Servant Leadership
Presented by Howard Baker, PhD at ULM
to UCG General Counsel of Elders meeting May, 2000

A Servant Leader must have a great deal of love and concern for those to be served, even before they are ever seen by the Servant Leader for the first time!

Under the Servant Leadership model of organization, the accountability exchange is in both directions.  Demands and requirements flow both ways.  Superiors and subordinates engage in dialog to establish a shared vision.

Servant Leaders know how to pose revealing questions.  They are more interested in being in touch than in being in control.

Change how you define leadership in an organization and you change how you run the organization.  People who work for a Servant Leadership organization generally enjoy it and do not want to leave.  Servant Leadership organizations create a culture of ownership and accountability at all levels of the organization.  They place a heavy emphasis on developing people.

A Servant Leadership culture is like a family.  Servant Leadership organizations have a "culture of the heart." They are more than organizations, they are covenantal communities where relationships are based on covenants and people are bound by a deep sense of loyalty to each other.

All things need watching, working at, and caring for - and the Church is no exception. Nothing neglected will remain as it was.  Could it be that what has been taking place recently in the Church of God is spiritual and organizational entropy (deterioration)?

Just because you have been placed in the Body as He pleased, does not mean you are actually fulfilling your God given position or currently pleasing Him! Being placed in the Body only affords us the opportunitv to serve and please Him!

Leaders are not placed in the Body for privilege, but for service.  Class privilege is the antithesis of service!  A privileged class structure makes an organization incapable of real service.  The number one job of executive leadership is to create a Servant Leadership culture throughout the organization -and the number one way they do that is by modeling the behaviors, attitudes, values, and actions they advocate for the organization!

"In truth, what Southwest has done has been to make mission, vision, and values the boss. Its principles are what makes this organization fly.  The covenants that serve its principles have glued this culture together so tightly that, even when Herb Kelleher is absent, the dream lives on."

To understand Servant Leadership is to truly understand Jesus Christ and God the Father! Just because one serves, and has a position of power, does not make that person a true Servant Leader.

Servant Leadership is about making the people around you to grow as persons, to be healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, and more likely themselves to become servants. Servant Leaders facilitate the growth of others along a maturity continuum - to greater and greater levels of maturity. This is true discipleship!

The very purpose of the Church - that our Friend and Servant Leader Jesus Christ raised up - is to serve!  It does not exist to become an autocracy, to satisfy the self-interests of a few in positions of power, nor does it exist to become a theological democracy.  It is not a hierarchical theocracy tracing from God down a ladder to lay peasants!  Rather, it is a family in which God rules supreme, but kindly and lovingly in a way that builds and affirms each member and makes hierarchy superfluous!  The Church must not be viewed as a chain of command but as a network of love!

Personal and organizational success in any type of organization springs from the willingness of the organization's people to embrace accountability.  Creating individual accountability is the number one leadership challenge facing organizations today.

In an epic historical study, one of the world's greatest historians, Edward Gibbon, identified five main causes of the decline and fall of Roman civilization.  One of the five reasons was the weakening of a sense of individual responsibility!

Interdependence is experienced only when a high level of maturity is present.  Interdependence is realized when mature people recognize joint accountability.  The interdependent mindset and the victim's mindset are mutually exclusive.  One represents a high level of maturity, while the other reflects a low level of maturity.

In the ultimate sense, it is not what happens to us that matters the most.  It is how we respond to what happens to us that ultimately matters.  We can tell a victim's story, or we can tell a transformation story - a story of how we learned and grew and matured because of the experience.

The word paradigm comes from the Greek, and means a model, theory, perception, assumption, or frame of reference.  It is the way we "see" the world.  A paradigm shift can be either good or bad!  It is simply a change in the way we see. Not all paradigm shifts are in a positive direction.  Conversion is a paradigm shift, and so is falling away! A paradigm shift simply moves us from one way of seeing the world to another.

Mr. Armstrong wanted Ambassador to be a liberal arts college.  A liberal education is one that is supposed to challenge us to examine our paradigms, and to free us from false paradigms, superstition, and the dogmas of men!

Servant Leaders must first define reality for themselves, and then help others to see it.  Not perfectly, of course, but Servant Leaders see things "more whole."

Just as a light bulb can't change itself, so each of us needs someone else to assist in the change process.  Before we can change a habit or behavior, or paradigm, we must bring it to consciousness.

If you are not getting regular feedback from a variety of sources, you are not doing what it takes to stay connected with reality!  Feedback refreshes the mental maps of reality we have in our mind.

Recognizing that rewards come from excellent performance, and that many rewards will not be received until Christ awards them personally, is the mature and realistic approach of a Servant Leader.

We are able to see dominance in others so much more easily than we see it in ourselves. On the other hand, when an organization moves to a Servant Leadership culture, there are still bosses -just not so many of them and they will not be operating as before!

A Servant Leader serves by preparing to serve.  An important step in preparing to serve is a careful and honest self-assessment - looking reality straight in the eye.

Change means a temporary or permanent threat to competence. Competent people are notorious at resisting change.  Why? Because it threatens to make them less competent, and competent people like to remain competent! Have you fallen prey to being competent? Do you have the will to take risks and change - to become incompetent - at least for a while?

When I speak of change, I am not talking about compromising principles, vision, or true values.  I am referring to new patterns of behavior, new ways to contribute, and ultimately the creation of a new and better culture - a Servant Leadership culture.

Robert Greenleaf (founder of the Servant Leadership Center) said: "The servant views any problem in the world as in here, inside oneself, not out there."  This is an inside-out approach to change.  It is the way of personal accountability!

To be serious about change means being willing to get on going feedback from family, friends, and the troops.  This is the litmus test as to whether you are serious about becoming a more effective Servant Leader!  Most leaders would rather drink Clorox than receive feedback.  However, that is because they are not used to getting feedback.  The more feedback you get, the less defensive you will become!

Honors Class web site: cba.ulm.edu/honors/
Email address for feedback and to request a bibliography: jhb001@juno.com