ethics news & views

Getting to know you:
Introducing the new Ethics and Servant Leadership team

Edward Queen and Kate O'Dwyer Randall joined the Center for Ethics this summer as the new Ethics and Servant Leadership team (see article). We pulled them aside to talk about their dreams for the program.

Q. What first attracted you both to work with EASL?

Edward: The combination of the components of the program was most attractive to me. The opportunity to work with students, faculty, and staff and then the wider Atlanta community on issues related to ethics and servant leadership really presented some exciting opportunities. For me, that was the most attractive part of the overall position.

Kate: As an Emory student, I knew about EASL and the holistic work it does—talking about integrating service and leadership in a way that was conscious, asking critical questions in a way that is community oriented, and a safe place to ask those questions. EASL has such a reputation in the Emory community. Being someone in the theological community who is asking critical questions, when I heard about this position, I was very drawn to apply for it.

Q. You both bring significant expertise in servant leadership...

Edward: It’s hard for me to think of servant leadership as a thing. For me, it’s more of a way to approach the way one lives and the way one works. It’s a consciousness of the situations around one, the situations which the people with whom one works find themselves, a clarity about the ends one is trying to realize and being able to articulate those ends. And then to try to work in that complex environment in a way that brings about those ends, in a way that produces a wider range of positive goods and positive ends—that for most people and most things in most places most of the time, everything is better. The end doesn’t become the sole thing, but the process and the means of effecting it are also important. I won’t necessarily say equally important. But they cannot be dismissed and destroyed along the way either.

Kate: I agree with Edward about servant leadership not being a thing. It’s funny, because my job in Washington was promoting it as a thing, which it has elements of. But I think just working with people and working with undergrads at Agnes, I keep saying, “Be critical of paradigms and be critical of constructs.” And look at themselves in the bigger environment, in the bigger world so that they can then decide how they can be in tune with and interested in the greater good.

Q. What is it that you find so compelling about “servant leadership?”

Kate: The term “servant leadership” itself is problematic for me. As a woman, the word “servant” before “leadership” creates problems. What is it to be a servant and to be a leader? How do those two things marry?

My acquaintance with it is from a couple of years ago when I worked with the Servant Leadership School in Washington, DC. That place was interested in helping people grapple with what it means to be leaders doing investigation into your own moral framework, into your own social location. We are highly privileged. How does that effect how you make leadership decisions, no matter what field you’re in—whether that’s business or medicine or education.?

So I have a love-hate relationship with the term “servant leadership”itself, but I think it is great to talk about what it means to be a leader for the common good.

Edward: I have been familiar with servant leadership for about a dozen years. When I first worked with the Lilly Endownment, the Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership was one of its grantees. I was a program officer for them on production of the first two volumes of Greenleaf’s writings.

Kate has suggested several possible negative connotations on why it may be difficult to get a handle on the term “servant leadership”itself. On the other hand, it’s a concept that really forces people to think about leadership in a way different radically different from how we’re accustomed to approaching it. It provides an opportunity where it breaks up peoples’ accepted modes of thinking and crystallizes an opportunity to rethink our conceptions of leadership.

For that reason, I think it’s particularly important because you have to think about what a leader does and a what a leader is—in a broader sense than just what kind of position a person may have. So those who can effect positive ends are the ones who come out as true leaders. That is what “servant leadership” tries to express. When they’ve reached the end of their time as a leader, are the people they are leading—is the organization they’re leading—better, more complete and more capable of leading on?

The biblical basis of this is Moses, the epitome of a servant leader. He brings his people to the point of their greatest moment and then is forced to step back. And they have to move on from there. Has he prepared them, has he prepared the next generation of Israel for the next step? I think there’s a real power there to the concept and to what it can help illuminate in our discussions of leadership.

Q. Even though EASL works with students from all across Emory, it focuses predominantly on undergraduates. What draws you to work with undergraduates?

Edward: I am much excited by the unformed nature of undergrads. They come to college: it’s a new environment, it’s a new reality, they’re making the major step of moving into adulthood. And life has a wider degree of possibilities and options for most undergrads than it does for most grads. So the excitement of the undergraduate years is for me as a teacher; it’s a real pleasure to have the opportunity to work with undergrads. It’s a time when young adults are moving through a process of ethical formation, when you can effect them in many powerful ways. And then they can take that formation, that education, into what they do either as graduate students or as professionals in their workaday life.

Kate: I think that undergraduates are a swinging door. They’ve just come from high school and now they’re coming into a place where they be introduced to questions and to people they’ve never met before. They’re incredibly energetic, and they’re very curious. And they’re very brilliant too, the way they ask questions and hold them up for one another. It’s a good place for them to explore things before they go into their profession.

Q. What are your hopes for EASL’s work with graduate professional students?

Edward: The possibilities of integrating some of the work that goes on in the professional schools is definitely a possibility. For me, though, much more immediate is a way to reach the wider group of undergraduates who are in the pre-professional programs at Emory. Thinking about what students are going to be getting into law school or medical school or in business careers or whatever. Starting some way to help form them as ethical lawyers or ethical physicians or whatever, and trying to help the early formation of professional responsibility in those fields is something I’d like to work with much sooner than anything new in the professional programs. I think there’s a way to integrate a lot of what this program does with when students are going to be in the professional programs as graduate students. But I think there’s a lot do to with undergrads in the pre-professional programs, so that’s sort of my current vision.

Kate: When you talk about work with graduate professional students, one of the things that’s crucial is to build a community where they have ethically minded colleagues and have a support group of people who are going to think about things in their field—as well as meeting folks in the community who are wrestling with these same questions and have done so in a way that they can be a mentor or guide to the professional students.

Q. What are you hopes for the Employee Council Servant Leadership Initiative?

Edward: It’s going to be important to be as supportive and as engaged a partner as desired and needed. The extent to which our engagement with the Employee Council gives that work the support it needs—we want to do that. On the other hand, it’s important encourage the work of the Employee Council to be their own. So I don’t want to take it over. I’m looking forward to being helpful and to working together. The key is that if servant leadership is truly a viable and valuable way of managing and way of approaching one’s work life and one’s life in general, it’s going to have to be realized in the workaday world. So the Employee Council is a way and a place where people are starting to do that on the Emory campus, for staff. And we need to be partners and supporters.

Kate: I really like the way Edward talks about “partners.” The way I envision that relationship is to lend support and lend resources, again, to be a place that can help them think about things but not dominate their process. But to let them know that we are actively involved in the partnership, an active partnership.

Q. How do you see EASL developing in the future?

Edward: Five or ten years from now EASL needs to be viewed as an important and dynamic part of the Emory system, as a place that people know about, as a program that students and faculty admire because they see how it integrates successfully throughout the campus. Ideally, it should be a program in one form or another that manages to touch the lives of everyone affiliated with the university, whether on a formal or informal basis, that it has had an effect really throughout all the components and all the ladders of the university. That would be my ideal.

Kate: I think to be recognized across the campus—and around the country—as a program that is giving the tools to young leaders to think about things in new ways, which I think it is known for, which is something our predecessors have done a remarkable job doing. And just to continue what they’ve done and to be attentive the needs that come up in the program as they come up.

Edward: It’s important to recognize that Melissa and Mary Sue have done a tremendous job of getting this program started and did an unbelievable job making the Forum and the summer internship programs so exciting and so successful. And also the support from faculty and Jim Fowler for getting the adoption of the Ethics Minor. Julia Leon, who started the Employee Council servant leadership work with the staff—all these people have created a tremendous opportunity for Kate and myself to move into. We’re very fortunate to have the opportunity to move into such a positive environment. One of my goals is to take all this wonderful work that’s been laid before us and really move it forward and to really build on it. It presents us with some exciting opportunities, and it also presents us with some frightening challenges. We’re stepping into the shoes of people who’ve done a tremendous job, and we’ve got to keep all that good work going and going as well as it has been. But we also find ourselves challenged to extend the work of the EASL program. I hope that we’re going to be up to that challenge, and that those who came before and those with whom we’re going to find ourselves working, two or three years down the road, they’ll see that what we’ve done is a credit to what they’ve given to us.

Kate: I’ve just been looking through the files this week, and the work has been unbelievably organized and wonderfully done. I’d love to work closely with the alums to find out what works—how does this work, why does this work so well—to get their insight, because they are people who have been beneficiaries of this program. What do they have to say about the direction the program should go in?

Edward Queen can be contacted at equeen@emory.edu or (404) 727-1240.

Kate Randall can be contacted at karanda@learnlink.emory.edu or (404) 727-3064.

[ Posted by Chance Hunter at August 15, 2003 11:02 AM | More Ethics and Servant Leadership articles ]

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