Thank you for dropping by! Thursdays are Servant Hearts day. Gracious leaders around the world guest post to NorthFork’s blog, A Servant’s Heart, sharing their fabulous insights regarding the serving nature of leadership. We’re delighted you’ve joined us. Be prepared for a variety of experience!

Today, we are happy to welcome Sharon Eden. Sharon is the “Inner Leadership and Coaching for Purpose” expert. Her bio highlights her role as an exceptional coach with a ‘fire in her gut’ deeply committed to helping executives and senior managers discover their purpose, passion, and power to be happier, more effective, and influential at work with substantially improved performances as leaders and managers. What her bio doesn’t say is this: Sharon is inspiration. There is a simple elegance about her and her work that brings you back for more. She is a lady of grace with a zest for life unparallelled. And she is a wonderful friend who reminds us in a brilliantly refreshing way life can be an adventure …

Dark Side of Servant Leadership
by Sharon Eden (London UK)

You’ve read the definitions. You’ve read the theories. You’ve read the seminal books on serving leadership. So… you know what it is.

Do you? Do you really?

It seems to me that the literature demands that servant leaders be absolutely fully actualised humans. And, as I say to my psychotherapy clients when they ask how long it will take to be cured, “Have you got 3,000 years?”

Here’s a sample of servant leadership characteristics taken from the literature…

Charismatic vision and behaviour that inspires others to follow, capacity to motivate others to commit to the vision, encouraging innovation and creativity, coaching to the specific needs of followers.

Mmm… I think Hitler and Mussolini had all those!

Clear sense of purpose, building vision and goals, value driven with congruent behaviour, strong role model, high expectations, persistent, identify themselves as change agents, enthusiastic, strategic, risk-taking, unwilling to believe in failure….

Mmm… I guess you know the comment I’m about to make here too.

But, what differentiates the servant leader is self-knowing, emotional maturity and the ability to deal with complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity. Oh, those old things… complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity. Piece of cake!

AND true servant leadership flows from the inner spiritual awareness, or presence, which servant leaders acquire in their journeys through this world.

Phew! No wonder they’re few and far between on the ground.

There’s a piece of Zen wisdom that says if you can define a thing, then that’s not it! And that’s the problem when ‘science’ and the intellect get hold of servant leadership. For they literally suck the heart and soul out of it and the nature of its being in action… Servant leadership is not its definitions!

Without heart, soul and action from integrity, your ego can get its rocks off with servant leadership. It can use it to inflate its own grandiosity… ‘How wonderful I am doing good works’… its own sense of absolute rightness and, as if still in the feudal system of kings, its own divine right to rule.

And, for sure, we have modern examples of leaders who purport to serve, from the kitchen sink to heads of nations, for whom ego, egoistic wants and desires are foremost. ‘I only want what’s best for you’ or ‘I deserve fame and lots of money for taking care of my people’… while the family or the nation is ruled by fear and obligation and eventually enters decline.

For me, being seduced by your ego is the most important aspect of the dark side. The aspect which you and I, if we aspire to servant leadership, must hunt out with the vigilance of a starving tiger seeking food.

Because such a travesty of servant leadership is a violent abuse to which any of us, being human, could fall prey.

There’s a part of my personality which I call Genghis Khan. Once upon a time I could castrate a man at 20 paces with the violence of my tongue. That was spawned by my fury and my pain which came from my experience of being a misused female in a male dominated world.

Having worked to expand myself, I no longer choose to hold to the experience or act out the fury and pain. But, hey, given the right circumstances, I know I potentially still could. Any time I’m very tired, feeling down, physically ill or depressed, my personality gremlins can come out and bite me on the butt!

And, if you don’t think that happens to you or you could behave in a similar way to my Genghis Khan, then you most definitely need to wake up to the dark side of yourself. Because, if you don’t acknowledge or work reparatively with it, I guarantee it will most definitely and unconsciously leak out of you and create a huge whack around the head for others and, potentially, yourself.

For how can you and I serve honourably and well without awareness of our dark side and being able to manage and choose our thoughts, feelings and behaviours?… How can you and I serve honourably and well without developing our own inner leadership so as to better lead for ourselves… as well as others!

Servant leadership and its dark side? A work in progress for us all!