Dialogues with Maria Pattison (3)
As i have been considering my role in relation the the Book of Debts (going live online and on the streets towards the end of next week) as servant, I was interested to hear Maria talking about servant leadership – perhaps the anti-thesis of the approach taken by the Thatcher, whose image I cannot seem to escape this week..(more on her later).
On Servant Leadership (Part 1)
M: So, servant leadership!it was a term that was coined by a guy in the 1970’s …Greenleaf. If you google his name you will come up with an Institute for Servant Leadership. He wrote that people who are servant leaders have the impulse to serve first and to lead second, whereas there are quite a lot of leaders who do use service as part of their leadership but the impulse would be the other way round, i.e. ‘first I want to lead and then serve’. So it’s about the impulse being first of all to serve others, and some of the qualities of servant leadership would be things like, humility; so if you speak to someone who is a genuine servant leader, probably if you say to them ‘How come you have become so successful?’ it’s likely that they would attribute their success to other people and to the times and just say ‘Well, I’m very lucky’. So those sorts of qualities come out.
The main thing also is that the service is for all human beings, so it’s not service just for a particular cause, the tendency is towards a much broader vision of humanity. But also, one of the ways of looking at leadership is that leaders are defined by characteristics and traits – so if you look down those kind of analyses, that’s only one way to look at leadership and its not necessarily the best one – but a lot of the traits that would be applied to a servant leader are also features of what’s called ‘Level 5 leadership’, which is a purely business piece of research done by this guy called Jim Collins in America. And he did some research into what makes a good company great, and the qualities of a company that can move from good to great usually have a leader at their helm who usually has great humility and who is not interested in their own ego and who can see the picture for a broader humanitarian cause, really, than just their own business as well. So it’s kind of interesting that those ways of leading have been shown to have a kind of economic success as well as a human impact.
A: And you said that model of leadership is faith based, so how. The guy who defined that models what was his belief system?
M: I don’t know how Greenleaf evolved it but if you look towards say the Christian model of leadership, it would be, you can see that a lot of the language in the New Testament is around putting oneself at the service of humanity, giving things up not piling things up .. and that has common thread swith Islam and certainly a sense to be inspiring of others, to work towards common goals. You know it’s quite interesting because a lot of Cameron’s Big Society, a lot of talk now around people all being in it together, that’s kind of the catchword
A: Yeah, apart from the people at the top.
M: Yeah exactly! So there is a lot of people seeing that these forms of leadership that aren’t just about charismatic men, leading from the front are ones that are actually really important in our world now, but how people really do it, the practice of it, that’s the issue.
