Wonderful blog! I found it while doing online research on servant leadership.
re: “What we can offer the world as servants and servant-leaders is something that includes but goes beyond numbers—an artistry that uses intuition, takes risks, and paints fresh possibilities in our corners of the world.”
I like your point that management takes intuition, risk taking, and creativity. I agree bottom line profit accounting only shows an organization’s financial perspective.
But I think you’re setting up a false dilemma---that numbers cannot capture (or at least help capture) these qualities of a good manager.
I’ve enjoyed the management literature and corporate practice on the “Balanced Scorecard.” I believe the original ideas were set out in the Harvard Business Review in the early 90s and the book “The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action” by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, 1996.
The concept was a simplified scoring chart to keep a manager aware of weaknesses and strengths in the organization. http://www.balancedscorecard.org...asics/
bsc1.html Those numerical scores included employee learning and growth.
A good leader and manager, using these ideas, can even score some ideas in ethics. http://www.balancedscorecard.org...ics/
ethics.html
It would be interesting for the knowledgeable servant-leader to attempt setting up metrics for servant leadership in an organization. Certainly it’s not a guarantee of a servant leadership, but maybe one more lever to push and a gauge to read on the path of a better organization.
Bobolink,
Thank you for your comments. They force me to be more precise about what I meant.
Greenleaf was a math major, started the world's first corporate assessment center at AT&T and urged managers to develop a "research mindset," so measuring performance was high on his list of priorities. In fact, his "best test" for a servant leader is all about measuring outcomes, not outputs. So I do, in fact, believe that numbers can help capture the qualities of a good manager, leader and servant-leader.
My main point is that we cannot measure our way into BECOMING a servant-leader, at least as Greenleaf defines servant-leader. The servant-leader chooses to serve first, and then chooses to lead out of that service. He or she becomes skilled in listening, accessing intuition and foresight ("The lack of foresight is an ethical failure" said Greenleaf) and using persuasion as the preferred mode of power.
I think the Balanced Scorecard is a terrific instrument for measuring what it was designed to measure. There are now some validated instruments that measure various aspects of servant leadership. For example, when he was at Indiana Wesleyan University, Dr. Jim Laub developed a terrific instrument to measure servant leadership in organizations, one that he has now incorporated into his consulting practice. (See www.olagroup.com)Regent University (www.regent.edu) sponsors a Servant Leadership Research Roundtable where papers are read and also made avaialable online.
I believe the interest in scholarly research into servant leadership is one of the most important and hopeful developments in the last 10 years.
Call me a mystic, but I still believe that one makes that crucial choice to serve first and then to lead in response to the lure of spirit, however one wishes to define spirit. Then come the measurements, the development of skills and capacities, the evolution of a seeker on this lifelong path. But along the way, a servant-leader continues to consult the deepest sources of servanthood.
re:"Call me a mystic, but I still believe that one makes that crucial choice to serve first and then to lead in response to the lure of spirit, however one wishes to define spirit."
Don,
I understand your initial post better now. Thank you for the additional information.
I too agree that a choice must be made for servant leadership before the measurements come in. Similarly I think your point might also be we could choose autocratic leadership and then measure it.
As an agnostic I appear to be different than many devotees of servant-leadership from my (not so in-depth) reading of the topic. My definition of "lure of spirit" probably is different. Maybe for me I'd call it "lure of deep fulfillment" or "lure of truth and goodness."
Bobolink,
Agnostics can be servant-leaders too! So can non-deist Buddhists, deist Muslims and multiple-deist Hindus. Welcome to the community.
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