Preface

One day in 1986 a manila envelope postmarked Dallas, TX arrived in the mail. I opened it eagerly because it was sent by the author Ann McGeeCooper, my friend and long-time mentor. Inside was a thirty-seven page essay bound in a plain orange cover with the title The Servant as Leader. The first paragraph hooked me: “Servant and leader. Can these two roles be fused in one real person, in all levels of status or calling? If so, can that person live and be productive in the real world of the present? My sense of the present leads me to say yes to both questions. This paper is an attempt to explain why and to suggest how.”

I spent the rest of the day reading and re-reading this piece by Robert K. Greenleaf, a man whom I had only heard about through Ann, and experienced a shock of recognition: “Yes. I’ve always believed that,” I said to myself, “but could never put it into words.” There was something about the way the essay was written that stopped my world. Its unusual organization and Emerson-like epigrams, its fusion of hopefulness, clear-eyed pragmatism, wisdom, and transcendence—all of this stunned me. At the end of the day I called a friend and said, “I want to work with these ideas for the rest of my life.”

In many ways I was not a good candidate to be captured by the writings of a man from my grandfather’s generation who had spent his life studying organizations and thinking about leadership. Seven years earlier I had fled organizations and gone into business for myself, frustrated by the injustices and spirit-draining events we all experience in the workplace. Perhaps the move was inevitable. I had grown up in a parsonage and experienced first-hand the effects of my denomination’s exercise of a tight pyramidal power structure, at least as it was practiced during my childhood. I spent four years in seminary to think through my own theology and considered ordination, but I never once heard a discussion about how soaring theological ideas would apply to the way a minister treated employees in the church office. In my work at broadcast television and radio stations, a museum of art, and a university, I met some wonderful people and learned a great deal, but I was unable to experience the sense of meaning and community I yearned for at work. So I made up my own job.

My new role as a free-lance consultant and producer of communications projects gradually gave me entry to a few spirit-sustaining organizations nurtured by authentic servants, and I developed a perspective I never had as a captive employee: Maybe the workplace could be a forum for personal evolution and meaningful contributions. Perhaps my problem with organizations was also a problem with me. Was it possible that my eagerness to do a good job, fit in, and please the bosses had caused me to give up my essential self, thereby robbing the organization as well as frustrating me?

Then I read The Servant as Leader and ran across lines like this: “Evil, stupidity, apathy, the ‘system’ are not the enemy. . . The enemy is strong natural servants who have the potential to lead but do not lead, or who choose to follow a non-servant.” Greenleaf had found me out.

In 1988 I attended the first Symposium on Servant Leadership in Atlanta and met some brilliant people who knew and had worked with Bob Greenleaf. Greenleaf himself attended the gathering by speakerphone. Then, in 1990, the year Bob died, the Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership not only moved to Indianapolis but set up shop in an office next to one where I worked part-time. I called this event “synchronicity squared” and was certain that lightning would strike me dead if I did not get more deeply involved with servant leadership. I met the Center’s director, Larry Spears, and worked part-time with the organization for more than four years. I pored over archives and edited a book of Greenleaf’s unpublished manuscripts.

The more I read Greenleaf’s private and public writings, the more convinced I became that one could not fully appreciate the juice of servant leadership without some understanding of Greenleaf the person. In fact, he once told an interviewer, “My writings are all autobiographical.” As I met trustees of the Greenleaf Center who had known Bob and listened to their stories, I found myself drawn to this quiet eccentric. I wondered how he had lived his own life as a servant-leader, especially while working in a top job at AT＆T, one of the world’s largest bureaucracies. As powerful and positive as Greenleaf’s writings were, I also wanted a better understanding of his personal challenges. Somehow, that would make him real, a human being more interesting than the icon he was becoming, and more accessible as a role model.

The idea of a biography popped into my consciousness and would not go away. The impulse seemed to come from beyond my small self and had nothing to do with personal ego. I finally decided I had better write the book so I could get on with my own life. Now, six years later, the book is finished and I know I can never “get on” with the life I once had. I have spent too much time with Robert Greenleaf for that luxury and must now move on to a different kind of life.

We all are wounded healers, seeking to teach that which we need to learn. Perhaps one thing I needed to learn from Robert Greenleaf was that it is acceptable to live life in a slightly unconventional way, choosing to respond to one’s inherent personal genius and destiny.

Robert Greenleaf had his own strategies for living a life of achievement and excellence but claimed he never had a blueprint, and his overarching purpose was neither recognition nor wealth—which reminds me of a radio interview I did some years ago with Bruce Joel Rubin. He had written a screenplay that would later be made into the movie Brainstorm, and he would eventually write blockbuster films like Jacob’s Ladder, Ghost, Deceived, and My Life. Bruce had traveled the world seeking truth, studying various religions. When I asked what he was doing with his life, what he really wanted to accomplish, he replied, “I want to introduce progressively higher notions of being into the common consciousness.”

I believe the same could be said for Robert Greenleaf, even though he chose the print medium and his own life as the modes of communication rather than film. His “higher notion of being” included the possibilities of harnessing personal and organizational potentials for what can only be described as the expression of love. It sounds too trite to even mention, and seems nearly impossible to accomplish in many of our inhuman systems. Still, that is what a servant-leader chooses to do, using his or her flaws, shadows, inadequacies and paradoxes as key tools.

There is no master plan for living as a servant-leader, but it certainly involves learning from those who have tried valiantly to do so in their personal and organizational lives, as Robert K. Greenleaf did. If the phrase “servant-leader” strikes an odd chord of resonance with you as it still does with me, if it stops your own world for a moment, gently challenges and lures you forward, read on. The stories of Robert Greenleaf’s life may give you clues about what to do next.

Don M. Frick
November, 2003