Servant Leadership — book summary

Book summary

In Servant Leadership, first published as an essay in 1970 and then as a book in 1977, Robert Greenleaf put forth a radical alternative to the hierarchy-based leadership model. Instead of the orthodox of leaders being strong-willed chiefs, intent on bending people to their will, Greenleaf posited that ‘servant leaders’, those who put the interests and growth of others before their own, were what was needed. The tone of this book is of its day, and is revealing in the way it talks about business as a relatively new area of study. We’re so used to elevating business to primary status, that it’s useful to remember that once upon a time they didn’t run the show quite so much. The book is a bit light on illustrations and diagrams, but it’s heartfelt tone and flow is a constant reminder of how deeply help these views were for Greenleaf. A sense that this was his major work. I’ve boied it down to these sections

1. Origins of servant leadership concept
2. Servant leaders start by listening
3. Servant leaders are empathetic
4. Servant leaders strive to “know the unknowable”
5. Servant leaders have foresight
6. Servant leaders serve without limits
7. Servant leaders are people-builders rather than people-users
8. Servant leaders are humble
9. Servant leaders have integrity
10. Servant leaders know what they’re in service of
11. Service organisations are themselves servants
12. Service leaders are first amongst equals
13. The world needs you to serve

Why choose this book?

At Society of Service we’re always looking to better understand the nature of service. Greenleaf was perhaps one of the pre-eminent thinkers about service and his work stands the test of time, echoing through newer books such as Give and Take by Adam Grant, The Excellence Dividend and Humankind by Rutger Bregman, which I’ll review in future editions. I first read Greenleaf’s work five years ago and it had a profound impact on me and how I think about leadership as a form of service. It’d be a bit much to say I’m a servant leader (I’m sure my teams might disagree!), but I have sought to live to its principles amidst my many failures.

A bit about the author

Robert Greenleaf was born in Indiana USA in 1904, and died in 1990 aged 86. The bulk of his career was spent as a management researcher, where he developed a growing suspicion that the power-centered authoritarian leadership style so prominent in US institutions was not working. This fed into his Servant Leadership thesis. In 1964 he took early retirement to found the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership.

Key points

1. Origins of servant leadership concept

Greenleaf opens this book with his moment of insight:

One day, in the course of a rambling lecture, my old professor made a statement along these lines: “There is a new problem in our country. We are becoming a nation that is dominated by large institutions — churches, businesses, governments, labor unions, universities — and these big institutions are not serving us well. I hope that all of you will be concerned about this. Now you can do as I do, stand outside and criticize, bring pressure if you can, write and argue about it. All of this may do some good. But nothing of substance will happen unless there are people inside these institutions who are able to (and want to) lead them into better performance for the public good. Some of you ought to make careers inside these big institutions and become a force for good-from the inside.”

This also hit firmly home for me. My central thesis — that we live in a world of services, with very little actual serving going on — aligns fully with Greenleaf’s thinking. And he was writing in a very different era, where the service economy was still small relative to industry and manufacturing. I’ve also felt that services do a bad job of serving us. I’ve also tried to go deep into organisations to make changes to how they serve, with mixed results but plenty of learning.

Behind what is said in the collection presented here is a twofold concern. My first concern is for the individual in society and his seeming bent to deal with the massive problems of our times wholly in terms of systems, ideologies and movements. These have their place but they are not basic because they do not make themselves. The basics are the incremental thrusts of individuals who have the ability to serve and lead.

This is a penetrative insight — especially in the 50s and 60s, when the cold war had ideologies raging abroad, and a range of radical new ideologies emerging at home. Greenleaf was prescient when he noted that we put too much in stock of these big top-down agendas. Instead he proposes that individual acts of service and leadership are what makes real meaningful change happen. If I look at the UK today, I see top-down, ideological agendas like Brexit being made by individuals, and I ask — who are those individuals in service of. This has always struck me to be a good atomic question. Who is serving who in this agenda?

Part of the problem is that serve and lead are overused words with negative connotations. But they are also good words and I can find no others that carry as well the meaning I would like to convey. Not everything that is old and worn, or even corrupt, can be thrown away. Some of it has to be rebuilt and used again. So it is, it seems to me, with the words serve and lead. Both words are essential for what is undertaken in the following pages.

I love this paragraph. I often tell people I’m on a mission to rehabilitate the word service. I don’t share Greenleaf’s religious convictions from elsewhere in thge book, but I do share his conviction that Service is a great word which we’ve lost touch with.

2. Servant leaders start by listening

One of our very able leaders recently was made the head of a large, important, and difficult-to-administer public institution. After a short time he realized that he was not happy with the way things were going. His approach to the problem was a bit unusual. For three months he stopped reading news papers and listening to news broadcasts; and for this period he relied wholly upon those he met in the course of his work to tell him what was going on. In three months his administrative problems were resolved. No miracles were wrought; but out of sustained listening this able man learned and received the insights needed to set the right course. And he strengthened his team by so doing.

This is what Tom Peters has since called “(MWK) Management by Walking Around”. Doubtless harder in these covid times, but the art of listening is at the core of servant leadership. This runs contrary to people’s views that leadership is a thrusting shouting match, involving a battle to convince people to listen to you.

If you want more on listening and dialogue, check out the excellent The Magic of Dialogue by Daniel Yankelov.

3. Servant leaders are empathetic

The servant as leader always empathizes, always accepts the person but sometimes refuses to accept some of the person’s effort or performance as good enough.

But deep down inside, the great ones have empathy and an unqualified acceptance of the persons of those who go with their leadership. Acceptance of the person, though, requires a tolerance of imperfection. Anybody could lead perfect people — if there were any. But there aren’t any perfect people. And the parents who try to raise perfect children are certain to raise neurotics.

What a wonderful paragraph. So attuned to our zeitgeist of vulnerability and acceptance. It’s amazing to consider it was written in 1977. Again the archetypal bullish leader is championed for pushing through and making change happen — rife with military analogies and language. Greenleaf is saying what we know each intrinsically know — that the leaders we love are the empathetic ones who understand and embrace the imperfection of those around them. As a service designer, this also rings true with my experience — that the best leaders want to understand the lived experience of the people around them — whether colleagues or customers — and know how to apply this empathetic data to the job of evolving their organsiation.

4. Servant leaders strive to ‘know the unknowable’

The leader needs two intellectual abilities that are usually not formally assessed in an academic way: he needs to have a sense for the unknowable and be able to foresee the unforeseeable. Leaders know some things and foresee some things which those they are presuming to lead do not know or foresee as clearly. This is partly what gives leaders their “lead,” what puts them out ahead and qualifies them to show the way.

Greenleaf is articulating that good leaders go “beyond conscious rationality” and tap into — whatever you want to call it: heart, gut, instinct, sixth sense. In our empirical, analytical, data-driven world, a servant leader needs to synthesise head and heart in their decisions.

Until quite recently many would attribute these qualities of knowing the unknowable and foreseeing the unforeseeable to mystical or supernatural gifts — and some still do… In far-out theorizing, every mind, at the unconscious level, has access to every ‘“bit” of information that is or ever was. Those among us who seem to have unusual access to these “data banks” are called “sensitives”. What we now call intuitive insight may be the survivor of an earlier and greater sensitivity.

As someone who has regularly been described as ‘sensitive’ my ears pricked up at this. Elaine Aaron, scholar of sensitivity, proposes that the sensitive trait is likely a factor of evolution: the sensitive one was literally a life saver for the rest of the herd / tribe. We hear and see things sooner, synthesis data faster, and respond more urgently — allowing the rest to avoid danger. (Challenge is to weed out the false alarms!) But he’s also getting at a sense that leaders need to be sensitive to more than just facts and data. Managing By Walking Around entails taking in the vibe, buzz and mood-music — the unreported or untracked data that describes a more complete organizational reality.

5. Servant leaders have foresight

Living this way is partly a matter of faith. Stress is a condition of most of modern life, and if one is a servant-leader and carrying the burdens of other people — going out ahead to show the way, one takes the rough and tumble (and it really is rough and tumble in some leader roles) — one takes this in the belief that, if one enters a situation prepared with the necessary experience and knowledge at the conscious level, in the situation the intuitive insight necessary for one’s optimal performance will be forthcoming. Is there any other way (in the turbulent world of affairs including the typical home), for one to maintain serenity in the face of uncertainty? One follows the steps of the creative process which require that one stay with conscious analysis as far as it will carry one, and then withdraw, release the analytical pressure, if only for a moment, in full confidence that a resolving insight will come. The concern with the past and future is gradually attenuated as this span of concern goes forward or backward from the instant moment. The ability to do this is the essential structural dynamic of leadership.

There’s a lot packed in here.

• Servant leaders gather the facts, but when it comes to the crunch, they have to rely on intuition. A deeper sense of wisdom, borne from how they have listened, empathises and explored.
• His reference to the creative process is noteworthy for us in our era where creativity is a much championed but still little understood dynamic. As a designer who works in a corporate environment, this really echoed with me.
• The need to withdraw is and ‘release the analytical pressure’ is also important. I describe needing ‘dark room days’ to allow for a sort of organic, non-logical synthesising process to play out.

There’s a clear suggestion that leading in service of others is about finding a path, through a relatively rare combination of data and instinct. And recoginsing the inevitable imperfection of such pathfinding, and so relying on and empathetic understanding back from colleagues and others around the leader. There’s a virtuous circle emerging: a leader listens well, empathises, synthesises and acts. Those who have been listened to and empathises with, respect the challenge of the leaders decision and their fallibility in making it. Gone is the brittleness of much of today’s leadership — where all-too-often mistrust grows in the gap between commanding leaders and cowering colleagues.

6. Servant leaders serve without limits

As a generalization, I suggest that human service that acquires love cannot be satisfactorily dispensed by specialized institutions that exist apart from community, that take the problem out or sight of the community. Both those being cared for and the community suffer. Love is an undefinable term, and its manifestations are both subtle and infinite. But it begins, I believe, with one absolute condition: unlimited liability! As soon as one’s liability for another is qualified to any degree, love is diminished by that much. Institutions, as we know them, are designed to limit liability for those who serve through them. In the British tradition, corporations are not “INC” as we know them, but “LTD” — Limited. Most of the goods and services we now depend on will probably continue to be furnished by such limited liability institutions. But any human service where the one who is served should be loved in the process requires community, a face-to-face group in which the liability of each for the other and all for one is unlimited, or as close to it as it is possible to get. Trust and respect are highest in this circumstance and an accepted ethic that gives strength to all is reinforced. Where there is not community, trust, respect, and ethical behavior it’s difficult for the young to learn and for the old to maintain

Readers in the public sector will be alert to this one. In my experience in that domain, there are thousands of empathetic frontline leaders who feel compelled to serve without limits. C19’s million daily examples of selfless service has shown us this much. However the service organisations that house those people have found ways to limit their liability to such a degree that the selflessness (or unlimited love as Greenleaf would have it) cannot be performed. A management protocol prevents the nurse from doing what’s needed in the moment. The teacher can’t go the extra mile due to restrictions imposed from government.

This is more starkly the case for the many public services that are outsourced. Then you have two levels of liability limitation — the public body and its contractually housed outsourcing partner. When you create distance between service-users and service-providers, you always get erosion of service. And by distance I mean legal distance here (contractual terms that prevent intuitive acts of service taking place), but increasingly technological distance (layers of often un-human digital technologies, that leave service users at the cold end of an experience).

7. Servant leaders are people-builders rather than people-users

Some institutions… aspire to distinction by embracing “gimmicks”: profit sharing, work enlargement, information, participation, suggestion plans, paternalism, motivational management. There is nothing wrong with these in a people-building institution. But in a people-using institution they are like aspirin — sometimes stimulating, pain relieving, and they may produce an immediate measurable improvement of sorts. But these are not the means whereby an institution moves from people-using to people-building. In fact, an overdose of these nostrums may seal an institution’s fate as a people-user for a very long time. An institution starts on a course toward people-building with leadership that has a firmly established context of people first. With that, the right actions fall naturally into place. And none of the conventional gimmickS may ever be used.

You know you work in a people-using organisation because each day leaves you feeling you’ve been used, rather than feeling you’ve grown. They may trumpet employee engagement initiatives, but they rarely work on the systematic nature of ‘usage’. In contrast, servant leaders want the people in their organization to feel served in the same way as customers are.

Great exponents of this approach are John Seddon, a vocal critic of employee engagement programmes, and Vineet Nayar, entrepreneur and author of Employees First, Customers Second.

8. Servant leaders are humble

Servants, by definition, are fully human. Servant-leaders are functionally superior because they are closer to the ground — they hear things, see things, know things, and their intuitive insight is exceptional. Because of this they are dependable and trusted, they know the meaning of that line from Shakespeare’s sonnet: “They that have power to hurt and will do none.”

Humility is a key aspect of servant leadership, but goes against the grain of modern leadership’s embrace of brittle values such as “move fast and break things”. Servant leaders are considerate in the true sense of the word. They consider what needs to be done, what could be done and then what should be done.

9. Servant leaders have integrity

The notion that the servant views any problem in the world as in here, inside oneself, not out there. And if a flaw in the world is to be remedied, to the servant the process of change starts in here, in the servant, not out there. This is a difficult concept for that busybody, modern man.

When making a decision, the servant leader reflects on how they might first make that change internally within themselves. No “do as I say, not as I do” for the servant leader. Instead the decision has to be generated with integrity

10. Servant leaders know what they’re in service of

This brings us to that critical aspect of realism that confronts the servant-leader, that of order. There must be some order because we know for certain that the great majority of people will choose some kind of order over chaos even if it is delivered by a brutal non-servant and even if, in the process, they lose much of their freedom. Therefore the servant-leader will beware of pursuing an idealistic path regardless of its impact on order. The big question is: What kind of order? This is the great challenge to the emerging generation of leaders: Can they build better order?

11. Service organisations are themselves servants

This is my thesis: caring for persons, the more able and the less able serving each other, is the rock upon which a good society is built. Whereas, until recently, caring was largely person to person, now most of it is mediated through institutions — often large, complex, powertul, impersonal, not always competent, sometimes corrupt. If a better society is to be built, one that is more just and more loving, one that provides greater creative opportunity for its people, then the most open course is to raise both the capacity to serve and the very performance as servant of existing major institutions by new regenerative forces operating within them.

Sadly, nearly 50 years later, this remains pretty much my thesis too, as alas we haven’t delivered for Greenleaf. In many ways I actually think we’re in a worse state than in the 1970s. The quality of service coming from our institutions, private and public, has deteriorated just as the gravity of challenges has increased. Democratic erosion, climate crisis, social justice, economic inequality, pandemics — we are in dire need of services and servant leaders who are prepared to respond to these challenges. On recent evidence, we are still seeking those leaders.

Why do the best of our institutions fall short of performing at the level of what is reasonable and possible with available resources? Possibly because these institutions are seen by too many of us, even some of us who are trustees, as impersonal entities to be used and exploited. Most people do not give to institutions the human caring and serving that they give to other persons.

I was taken aback by this. The idea that our cyncism about service institutions was due to a lack of love for them. Of course he’s right. The organsiations are man-made — so we can moan about things we made, or we can embrace our mongrel creations and reshape them. Greenleaf frames this as ‘trusteeship’ — that institutions need trustees who are entrusted with the integrity of the service, over and above day-to-day operational and commercial administration. How many boards live up to this level of care?

12. Service leaders are first among equals

The hierarchical principle… places one person in charge as the lone chief atop a pyramidal structure. Nearly all institutions have pyramidal structures: businesses, governments, armies, churches, universities. They have been organized this way so long that it is rare for anyone to question the assumptions that underlie them. We see no other course than to hold one person responsible. And so the natural reaction is to call for stronger leadership and to try to strengthen the control of the one person at the top. This reaction, in most cases, exacerbates rather than alleviates the problem. The second tradition, of much more limited use, comes down from Roman times. It is the form where the principal leader is primus inter pares — first among equals. There is still a first,” a leader, but that leader is not the chief.

I’ve written eslewhere about this before — how most organsations have historically based themselves on military and church models — which are themselves based on command and control logic, and the underlying assumption of superiority at the centre and waywardness at the outskirts. An ongoing macho culture persists on doubling down on this leadership culture, which is predictably allergic to servant leadership.

Greenleaf sets out that servant leaders are not ‘chiefs’, they are ‘primus’ — first among equals. Servant leadership is participative, but it’s not necessarily a democracy — someone has to make a decision sometimes, and not everyone will be happy. But the servant leader brings supporters and detractors with them through the decision-making porocess — by listening, empathising and applying decisions with humilty.

13. The world needs you to serve

Greenleaf ends with a personal plea to the reader, which is worth reproducing in full.

At the heart of every constructive action are responsible persons, those who reach out to engage with real life issues where the going may be rough, lay out alternatives (invent some if necessary), assess their relative merits, choose one that accords with virtue and justice-with their own hearts — make the choice knowing they may be wrong and suffer for it, and bear the risk bravely. But at every level from the family to world society we are tragically short of such people. We have plenty of able people who are only critics, plenty who are only experts, and too few responsible people. And we are in this dilemma because not enough of my generation, when they were your age, thought it their duty to remake the world and bring it more in accord with virtue and justice, more in accord with their own hearts, and too few consciously sought a lifestyle that would prepare them for and responsible roles that would make a difference. If they were able, too many settled for being experts and critics. They had the chance to be exceptional, by adding responsibility to good motives and ability, but they settled for the ordinary.

I absolutely agree with this. We need a renaissance of service. It’s such a deep irony for me that we live an era of services, unprecedented in human history, where digital technologies have enabled such enormous serving potential, and yet they are put to such poor effect given the challenges we face. People are paid hundreds of thousands to get you to look at an ad or to get you to one-click purchase a book. We all need to put ourselves in service of bigger, better and bolder challenges.

Conclusion

Greenleaf was a passionate researcher and incisive student of organisational management. Servant Leadership is his grand opus, communicated from the heart off the back of years of experience. It’s more relevant now than ever. That’s why it’s one of my most recommended books on service.