Download The Power to Empower, the Transformational Energy of Servant

The Power to Empower
The Transformational Energy of Servant Leadership
Are you a leader or professional who wants to deepen your ability to make a difference? Do
you desire to really be of service, in the deepest sense of the word? Is your leadership or
professional style in keeping with that desire? When working with others, do you generally
come from a place of fear or of love? When you come from fear, you are more concerned
about your image and success, and you will tend to control others, causing resistance.
When you come from love, you are more concerned with serving people, and will seek to
empower them. This is a key test of a new approach called “servant leadership” for leaders
and professionals.
The servant leader or professional is foremost a servant of the people led or influenced,
seeking to serve rather than to control, seeing human enhancement as the primary goal so
that those served are empowered, enlarged, and liberated.
How to do this? Servant leaders exercise openness to Spirit and right-brain, intuitive
activity. They are trustworthy, authentic, caring, compassionate, inclusive, and courageous.
They create a corporate culture of trust and collaboration, developing vision and mission in
a participative process, and aligning systems, structures and resources with the vision and
mission.
Servant leadership is a leadership approach fit for the new century and organization of the
future. This leadership approach can result in an astonishing increase in zest, creativity, and
productivity while bonding people into communities of caring. Thus people are served while
the organization’s mission is accomplished.
Does this really work? Yes, indeed. Just ask Tom’s of Maine, Ben & Jerry’s, TDIndustries,
Interface, and many other companies that have tried it. Studies are now confirming that
socially responsible companies that put people on the bottom line too are outperforming
traditional companies that put only profits on the bottom line.
Where does the idea of servant leadership come from? If you think it seems out of step
with Western culture, you are right. Western culture is based on Greek and Roman
cultures. From the Greek culture we took ideas of democracy for our governments. But we
never applied these ideas to our corporations. For them we took ideas from the Roman
army. We told our corporate leaders to be generals who command and discipline a chain of
command to make sure that the orders are carried out.
In recent decades leadership experts like Stephen Covey have been telling us that this
Roman army approach doesn’t work well any more. Books abound with new leadership
approaches. The fastest selling business book category is now the spirit or soul in business
category. The best, most solid new approach is actually an ancient approach – servant
leadership, advocated by leaders of the world’s great religions like Jesus, Gandhi, Buddha,
and the Dalai Lama. They all offer us a common message, that we are called to serve
others and that service is a path that connects us to Spirit and empowers us.
Eagle Alliance Executive Coaching  Bill Murray, Executive Coach  [email protected] 
http://www.eaglealliance.com  919-419-9460  8 Wexford Drive, Durham, NC 27713-8024
Servant leaders and professionals need to stay open to Spirit and do constant inner work
for at least three reasons. The first reason is to be aware of their inner landscape, noticing
when they are coming from fear and switching to love. Secondly, they need discernment
and the ability to intuit how to serve others. Sometimes encouragement is needed, and
sometimes, assertiveness or tough love. Last, but not least, they need to know how to love
and nurture themselves. Jesus repeatedly left the crowds of people who came to him for
healing in order to revive himself with prayer. And he took the disciples with him to quiet
places to rest.
When people are open to Spirit, they receive guidance, hope, power, and love to
accomplish our divine servant leader mission. They can have a sense of joy and peace
regardless of outcomes because they experience grace so that success does not matter all
that much. But success often does result.
For example, someone once pointed out to a great servant leader, Mother Teresa, that she
was not all that successful. She had hardly made a dent in the poverty of Calcutta. Mother
Teresa replied that she was not called by God to worry about success, but only to obey. A
person I know once volunteered for her for 6 months in Calcutta. He was giving a bath to a
sick person when she walked into the room. She said, “You know, you are doing a
wonderful thing. You are bathing the body of Jesus.”
She was referring to one of her favorite passages in the Bible, Matthew 25: 40:
“…whenever you did this (act of kindness) for one of the least important of these brothers of
mine, you did it for me.” With this view, she was able to build up the volunteer who had a
peak experience. He was tearful with appreciation when he told me about it months later.
He came back home encouraged to be a better servant leader himself.
This is another test of servant leadership: Do those led or influenced tend to become
servant leaders themselves? Mother Teresa spiritually led and mentored Princess Diana
who then blossomed into a servant leader herself, becoming a world renowned symbol of
compassion.
For Mother Teresa, success was in the act itself, regardless of outcome. Living this way
freed her from fears about outcomes and image. And she was a fearless lady. Once she
hopped into a van to cross into the war zone in Beirut to save dying children in the battle
zone. There is more than one kind of outcome. She didn’t cure poverty. But the whole
world admired her compassion.
Of course, Jesus was a great example of servant leadership. And on his last day on earth,
Jesus washed the feet of his disciples (John 13: 4-17). He told them that he had been
among them as a servant, and they should do likewise. They should not seek to lord it over
others, but rather, to serve (Mark 9: 33-35). The disciples obeyed and were empowered by
the Spirit to spread the message throughout the Roman world, against great odds.
Gandhi and Martin Luther King proved to us moderns that their servant leader approach
had more power than the British army and the American system of discrimination. In the
cases where servant leadership has actually been tried in modern corporations, it is proving
to be more powerful than the Roman army approach. The spiritual leaders knew what they
were talking about.
Eagle Alliance Executive Coaching  Bill Murray, Executive Coach  [email protected] 
http://www.eaglealliance.com  919-419-9460  8 Wexford Drive, Durham, NC 27713-8024
When corporate leaders decide to be nice to the people but still keep their old command
and control values, it just doesn’t work. People are now too cynical to be easily swayed.
There have been too many downsizings, layoffs, and broken promises. Many of the new
programs of empowerment have failed. Why? Maybe people just stayed cynical and never
really got on board. They perceived that their leaders didn’t have their heart in it.
I believe servant leadership works because Spirit supports it in the very nature of the
universe, and because the leaders who have adopted it, put their heart in it. Generally, they
say they were motivated by their spirituality. For example, Tom Chappell, president of the
very successful company, Tom’s of Maine, decided that his innovative leadership had more
to do with spirituality than with management science. So to improve further his servant
leadership, he went to Harvard Divinity School.
To learn about leadership, I myself completed studies at both Yale Divinity School (M.Div.)
and the Harvard Business School (MBA). Through 20 some years of being a leader and
advising leaders in major corporations and hospitals, I have observed examples of servant
leadership and of traditional leadership and their different results. Then I founded Eagle
Alliance Executive Coaching, a consulting firm that specializes in empowering leaders and
professionals who are really committed to serving and making a difference. Interestingly, I
have become convinced, it is these leaders, professionals, and the organizations they
serve, that will prosper.
© Copyright Bill Murray l998
By Bill Murray, Executive Coach of Eagle Alliance Executive Coaching, a consulting firm
specializing in coaching leaders and professionals to significantly improve their leadership,
people skills, and personal effectiveness. Bill would like to dialogue with readers. Please email him at [email protected] or call at 919-419-9460 or check out the web site,
http://www.eaglealliance.com.
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Eagle Alliance Executive Coaching  Bill Murray, Executive Coach  [email protected] 
http://www.eaglealliance.com  919-419-9460  8 Wexford Drive, Durham, NC 27713-8024