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Robert K. Greenleaf (1904-1990) was the founder of the modern Servant leadership movement. Greenleaf was born in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1904. After graduating from Carleton College in Minnesota, he went to work for AT&T. For the next forty years he researched management, development, and education. All along, he felt a growing suspicion that the power-centered authoritarian leadership style so prominent in U.S. institutions was not working, and in 1964 he took an early retirement to found the Center for Applied Ethics.
Philosophy According to his essay, Essentials of Servant Leadership, Greenleaf’s philosophy had its roots from reading a work of fiction in 1958: "The idea of the servant as leader came out of reading Hermann 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." Essays Greenleaf was captivated by the idea of a servant actually being the leader. In Essentials he wrote, “As it was, the idea lay dormant for 11 years during which I came to believe that we in this country were in a leadership crisis and that I should do what I could about it.” In 1970 Greenleaf published his first essay, entitled The Servant As Leader, which introduced the term "servant leadership." Later, the essay was expanded into a book, which is perhaps one of the most influential management texts yet written. The Servant Leadership movement was born. Of his philosophy, Greenleaf wrote in Essentials, "The servant-leader is servant first... Becoming a servant-leader begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first... The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant first to make sure that other people's highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and the most difficult to administer, 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?" Consulting work Through the next twenty-five years Greenleaf served as a consultant to such notable institutions as MIT, the American Foundation for Management Research, and Lilly Endowment, Inc. He continued writing, fine-tuning his ideas and focusing them on several different areas of leadership. For example, to apply Servant Leadership to an organizational level, he wrote The Institution as Servant. For educators he wrote The Leadership Crisis: A Message for College and University Faculty and Teacher as Servant. Other writings targeted seminaries, personal growth, religious leaders, and trustees, among others. Legacy Greenleaf influenced a whole generation. In 1985, The Center for Applied Ethics was renamed the Robert K. Greenleaf Center. Though Greenleaf died in 1990, the Center continued his work, publishing two posthumous essay collections in 1996, which are available at Greenleaf.org. Today there are scores of colleges and universities that include Servant Leadership in their teachings and hundreds of companies that embrace Greenleaf's philosophy. It is worthy to note that as Greenleaf strived to serve through education, he became the leader of a movement. | ||||||||
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