and John Leduex who are active in teaching farming, running a handcraft cooperative for handicapped children, or working as interpretors for our group; the Nyange Parish Priests Father Safari and John Baptist and their assitant Noel who work with the parish where over 2000 of the the former parishoners were bulldozed to death under the orders of the church's former parish to help their parishioners continue with life; the Headmaster of a baptist secondary school Raymond, who came up to me during a candlelight vigil to remember the victoms of the Nyange area and began to explain to me in english what the memries of the survivors were; or from John Paul our guide who watched his own parents and family members killed during the Genocide, and took in two orphan children as his own at the age of 15 -- get it not from books or theory, but from living it.

I believe that is what Robert Greenleaf meant when he wrote, "Moral priciples do not emerge from theory, but from testing and experience. Theories are later built to encase and explain the working principles."

I hope to write more on the priciples I have learned during the trip in some future posts. In the mean time find some time to experience both the goodness and the bitterness of life.

p.s. Please forgive my spelling and grammer errors. The internet connection is slow here and my time is limited, so just a quick and dirty unedited post.

Mentoring.

The mentors granting of freedom is fairly clear. He must not judge what his understudy will become. But how about the freedom that the understudy will achieve? What is it, and how does the climate set by the mentor encourage its growth?

[...] the important qualities they will need cannot be dictated or directed by me or by anyone but will emerge as a natural consequence of the total environment in which the person lives. [...] I don't have access to that total environment.

Robert Greenleaf, “Growing Greatness in Managers”, ON BECOMING A SERVANT LEADER

I have an opportunity to fill a mentoring role for a group of students from the University of Wisconsin Madison chapter of Engineers Without Borders. We leave for a trip to Rwanda today where the students will be following up on some projects they have been working on related to improving farming practices and drinking water systems. Therefore, I will not likely be posting here again until we return in the middle of June.

I hope to learn much about the role of a mentor, servant leadership, and living simply from the students I work with and the people of Rwanda. I will try to post some thoughts when I return. I hope to allow myself to grow from both the duel role of the mentor/mentee.

Servant Leadership is...tossed in the leadership salad like crotons

Leadership Expert Says Crisis Gives Opportunities
John Maxwell focuses on relationships, influence, making connections.

By Cary McMullen
THE LEDGER
Published: Monday, May 4, 2009 at 11:35 p.m.
Last Modified: Monday, May 4, 2009 at 11:35 p.m.
Someone remarked to John Maxwell just after the November election that with all the problems facing the country, he wouldn't want to be in Barack Obama's shoes. Maxwell had a different take.
John Maxwell, author and nationally recognized expert on leadership, at a leadership conference held near Alturas, Florida, on April 30, 2009PIERRE DUCHARME | THE LEDGER


"I said, 'I'd love to be president right now.' What an opportunity! If you look at the American presidents we've so highly esteemed, they took America through difficult times," he said. "In a difficult time, leaders emerge."
Maxwell is a student of leadership. A pastor, author, consultant and speaker, he has made an international name for himself as an authority on leadership. His book, "The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership," published in 1998, has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide, he said.
Maxwell, 62, who lives in Jupiter, is an occasional visitor to Polk County. His brother is Polk County developer Larry Maxwell, and his father, the Rev. Melvin Maxwell, lives here also.
On Thursday, at his brother's ranch near Alturas, Maxwell led a private roundtable session on leadership for about 65 local community and business leaders. It was the second year Maxwell has led the roundtable, a fundraising event for Discovery, a program at Lakeland Christian School for families with autistic and special needs students.
Maxwell began his career in 1970 as a pastor, following in his father's footsteps. By 1995, he was senior pastor of a megachurch in San Diego. Over the years, he wrote books to help pastors understand principles of leadership. Then he learned that two-thirds of the people buying his books were in the secular market, in corporate, government and nonprofit sectors. Maxwell decided to leave the ministry and take up speaking and writing on leadership full time.
"I've been teaching the subject since 1974," Maxwell said. "There's such a need for (leadership). When times get difficult, it's even more in demand. I've never gone to a company and they say, 'You know, we have too many good leaders.' I've never been to an educational institution and they say, 'We've got an excess of good leaders and we need to weed some out.'"
Instead of offering techniques, Maxwell specializes in what he calls "the soft side" of leadership, focusing on relationships, influence and making connections. He said before people will follow a leader, they ask three questions: Can you help me? Do you care about me? Can I trust you?
Not surprisingly, he said his principles of leadership are taken from the Bible. Maxwell pushes "servant leadership," a philosophy with a heavy dose of humility that he said works even in the competitive corporate climate.
"A big thing in the corporate market is how you can serve your clients. Another is valuing people. I learned that watching the life of Christ," he said.
Kevin Knowlton, a lawyer with Peterson Myers in Lakeland and chairman of the board of Lakeland Christian School, attended Thursday's roundtable and said Maxwell talked about the necessity for leaders to reassess their values in difficult times.
"He said leaders and individuals tend to grow more in times of adversity. In America now, we're focusing more on what's important in life. Maybe we weren't as good as we thought we were," he said. "It's common sense, but sometimes we forget the simple things."
With regard to Obama, Maxwell said he has shown "some very good leadership qualities."
"He's very clear. He's not afraid to put his name on the line. He understands the value of constant communication. He seems to be able to have good people around him. And he has the ability and the desire to listen," he said.

A Good Society Revisited.

As you may have noticed, my latest posts have been inspired by Robert Greenleaf’s writings collected in the book THE POWER OF SERVANT LEADERSHIP . While working my way through the essay “The Servant as Religious Leader” on the bus the other day, I came across another reference to Greenleaf’s great description on what “good society” consists of. (See my January 17, 2008 post for the prior reference to Greenleaf’s “good society”.) Greenleaf expands on what constitutes a good society in this essay.

"Among many facets of a “good” society that might be achieved with finite resources are: the opportunity for as many people as possible to engage in useful and remunerative work — with the feeling of belonging and being a part of a constructive effort where they are; children get good preparation for a life of service; strong young people are encouraged and prepared for religious leadership; health is encouraged and the environment is protected; the needy, the aged, and the disabled are cared for."

Earlier in the essay, Greenleaf points out his ideas on what constitutes religious leadership: “(in its root meaning of religio — to bind or rebind) is the quality of the consequences of her or his leadership. Does it have a healing or civilizing influence? Does it nurture the servant motive in people, favor their growth as persons, and help them distinguish those who serve from those who destroy?”

Now that is a society I would hope we all would like to belong to. In last weeks Earth Day post, I wrote about merging Greenleaf’s “best test” with Leopold’s “land ethic”. What is interesting is that Greenleaf’s “good society” as created by religious leadership may have the power to do just that.

So are we following the nurturers or the destroyers?

The Day of the Earth

For an Earth Day post, I thought it would be good to revisit my first post on the Servant-Leadership BLOG. In it I referred to Aldo Leopold’s essay “The Land Ethic” and his reminder that “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

I have often thought that Leopold’s test should be melded with Robert Greenleaf’s servant-leader best test: “Do those being 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 she or he benefit, or, at least, not be further deprived?”

Don Frick, Robert Greenleaf’s biographer, touched on this idea in a comment he wrote in regard to his post on this Blog titled “Global Warming, Servant Leadership, and Foresight” where he wrote:

I find Greenleaf's "best test for a servant-leader" the omega of all thinking about aspects of his servant writings. I sometimes wonder, however, if he left something out of the equation.

Greenleaf began penning the first draft of "The Servant As Leader" in December, 1968, the end of a terrible year. (I know; I graduated from college that year.) Vietnam was raging, assassinations were fresh in our minds and the environmental movement was just reaching wider consciousness. I sometimes wish Bob would have included in his test a question like "Is the planet protected?" On the other hand, the test focuses on the effects on people, so with what we now know, we can certainly conclude that issues like global warming and toxic waste that have the potential to inflict massive damage on people still fall within the purview of the best test.

I have never seen evidence that Greenleaf considered such a statement, but find it fun to speculate whether he might if he were rewriting the test today.

What is intriguing to me is that Robert Greenleaf did propose a rewrite to the best test in his essay “Servant: Retrospect And Prospect” from the book THE POWER OF SERVANT LEADERSHIP that he wrote ten years or so after his original. In the essay he proposed a rewrite with the following addition “No one will knowing be hurt by the action, directly or indirectly” (page 43).

Merging of Greenleaf’s servant-leadership with Leopold’s land ethic is what we will need to have the foresight to deal with the problems we face in the coming years.

In his essay “An Opportunity for a Powerful New Religious Influence” from the book SEEKER AND SERVANT (page 106) Greenleaf did write:

It is the choice to act upon those assumptions about the nature of people and the world that will release an optimal contemporary force to lead people to be religious in the root sense of the word, that is “bound to the cosmos,” at one with the great creative force.

It is our relationship with the cosmos, one in which we are simply a part of it, and not the pinnacle of it, that I believe is the key to not knowingly hurting any of earth’s inhabitants and as a result working towards healing the harms we have inflicted.