1. Center for Servant Leadership
2. control creates fear and fear creates distrust
   - which destroys relationships and growth
3. powerpoint presentation on servant leadership
4. servant-leadership skills of foresight and “seeing things whole
5. "No one in the past 30 years has had a more profound impact on thinking about leadership than Robert Greenleaf." Peter M. Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline

From the source

Robert Greenleaf made an early contribution to melding organizing, facilitation and leadership development in the work summarized in his book, Servant Leadership. He began writing the book out of a concern for the lack off hope he saw in young people in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hope, he said "is absolutely essential to both sanity and wholeness of life." Hope is the essential before any successful facilitation or organizing can take place.

Below are a few passages from the book and some relevant links.

"The idea of The Servant as Leader came out of reading Herman Hesse's Journey to the East. In this story we see a band of men on a mythical journey . . .The central figure of the story is Leo who accompanies the party as the servant who does their menial chores, but who also sustains them with his spirit and his song. He is a person of extraordinary presence. All goes well until Leo disappears. Then the group falls into disarray and the journey is abandoned. They cannot make it without the servant Leo. The narrator, one of the party, after some years of wandering finds Leo and is taken into the Order that had sponsored the journey. There he discovers that Leo, whom he had known first as servant, was in fact the titular head of the Order, its guiding spirit, a great and noble leader." p. 7

"[J]ust as there may be a real contradiction in the servant as leader, so my perceptual world is full of contradictions. Some examples: I believe in order, and I want creation out of chaos. . . Reason and intuition, each in its own way, both comfort and dismay me."

"The best test [of a good servant leader], and most difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?"

"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 ways things were going. . . For three months he stopped reading newspapers 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 a sustained intentness of listening that was produced by this unusual decision, this able man learned and received the insights needed to set the right course. And he strengthened his team by so doing.
Why is there so little listening?What makes this example so exceptional?" "This suggests a non-servant who wants to be a servant might become a natural servant through a long arduous discipline of learning to listen, a discipline sufficiently sustained that the automatic response to any problem is to listen first."

Know the unknowable--
Beyond conscious rationality

Intuition is a feel for patterns, the ability to generalize based on what has happened previously. Wise leaders know when to bet on these intuitive leads, but they always know that they are betting on percentages. Their hunches are not seen as eternal truths.

William Blake has said, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything will appear to man as it is, infinite. . . . Most of us move about with very narrow perceptions--sight, sound, smell, tactile--and we miss most of the grandeur that is in the minutest thing, the smallest experience. We also miss leadership opportunities."

"The Danish peasantry at the beginning of the nineteenth century was an underclass. . . A new form of education was designed by Grundtvig" where "The spirit (not knowledge) is power.' 'The living word in the mother tongue.''Real life is the final test," as contrasted with the German and Danish tendency to theorize."

Community--The Lost Knowledge of These Times

" . . .Thomas Jefferson would not allow the University of Virginia to give degrees as long as he was rector. He believed that degrees were pretentious and he wanted only students for whom learning was a sufficient motivation."

Reflection on the simple fundamental facts of our exprience brings immediate recognition of constant change. To the unsophisticated mind, the characteristic thing about phenomena is their dynamism. It is only abstract thinking that takes them out of their dynamic continuity and isolates them as static units."

"An institution is but the lengthened shadow of a man."--Emerson p.256