Book Note: Servant Leadership

For my Teacher Leader Workshop final project, my study group will be presenting about servant leadership.

“I’m good at writing new words to popular songs about topics,” I told my group mates at our first meeting. “Maybe I could do that for this, too.” I described the time in college when, not realizing the assignment would count as a major class grade, I quickly wrote some lyrics for the guitar riff from Collective Soul’s “Shine” for a presentation about empathetic listening. I performed it for class, and the professor loved it.

“We’ll let you do that part of the presentation,” my group mates said.

I started brainstorming–and found that “servant leadership” easily fits in place of Bad Company’s refrain “Feel Like Making Love.”

But I really had no clue yet just what servant leadership was, and so I read (and just finished this afternoon) The World’s Most Powerful Leadership Principle: How to Become a Servant Leader by James C. Hunter.

“I really like this book,” the book’s back cover quotes Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership Board Chair Jack Lowe, Jr. “Servant leadership is for people of action and this book is a practical guide to actionable servant leadership.”

While the whole book is biased towards the miracles of big businesses, the military, and Presidents Reagan and G. W. Bush, it’s also full of humorous and meaningful quips, quotes, and thoughts.

And, in its heart, it’s all about Jesus: “I have studied great leaders from many fields, including the military, education, religion, politics, business, and athletics,” writes Hunter. “I have studied mystics and sages from the past and present in my search to uncover the true essence of leadership. Then one day it dawned on me that I should look at what Jesus had to say about leadership” (71). And what did he say? In Mark 9:35, “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.”

“That’s great!” I can imagine Jesus saying, picking up the book and miraculously turning to the page where he is quoted (70). “Someone’s listening! But how the hell is it that I am so glorified in a book that also extols Wal-Mart and Nestle [see “Controversy and criticism“]? Hmmmm. Sounds like a personal versus corporate ethics dilemma to me.”

But anyway, foundational to servant leadership, writes Hunter, is love, which he defines as the “act(s) of extending yourself for others by identifying and meeting their legitimate needs and seeking their greatest good” (86). This is “volitional love,” which is “the choice, the willingness of a person to be attentive to the legitimate needs, best interests, and welfare of another, regardless of how he or she happens to feel on certain days” (85).

In the context of leadership, Hunter notes, that means being patient, kind, humble, respectful, selfless, forgiving, honest, and committed (1 Corinthians 13).

Well. I think the Bad Company rewrite will be perfect.