ethics news & views

Prophetic awareness: Greenleaf on servant leadership

In The Servant as Leader, Robert K. Greenleaf makes a compelling contribution to several fields, including organizational management, leadership theory, practical theology, and applied ethics. And he does so with an essay that speaks to the heart as well as the mind.

But while Greenleaf’s treatise may be penned in simple style, it is by no means simplistic. Nor are his exhortations easily accomplished. Greenleaf’s driving metaphor comes from Albert Camus’ concept of “creating dangerously.” Building on this injunction, Greenleaf defines the servant leader as a person who follows her creative dreams–and in doing so, serves the least privileged in her society. Servant leaders must, in Greenleaf’s words, “confront the exacting terms of our own existence, and. . . find our happiness in dealing with it” (5). The servant leader finds fulfillment and wholeness through “adventurous creative achievement.” And he uses this creativity to help those who have been marginalized or made invisible (6-7).

The Servant as Leader, first published in 1970, is a series of brief essays that describe the faithful servant leader and the challenges he or she faces within contemporary contexts. The best–and most difficult–“test” of a true servant leader, Greenleaf writes, is this: “do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will he benefit, or, at least, will he not be further deprived?” (7)

The results of such a test, Greenleaf admits, are not easily predicted. Here his stance resembles that of theologians such as Karl Barth, who insist that ethics must be done hand in hand with prayer. And prayer must be undertaken with great humility, particularly in light of our inability to predict with certainty what the outcome of our ethical actions will be. “One must,” Greenleaf writes, “after some study and experience, hypothesize–but leave the hypothesis under a shadow of doubt. . . ‘Faith is the choice of the nobler hypothesis’” (7).

And so is love. Servant leadership, according to Greenleaf, remains fundamentally a practice of love, which is an “undefinable term” whose manifestations are “both subtle and infinite” (29). The love that a servant leader gives remains fundamentally inexpressible. It also remains unqualified: there must be no conditions placed upon love; for love by its very nature is unconditional.

Here the specific role of the servant leader in seeking a more humane world becomes clear. He or she must possess “a sense for the unknowable” and must begin to “foresee the unforseeable” (14). Greenleaf is quick to assure his readers that such a statement does not negate his previous argument that love remains indefinable. Rather, the servant leader must simply be a person with a well-cultivated sense of intuition, or the ability to accomplish what most people cannot: to bridge the gap between information already at hand and information that is still needed (15). “Intuition is a feel for patterns, the ability to generalize based on what has happened previously.”

Another way of putting this point is that the servant leader must lead with a prophetic sensibility. For while knowledge of past patterns is important, Greenleaf says, a vision of the future is equally–if not more–crucial to ethical leadership. In this forward-looking orientation, Greenleaf explains, the leader will find herself thinking “like a scientist, an artist, or a poet” (15). She will use her imagination to communicate her prophetic vision to those around her. She will have to read–and think–between the lines of conventional speech to discern what is “really going on.” And she will need to use her artist’s eye to envision a world that, like a painting or a poem, offers a tonality of hope and possibility amidst the actualities of human existence.

In this description of the servant leader as artist, Greenleaf’s imagery can be compared to Kierkegaard’s notion of the faithful self. For Kierkegaard, the self who is not bound to despair is a self who lives in the creative tension between what is “possible” and what is “necessary.” If the self – or in this case, the servant leader – has “too much” possibility, he will ignore the concrete social realities of life outside his window. But if he has “too much” necessity, he will remain unable to look beyond the current situation and envision a more just and compassionate world.

On Greenleaf’s reading, this dynamic exchange between possibility and necessity is “awareness.” One of the crucial qualifications for effective leadership, he writes, is the ability to “tolerate a sustained wide span of awareness so that one better ‘sees it as it is’” (19). And why does awareness need to be “tolerated”? Because it is not an easy gift to bear. Awareness does not give solace, Greenleaf insists. Rather, “it is a disturber and an awakener” (20). Servant leadership is thus, to borrow from poet Wallace Stevens, the endurance to see “things as they are” – and the intuition that “things as they are” might one day be transformed into things as we have not yet seen.

“On Becoming a Servant-Leader.” By Robert K. Greenleaf. Excerpts of this essay are available in Insights in Leadership: Service, Stewardship, Spirit, and Servant-Leadership. Edited by Larry C. Spears. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 398pp. $29.95.

[ Posted by Stacia Brown at September 1, 2000 08:49 AM | More Ethics and Servant Leadership articles ]

© 2000-2000 by the Center for Ethics, Emory University. Some rights reserved.