Question

Robert Greenleaf (the “father” of servant leadership) said, “The servant views any problem in the world as in here, inside oneself, not out there. And if a flaw in the world is to be remedied, to the servant the process of change starts in here, in the servant, not out there” (Spears, 1995, p. 56).

Do we, who desire to exhibit servant leadership, practice this? Should we? If so, how? If not, why not?

Answer 1

In my opinion, Robert Greenleaf has said the right thing that servant leadership starts from inside or is intrinsic to one's self. If we want to change the world, we must change ourselves first. This is the thought projected by Robert Greenleaf when he says so.

In my opinion, we do not practice this thought even though we desire to exhibit servant leadership. This is because human tendency is to find faults with others or with the processes or systems rather than finding faults inside their own being. If they are able to do so, then they can learn the true essence of servant leadership.

Yes, we should try and practice this thought if we want to exhibit servant leadership. We can do so by listing out the changes that we want to see in ourselves in order to make ourselves better and competitive to achieve our goals and targets. We must try and act on all these weaknesses one by one and measure our performance with respect to earlier flawed performance and see the difference. We will notice that with the passage of time, we have started to improve ourselves and develop qualities within ourselves which provide us the true essence of servant leadership over a period of time.