Trevor,
Your Blog is wonderful, something the servant leadership world needs right now.
Thank you for your kind comments about my presentation at the First Annual Wisconsin Conversation on Servant Leadership. I wish there had been time to emphasize two additional points I learned from researching Greenleaf's life.
1. Bob Greenleaf was a math major, an amateur astronomer, and a crackerjack, world-class researcher. Along with the hundreds of management and personnel studies he personally oversaw at AT&T, he also valued pure science and applied technology. He learned from the best, including the original Hawthorne Experiment researchers and the Nobel Prize-winning scientists he hung out with at Bell Labs. This guy was not a soft and mushy Luddite. He knew all about benchmarks and evaluations but, like Kurt Lewin, sought to measure attitudes and behaviors that were typically ignored in the research. You can find some of those in Greenleaf's "Best Test" for a servant-leader.
2. In his own life, Greenleaf learned that two things were critical for a servant-leader to be effective.
a) He or she should fearlessly explore personal shadows so they are not projected out onto others, and
b) a servant-leader must first lead him/herself. That means reading passionately, seeking out experiences of art and culture, making friends with thought leaders, exploring interior and exterior challenges beyond the bounds of comfort, creating and playing joyfully, and setting and meeting personal goals, all the while remaining open to the promptings of spirit.
As Greenleaf said, "It all begins 'in here,' not 'out there.'
Don Frick
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