No More Mr Nice Guy
Sep 2nd
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, our friend Thomas Harper returns to gently remind us just how important it is to find and hold fast to our authenticity, especially when we are helping others do the same.
No More Mr Nice Guy
by Thomas Harper (Indianapolis, Indiana)
What does it truly mean to be a Servant Leader? The title is catchy, and it has current appeal. But what does it really mean?
I used to be nice. To me, nice really meant the appearance of caring. I believed by being nice I was helping others; you know, no ruffled feathers. I came to realize, over time, being nice was really about my image and approval; it wasn’t really about others. So, I stopped being nice. That’s not to say I became mean. What I became was caring. And caring is not always ‘nice.’
When we deeply or unconditionally care about others, we let go of our attachment to image, and we let go of our need for approval. Why wouldn’t we? After all, image is a façade; it’s a cheap substitute for the person we truly are. And approval is just a cheap substitute for love and respect, just like being ‘nice’ is a cheap substitute for caring. (Assumptions, by the way, are a cheap substitute for communication, but that’s a subject for another article). If we have love, care, and respect for ourselves, we can trust others will, too. It’s when we let our image, or our need for approval, stand in the way that we do not offer the people in our lives feedback, thereby enabling them to engage in behavior that’s not in their best interest. I’m not saying providing feedback is easy. I’m saying providing feedback is vital.
Positive feedback is easy to give, although it’s not given often enough. The challenge is giving feedback on negative behavior. We need to remember the more poignant the feedback, the more impact it has. Our fear, of course, is that our poignant feedback will “hurt someone’s feelings,” and we’ll lose their approval, or they won’t like us. If we were perfect, I suppose we would be masters of feedback, and we would be able to give feedback in such a caring way it would never be ill-received. Good luck with that, right? Instead, as mere mortals, we must risk our image and our approval rating because when someone we know is engaging in negative, counterproductive, or destructive behavior, our feedback may never be more urgently needed to change their path.
It’s helpful to understand the source of the ‘pain,’ or the feelings, triggered by feedback. You can often tell how poignant or how true feedback is by the impact it has. Believe me, if it is on target, it “hits home.” If feedback is off the mark, however, it usually has little or no impact. The messenger, I should point out, is not the source of the pain; pain comes from the revelation we are behaving inconsistently with our values. It’s the realization we are so out of integrity, or so out of bounds, it’s apparent to others.
One reason we feel like we don’t want to give feedback is because we feel like we don’t want to receive it. We feel that way, in large part, because we think we are able to fool the world. When we act inconsistently with what we value, we know it inside. We are only ‘hurt’ or have ‘hurt feelings’ because we find out it’s not so well concealed after all; we come to the conscious realization we have been acting inconsistent with what we value. In all likelihood, the behavior was never really well-concealed; instead, others likely were afraid to give feedback. What we need to realize is feedback may be the only way to initiate change in behavior; change which, if accepted, would be in the best interest of the those receiving the feedback. Feedback, after all, is the very best agent for learning and change; it’s invaluable, especially when it is impactful.
This does not mean the way we give feedback isn’t important. Just as the decision to give feedback isn’t about us, the way we give feedback shouldn’t be about us, either. It can be self-defeating to give feedback in a judgmental or self-righteous manner. Giving feedback isn’t about our worth, our judgment, or our being right. Feedback, at its best, is a tool to ‘appreciate’ someone else; it’s a tool to help others assess their choices and behaviors. From there, the choice to change, or not, is up to them. It must be given with care, because we care. As such, it’s often best received with a dose of positive feedback as well. Besides, if we withhold valuable feedback, we do others a disservice, especially if it is withheld so we can continue to be ‘nice,’ maintain our own image, or continue to receive their approval. In withholding feedback, we, too, are responsible for the behavior, because we enable it.
In closing, what does servant leadership mean? At its essence, it means we put others first. We let go of image. We let go of approval. We make tough choices. We support others with courage and care. When that support necessitates feedback, we are obligated to provide it in whatever form is necessary. For me, it means no more Mr. Nice Guy.
How to Get Along With an Enemy
Aug 26th
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, I am especially DELIGHTED to introduce you to Mark McKinney. Mark is a young emerging leader endeavoring to share what he learns on his journey to encourage other young people to develop their leadership ability and make a difference in whatever they are doing. Mark helps us better understand we can learn to serve the world around us by learning how to use our gifts. Mark blogs and he is developing an awesome leadership web site for young people called Leader: Me! You can read Mark’s original post, and comments, here. Mark’s bio reads, “Love the outdoors, reading, building things, languages, HTML, Krav Maga, learning anything, spying, codes and ciphers, leadership.” Friends, Mark inspires me. I’m sure he will inspire you, too!
How to Get Along With an Enemy
by Mark McKinney (California)
We always want to avoid making enemies, but it will certainly happen. It may be the opposite of what you would want to do, but the first step to try to turn enemies into friends is to get to know the person better. As Abraham Lincoln said, “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.” Getting to know them will enable you to learn about most of his or her strengths and weaknesses. Knowing that will help you understand them and get along. You might even figure out what you did (if you did really do something) to them. Then you can apologize to them and this will hopefully turn your enemy into your friend.
Now what if that doesn’t work because they just don’t seem to like you for whatever reason, you must now learn how to get along with them. To do this, you must first ignore their comments. Now I don’t mean that you should blow them off like “who cares about them” because that’s just what they would do to you. No, you must not react to their comments in a negative way. Don’t make their problem your problem. The next step is to not say anything about what he or she does. Don’t be critical of them. Don’t make negative comments. Otherwise, again, you are doing exactly what they are doing. You must ignore the urge to get back at them or the desire to embarrass them. Finally, you must always remember to be nice to them even if they are being a jerk to you. If you do this you will be setting an example. Hopefully they will follow your example.
The people we don’t like are usually the people we don’t know or seem to be not like us. We don’t usually like people that are different from us. The solution is to get to know others even if they are different and be nice to everyone we see. Will Rogers, speaking of Leon Trosky, said, “I bet you if I had met him and had a chat with him, I would have found him a very interesting and human fellow, for I never yet met a man that I didn’t like.” Get to know people. You’ll be surprised how much you might like them.
“You been doin’ your job?”
Aug 24th
Ever thought about what is it, exactly, leaders should be doin’? If so, you’re not alone.
Remember the Titans, a movie starring Denzel Washington as Coach Herman Boone, is based on a true story of hope set in the newly created and integrated T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1971. In the clip that follows, we learn of two young men — Gerry Bertier and Julius Campbell — coming of age, coming to terms with humanity as it relates to racial harmony, and coming up against the true meaning of leadership. What they learn, and what many of us learn from them, is this: fear, if not confronted, stands in the way of trust, integrity, friendship, hope, and love.
We also learn fear, given its tendency to deceive, is quick to disguise itself behind long, thick curtains pretending to be something it is not; these ‘curtains’ (e.g., where we come from, gender, socio-economic/class status, the color of our skin) often hang precariously from the rusty nails of man’s inhumanity to man. Over time, they are jostled loose by the unrelenting march of time and the resolute persistence of the human will’s desire to overcome. If we look carefully, the light of other-centered leadership, as it majestically rises over the horizon, pierces these curtains to give us, with renewed clarity, a glimpse of the beauty that lies on the other side — a beauty that helps us ‘see’ what really matters: who we are as people and what we need from those we have chosen to lead us.
Julius helps us get to the point: “attitude reflects leadership.”
There exists a prevailing sense that leadership has somehow lost its authenticity. In many corner offices, we find ‘leaders’ surrounded by “good people with great talent and awesome attitudes,” to borrow John Maxwell’s words, who, like the Wizard of Oz, expend great effort to deceive. They put on a show, of sorts, highlighting ‘outstanding’ results, results that have little to do with talent or leadership. ‘Great talent and awesome attitudes’ sound pretty good on the surface but, when left to their own devices, come across as shallow, biased, and often badly presented, if not self-centered. You see, if our job as leader is merely to gather ‘good people with great talent and awesome attitudes,’ what’s next? We need only look to C suites around the globe to see the catastrophe that befalls such thinking.
Here’s the lesson for me.
I think Gerry and Julius found themselves confronted with the problem of authenticity. Top-down strategies, even those on high school football fields, that insist on surrounding the leader with ‘good’ people, fail to place the people first. By design, the leader becomes the center of attention. I’m reminded of a bygone era during the long, hot summer days on dusty, American grade school playgrounds when the two very best players stood in front of the rest of us selecting, one at a time, what he (yes, in those days, it was always a he) considered the best players available for his team. Sounds nice enough, I suppose, if your only interest is looking good (aka, seeking fame and admiration because you are so adept at gathering ‘good people with great talent and awesome attitudes’). Of course, it doesn’t look so good to the one left standing after everyone else has been selected. And it doesn’t take into account the rest of us who are making judgments of our own as we look on.
For me, the way to get attitudes to go up, up, up is not for leaders to select great talent predisposed with awesome attitudes but, rather, to take on the challenge of first improving their own. “Attitude,” Winston Churchill taught us years ago, “is a little thing that makes a big difference.” You see, with the right leadership — a leadership with an other-centered attitude — people of all walks of life can come to terms with their differences, overcome a long history of fear, hostility, and mistrust, sacrifice self for others (indeed, for a better humanity), dream their very own dreams, and come together to achieve great things, even if they are not very good at the game. That’s what leadership does.
Want to see for yourself? Next time teams are being forged on the school playground in your community, look for those leaders who go out of their way to pick players not based on any great talent or attitude but, instead, on their love of the game and their desire to be part of the team, whether they can play or not. That will be the team that learns the most, loves the most, and has the most fun because that’s the team that stands on the shoulders of a true leader. They may not win on the scoreboard, but they’ll be chalking up some heavy points in the game of life. And it won’t take other folks long to notice. Why? It’s quite simple really. Such a leader “tames the savageness of man and makes gentle the life of this world.”
Isn’t that exactly the job leaders ought to be doin’?
From the Inside Out
Aug 19th
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 Stash Serafin. Stash is inspiration personified! I have enjoyed the wonderful opportunity to connect with Stash outside of Twitter and I find myself in awe of his positive energy, his enthusiasm, and his love for others. Stash has been a figure skater since 1968, but he’s not your run-of-the-mill figure skater. Blind since birth, Stash takes skating to a new level. Through skating, Stash helps script life, sensing the grace and majesty of movement — movement best distinguished, you guessed it, from the inside out. Stash hails from the City of Brotherly Love, but you don’t need me to tell you that. It shows!
Servants from the Inside Out
by Stash Serafin (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Thanks to our wonderful Dr Jack King for inviting me to post my thoughts about being of service and how to feel like we are valued because we serve.
I took a long look at my life and realized that being of service feels really good. I liken ‘servant’ and ‘service’ to an inside job; both come from the heart.
For me, as a blind person, I feel everything. I mean everything. I feel when our dog is sick. I feel the trees, and their energy as the seasons change. I feel the wind with all its different textures, storms, calm, stillness, and its gentle breezes. Heart gives sensing a home; it is always whole, pure, and full when we really feel what it has to teach us.
Sensing can be tricky; we as humans tend to want everything yesterday. {Sigh.} I’m no different, but I’ve learned a few tips and tricks along the way; some help me not to ignore anything while others help me pay more attention, especially to what my heart has to say.
One of the more important tricks I’ve learned is when I am very gentle—very sensitive to heart—I can feel tiny dots, something like tiny grains of sand or tiny mustard seeds. I think of these dots as pixels, what sighted folks use to design the wonderful digital images folks have come to know and love, images often used to share messages of hope, faith, and insight. Like amazing images that come into focus through tiny pixels, gentleness helps us become more aware of tiny dots of energy all around us.
Sometimes, it is easy for me to think of these dots in terms of Braille, the way I learned how to read and write. Braille, after all, opened me to the world of universal ideas; it allows me to feel again—everything. When we find this link to feeling life, we begin to connect, vibrate, and put together life in a new way, a way that really makes some sense.
Serving is at the heart of life’s connecting, because as we sense something such as a dot, a pixel, a grain of sand, or a mustard seed, we feel it, we deal with it and, somehow, the smaller we manage to condense our senses to a dot or pixel, the better we focus on it, and the more it grows. It grows like a newly planted field of corn grows. Did you know it’s especially easy to hear a field of corn start crackling and snapping in the quiet of night as the corn gently grows?
The idea of growing gently may have its issues (e.g., the gentleness of the seed to harvest process takes time and patience), but when gentleness has it due, we stop to take notice, often allowing it to guide us rather than picking a fight with it. When gentle growing happens, we can — and we do — make a difference, not only in our own lives, but in every life we think about, every life we touch by action or kind word that encourages energy to ebb and flow, and move easily to and fro. In making a difference for others, we discern a sense of grace about ourselves only visible when we, too, dance through life.
The idea of serving from the inside out is an ongoing experience: balancing as we go, feeling as we go, dealing as we go, and coming to understand how much we can give without stress or struggle. I’ve always somehow knew — without knowing why — real charity begins at home and, for me, home is where my heart is. Home and heart, when full, have to overflow like a cup that runs over; it has no choice but to flow, go, and flow some more. Where it goes we sometimes know and, sometimes, we have no clue. But there is no denying it flows like a river.
If spirit is wholeness, heart is whole. Our heart helps to center and balance the physical, mental, and emotional aspects of who we are. Sometimes playful, and at all times with a gentle touch, a gentle thought, and a gentle image of what we want, our heart helps us focus. This knowing is moving energy; it comes and goes — and flows — through our experiences of heart. As our heart feels, it guides and we go places. We move and we thrive, not just survive.
You see, when we serve from a full cup, an open heart, a full sense of our true self — whole, beautiful, brilliant — we radiate this fullness, no matter what field we find ourselves in, and results happen. I’m not sure why results happen, but I suspect because we love what we are doing, our actions speak louder than our words, and our actions and our words come together from a loving place inside our heart. As that happens, we succeed; we can accomplish any task, any plan, any goal we set forth to do because we love. In love, we see fullness, much like a seed of corn or a mustard seed knows with certainty the plant it is sure to become.
Likewise, gentleness allows us to really feel when we are truly inspired — truly moved by inspiration. We act because we are moved to act rather than merely doing so simply because it is expected. As such, our action becomes an uplifting experience, much like the wind that lifts an Eagle in flight. It is not an eagle’s power that enables it to fly so gracefully. Instead, something silent and unseen satisfies its will to fly and soar and rise above every battle imaginable.
So it is with leadership. It’s an inside job. In my humble opinion, everyone wants to be of service, and everyone can be a servant. The trick is to be gentle enough and patient enough to feel how we want to serve and how we want to be of service. As we feel, we deal. And as we feel and deal, we heal because our serving nature is a healing act of universal nature. You see, giving and receiving are one. How we give and how we receive can be as kind and as gentle as grass or corn grows, showing the way to be more, to do more, and to love more, with a full cup and an open heart.
In closing, let us not forget it matters not the size of our cup. What matters is our heart — our servant heart — and how it feels as we serve, live, and love, honoring everything.
Enabling Peak Performance
Aug 12th
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 Gary Loper. Gary is a newfound friend. We met on Twitter. Gary will tell you he is a ‘Bob Burg Consultant’ who teaches and relies on Bob Burg’s concept that “all things being equal, people will do business with and refer business to those people they know, like, and trust.” As I see it, Gary, more than anything else, is a friend interested in helping people achieve their dreams.
Peak Performance: Motivating the Best in Others
by Gary Loper (St Petersburg, Florida)
How do people best learn? Freely? Or, by force?
Leaders understand we most often are motivated by direct result — getting a product or service to market, or raising a child or protégé to achieve their dreams, or just getting through life with the least harm done possible. This is particularly true of parenting.
We, parents and leaders alike, tend to be over-protective, often limiting creative potential and probably damaging growth. We know, first hand, many of the mistakes others will make, and we rush to tell them how to do it, often in a demanding way; they’d be better served in a showing, sharing way.
Is our world really so busy and deadline conscious that we, as leaders, cannot be compassionate to those we work with and serve, so busy we fail to teach them in the best possible light, a light that is certain to provide beneficial results for everyone?
Each of us is genuinely unique; so much so, the ways we learn and are motivated often stand in conflict with the ways throughout our life we are given “advice” we may not be ready to receive, or unwilling to hear. Over time, we needed to learn for ourselves; sometimes those lessons were painful. If we are willing to pay attention, we can gain from that past pain. If not, we will be presented with the same lesson time and time again until we “get it.”
Looking back, I recall leaders who never would admit their mistakes; instead, they would scream and belittle to beat their way into our heads. I have yet to see either method be very effective. Have you?
How different would things have been if those same leaders had led with compassion and understanding, allowing us to make our choices but always near to assist us should things start looking a little dicey? How different would things have been if those same leaders were guiding, listening, and sharing to help us realize we have more within ourselves than we realize? How different would things have been if those same leaders actually cared, instead of berating and beating everything out of us as though they know everything and we are something less than what we know ourselves to be?
Glinda, the Good Witch of the North in the Wizard of OZ, represents the compassionate leadership we seek. As you may recall, she patiently waits ‘behind the scenes’ as Dorothy follows the Yellow Brick Road, persistently looking out for Dorothy’s welfare while allowing her to learn her own lessons. When necessary, she quietly and subtly steps in to help — awakening her, for example, from the poppy field sleep to continue the journey.
Mistakes and misfortunes visit all of us; those we serve have their own. As leaders, we must always remember everyone has a deep desire to matter, to be needed, loved, and heard. Sharing our experiences in a way that respects them can do wonders in building them into all they are to become. When possible, there is nothing like personal experience to drive home a lesson that allows them to learn on their own.
Along the way, we do what we can to minimize the harm done to them, or the product, mindful, of course, many people learn best when they fail. I recall a story of a project manager whose mistakes led to more than $1 million in losses to the company. To the project manager’s amazement, he was not fired; instead, he was reassured the company had just invested $1 million in his education.
So often we make mistakes and are thrown away — by companies, in our relationships, or by family. It seems the times we are most in need of love are viewed as those times we deserve it the least. In the example above, the boss demonstrates his compassion and we sense he somehow knows — even, expects — the company will more than recoup their investment in this project manager.
How is it in your world, your company, or your family?
Are you leading as you have been led, or are you leading the way you want to be led?
Gandhi tells us “to become the leader you would follow.” Far too often our experiences touch us deeply as we go about learning things we would never want to go through the same process to learn again. It turns out, learning what not to do invokes our own passions of what we truly want to do and become.
It is my hope the thought of people being disposable ends soon; after all, we will never think or learn alike, and each of us has personal issues that tend to blur our visions. It’s been my experience many times those who do not comply with guidelines are disregarded, perhaps blurring their visions even further. We can change this pattern through compassionate leadership.
The definition of compassion is “to suffer with” or “have sympathy.” For us, perhaps it means to discern how others feel by remembering how we may have felt under the same circumstance. Essentially, all of us are walking wounded — just keeping that in mind will provide an incredible shift for all those you serve. We would do well to also remember problems can never fully be left at home, at the office, or swept under the rug. Putting the needs of others first and investing time and energy in those we serve will come back to us more than ten-fold. Such is the servant leader. For me, that leader was Rima. Rima helped run a small marketing company. She was incredible. Why? I believe it’s because she took notice of her employees’ gifts and talents, and she fed their need to share them. Over the years, I saw her turn many lives around — including my own — by listening, nurturing, guiding, allowing us to learn from our own mistakes, and validating us. Through her example, folks like me now have the great opportunity to pay it forward.
A Greater Victory (originally published with Lead Change Group)
Aug 6th
Earlier this week, Mike Henry graciously published this post on the Lead Change Group blog. Comments to date have been fabulous! You can find it, and the wonderful comments, here.
For the benefit of those unable to visit the Lead Change Group, “a peer-based open-source leadership community dedicated to applying character-based leadership around the globe to make a positive difference,” I take this opportunity to republish the post in its entirety.
~Pam Knox, Head Coach, Western Oregon
We all know leadership when we see it. The problem for most of us is this: we expect leadership greatness to look something like a CEO, the Chairman of the Board, or the President. We have somehow come to a place where leadership is commensurate with graybeards waxing long on the wisdom of the ages.
You are invited to view a clip that’s proof positive leadership is anything but old people (mostly men) telling everyone else what to do. You see, leadership never was about power, position, perks, prestige, or privilege. Instead, it’s always been about people, and it has always manifested itself as someone of character. Anne Frank said, “Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness.”
Mallory Holtman, the conference home run king, embodies this goodness. Her Central Washington softball team is behind in the second game of a double-header in a quest for the conference championship. As you may guess, there’s a lot at stake. Every decision matters, especially with their opponent at bat. On the second pitch in the top of the second inning of the second game with two runners on, Western Oregon senior Sara Tucholsky hits her first career home run. But there’s a problem. Only a true leader will do what Mallory does next.
Mallory and her Central Washington team went on to lose the game that day. But what they found will carry them — and all of the graybeards who realize just how much they have to learn from young & emerging leaders like Mallory — through a lifetime: leadership is love.
The next time we go looking for leadership, let us remember leadership without love is no leadership at all.
Frictional Coefficients
Aug 5th
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 Mike Henry. Mike is passionate about helping leaders grow leaders. So much so, he is the founder and president of Lead Change Group, “a peer-based open-source leadership community dedicated to applying character-based leadership around the globe to make a positive difference.” Mike is also a positive force on Twitter. I find his influence to be both encouraging and inspirational. Did I tell you Mike likes golf!?
Frictional Coefficients
by Mike Henry (Owasso, Oklahoma)
Have you ever been misdiagnosed by someone when they thought you weren’t trustworthy? They doubted you or your motives or something you did or said. I’m not talking about people who don’t trust you for valid reasons, but something you don’t understand. You mean them no harm, but it seems that they are afraid you are a threat.
We all have radar built into us for our own protection. We notice body language and voice tone. We compare words to actions. If we decide someone is using us to get what they want, we tend to resist. We doubt their motives and we process everything they do, every request they make, and every action they take through our mental filter. We begin filtering for more actions to justify our impression of them. After a very short while, if we’re not careful, we only look for evidence that will convict them of being out for themselves. And the more evidence we find the more we filter. Eventually it is extremely difficult for that person to change our perception of them.
When your team, organization or business thinks you’re looking out for number one, they withhold energy and commitment from the effort. They believe they must look out for themselves. They don’t think you will look out for them. The loss of trust creates an immense obstacle or a heavy weight for your group’s performance. That lack of trust creates friction. And that friction opposes the creation of a healthy, vibrant, successful team. It creates heat any time you try to get something done. Left alone long enough and your team will become more and more dysfunctional, eventually locking up from the heat, wear, and tear.
Trust lubricates relationships. Service creates trust. Leaders who serve their team find their service lubricates the relationships and frees everyone up to do their best. When your people feel ‘looked out for,’ they are free to give everything their best effort. Like a golfer with a grip that’s just too tight, tension reduces freedom of movement and hampers performance. Service creates room for coworkers to relax and do their best. All of the moving parts remain cool. Service reduces fear and friction and enables relationships to grow. Many people who feel cared for also feel free to care for others. Now you’re multiplying the lubrication.
Sensing friction in your relationships? Serve your people and oil the gears of the team. You’ll see tremendous benefit from small things. Fill in for them on a painful task or sacrifice something for them and you will break the tension. Serving others gives them the assurance they’re going to win. You can’t have win-win unless your stakeholders win.
The Dark Side
Jul 29th
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!
Make Gentle the Life of this World
Jul 27th
Today’s #servantheart quote is, “A servant heart makes gentle the life of this world.” As such, I wanted to share a few thots on the nature of leadership’s gentleness. What follows is the relevant text of a comment I recently left on a Servant Hearts post by Monica Diaz. She, too, spoke of Gentle Leadership. In her gracious words I found myself taken back to a time and place much in need of a strength of character capable of serving others with little or no thought of their own wants and desires, a time and place not unlike our own, a time and place much in need of the advice of the ancient Greeks.
Strength manifests itself in ways counter to our expectation. “Nothing is so strong as gentleness,” Ralph W. Sockman teaches us as he goes on to say, “nothing is so gentle as real strength.” We read of a similar sentiment in Han Suyin’s turn of phrase, “There is nothing stronger in the world than gentleness.” As we look back across time, we begin to discern, first hand, what Leo Rosten meant when he expressed, perhaps with some level of sadness, “I learned that it is the weak who are cruel, and that gentleness is to be expected only from the strong.”
It’s April 4, 1968. Senator Robert F. Kennedy had just began his campaign for the presidency a few weeks prior and was a front-running candidate of the Democratic Party. He is enroute to the Ghetto, one of the poorest areas of Indianapolis, Indiana. While on the plane, Robert received word that Dr Martin Luther King had been shot. Dr King dies before Robert Kennedy arrives in Indianapolis. Word of Dr King’s assassination had not yet been broadcast, and it fell to Robert Kennedy to inform the people of Indianapolis of this terrible news and the tragic loss to this country, indeed, to the world.
Robert Kennedy’s son, Max, who was three years old at the time of his own father’s assassination, later relates a remarkable story leading up to what has perhaps become one of the most poignant American speeches ever delivered. Driving into the Ghetto, Robert Kennedy’s police escort (and the car carrying Robert’s prepared speech) pulled away and refused to enter. Apparently, the Indianapolis chief of police warned Kennedy that the police could not provide adequate protection for the senator if the crowd were to riot, but Kennedy decided to speak to the crowd regardless. Standing on a podium mounted on flatbed truck in the midst of a very poor area of Indianapolis’ inner city, Kennedy spoke from his heart for just under five minutes.
He begins by telling them, “I have some very sad news for all of you, and, I think, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world; and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.”
Did you feel the empathy in his voice, his love for humanity? Robert’s speech continues to tug on the heart strings of all who understand a leader’s role is not to place oneself upon a pedastal but, rather, lift others within reach of dreams of their own. That night, many felt as though the dream they shared with Dr King had died too. Robert Kennedy, in the short span of five minutes, showed people not only in Indianapolis but the world over, that Dr King’s dream — our dream — remained alive and was still within reach of those who held it dear. He tells them (and us), “Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort.”
Love. Wisdom. Compassion for one another.
Near the end of his speech, Robert reminds the audience of Dr King’s efforts to “… replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.” “What we need in the United States,” he tells them regarding this injustice against all people, “is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.” Because our spirit of unity is at stake, Robert suggests we find the courage to “dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”
Robert Kennedy understood what it means to lead with the heart of a servant. He easily could have justified the cancellation of his appearance. After all, Dr King’s death was sure to instill vengeful hearts certain to rise up in unimaginable anger and riot (more than 180 riots that night across our great land), the police chief admittedly could not protect him, and his prepared speech never arrived. Instead, Robert knew what he had to offer resided in his heart, and he knew American citizens in Indianapolis and elsewhere needed a leader they could trust, a shepherd of sorts, a gentle giant of a man who would help them stand firm on moral ground and reach, once again, for the dream that was within them. History records the impact of Robert’s leadership: Indianapolis was the only major city in America that did not riot that night. Such is the influence of a servant leader.
It seems to me our world desperately needs more servant hearts with the courage to stand against the status quo, realizing a leader’s first love is serving the wants, needs, dreams, and aspirations of others.
It is certain our world could use a lot more gentleness.
