Servant Leadership
Servant Leadership is the first topic inspired by the interview to my father that I wanted to draw. My father did not use the term “Servant Leadership” but I feel that the way he led in his company as well as with his customers was really it. It is intuitive to think of Servant Leadership for people that run companies as well as for people in commercial operations, sales and marketing given their interaction with employees, customers and consumers. However, in order for any of us to become indispensable, having a Servant Leadership mindset is very important. We all have internal customers and often times we have leadership opportunities even though we may not have people that report directly to us. Having this Servant Leadership mindset can help us achieve our greatest success: Grow and develop others. There is plenty of content online about Servant Leadership and it goes back to at least 1964 with the foundation of the modern Servant Leadership movement and the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership by Robert K. Greenleaf. Greenleaf was born in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1904. After graduating from Carleton College in Minnesota, he went to work for AT&T, then the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. For the next forty years he researched management, development, and education. All along, he felt a growing suspicion that the power-centered authoritarian leadership style so prominent in U.S. institutions was not working, and in 1964 he took an early retirement to found the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership (Wikipedia). One of his famous quotes explains Servant Leadership in a simple and clear way “The servant-leader is a servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first”. There are several important leaders along the history that have been associated with servant leadership like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.
