Trevor, I think you made an important point when you mentioned "attitude". I believe the core of servant leadership is a way of "being" with another. Perhaps it matters less what we are actually "doing" (of course this implies that our actions are moral, ethical and legal). Each one of us has gifts and abilities that someone else needs. But I am reminded of the many times that I thought I was the "minister", only to realize that I received more than I gave. Who really is the servant-leader? Perhaps the grateful recipient is, perhaps the grateful giver is, perhaps both.
Mary, you make a great point. Servant leadership is about motives AND identity AND outcomes. Or, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "having a servant's heart." After Greenleaf defines a servant-leader in "The Servant As Leader," he writes in the next sentence that the servant-leader is "sharply different from the person who is leader first because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions."
I don't know about others, but I can see grandiosity in others more easily than in myself. All of us, and especially those in the helping professions, must be on guard to recognize personal ego inflation while still claiming what Greenleaf called our "legitimate power and greatness." This is a way of being that is at odds with America's consensual culture.
In the course of researching the details of Greenleaf's life I gradually realized that HE needed to hear this message from whatever source it came as much as the rest of us. His courage lay in being conscious of that.
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