The basic concepts in Servant Leadership have had an enormous impact on leadership thinking and culture. Even today, the idea of servant-leadership is referenced by thought leaders and consultants like Simon Sinek. Nevertheless, the fuller implications of Greenleaf's work seem to me to be neglected. Reading the original book again, I am struck by the many ways Greenleaf extends the idea of servant-leadership beyond his introductory essay. The popular notions of servant-leadership fail to capture the expansive implications Greenleaf saw for his ideas to impact our society and institutions.

Chapters 2 and 3 shift the focus from "servant-leaders" as individuals and apply the concepts to institutions. Because servant-leaders are a different kind of leader, the institutions in which they thrive will take a different form. But the measurement of success that Greenleaf advocates is the same for institutions as for individual leaders:

Greenleaf is particularly critical of boards of trustees, both of corporations and in the non-profit sector. I have served on boards that fit his description well - boards with little energy, little passion, little engagement. I have seen boards that were simply stuck in old traditions and routines, too comfortable with business-as-usual to dare to strive for excellence. Greenleaf believes that the consequences of such indifference are dire:

Fundamentally, institutions do not receive the attention and affection they need. We often fail to afford the kind of care and concern for our institutions that they deserve, perhaps taking for granted that others will fill the gap or just succumbing to our general suspicion of and frustration with institutions. What is needed is a renewed commitment:

I do think that in the years since Greenleaf's book was released, much work has been done to address non-profit boards and to foster more engagement and accountability among board leadership. I am less familiar with work in the business world. But one particular idea from Greenleaf remains, so far as I know, wholly unaddressed. Greenleaf calls for a transformation of the role of executive director/CEO. This idea I found quite compelling, and wholly absent in my personal experience:

Instead, Greenleaf borrows an idea from ancient Rome - primus inter pares or "the first among equals." It isn't clear exactly how this would work, though Greenleaf does his best to outline the change in roles. As best as I could understand, both in the executive leadership of institutions and on their boards, a primus inter pares would serve as a key facilitator who employs the principles of servant-leadership to move their colleagues to consensus. Coercion would be lessened or eliminated from power structures and persuasion would become more important. The best ideas would, in theory, win the day and consensus would ensure institutional strength, alignment and excellence. No single person would be expected (or allowed) to direct the institution without building a consensus from a group of peers. Boards would hire leadership teams - not just the ED or CEO - and all of the team would be accountable to the board. In Greenleaf's imagination, much more would be expected of boards in terms of time and energy than they typically offer. But the work would be spread across more people who are working together to build consensus out of a passionate commitment to the institution.

I really do wonder if this was every earnestly tried. It feels to me that in the years since Greenleaf's work we have actually moved in the opposite direction, expecting more and more from our top leaders, and rewarding them with extravagant salaries and lavish praise. It is not at all evident that we have better institutions and a better society as a result. Would our institutions be more excellent, as Greenleaf understands define excellence, if they had adopted an executive structure like he suggests?

In light of our current cultural moment, Greenleaf envisioned something strikingly different.

It is not hard to imagine that our leaders are suffering from a severe lack of serenity and fulfillment.

A few additional notes:

• Looking to the next chunk of the book, I intend to skip ahead a bit and write a post on Greenleaf's thoughts about servant-leadership as they apply to the church. This is really what I am most interested in, so I look forward to completing the relevant sections and compiling my notes here.
• A recent study released by the Pew Research Center suggested that church decline in the U.S. may have stalled or plateaued. (If a trend stops at a low point, should I say "valleyed"??) This article in the New York Times offers a summary. It is not clear if this change in trends is a positive thing - for Christendom or the world.
• I have found Rev. Benjamin Cremer's substack to be helpful these days. Check it out if you need something more (or better) to read.

A quick follow up to my last post regarding the story of the Four Chaplains.

As time passed, the story of the chaplains' heroism spread, resulting in a movement to award the chaplains the Medal of Honor. However, the Medal of Honor is reserved for heroism while engaged in combat with the enemy. Consequently, it was deemed that the chaplains did not qualify.

Congress decided, in 1960, to create a special medal to honor the chaplains, specific to them and to be regarded as a rough equivalent of the Medal of Honor. The Four Chaplains' Medal was presented to descendants of the chaplains in 1961.

I think it is the rarest such honor ever given by Congress.

A little over a week ago, a group of people gathered in a small chapel in Gilman, Vermont, about twenty miles north of where I live in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The people assembled in the chapel, named the Reverend George L. Fox Memorial Chapel celebrated and remembered the chapel's namesake. Many years ago, the chapel had housed a Methodist congregation and Reverend Fox had served as its pastor.️

What had made Fox worthy of a chapel named in his honor was a decisive moment during World War II when he exemplified servant leadership. Serving as a chaplain aboard the USS Dorchester, a transport ship moving troops across the Atlantic, Fox was one of four chaplains on the boat. A German submarine managed to torpedo the Dorchester, and the ship rapidly began to sink in the icy waters. Facing death, the ship's crew began to panic.

Fox, and his three colleagues, saw this as their chance to serve. Doing what they could, they helped organize the evacuation, gave assurances to the crew to maintain calm, and handed out life jackets to save lives. Having saved as many as they could, the chaplains - from different denominations, faiths and backgrounds - joined hands, sang hymns and prayed as they went down with the boat.

The primary feature of servant leadership is that it always puts others first and seeks ways to serve people. It is this feature that gives servant leaders their unique influence and power. People are inspired to follow leaders whom they trust will prioritize their interests. In the extreme example of Rev. Fox, it is not hard to imagine how terrified young men were able to find their way to safety because of Rev. Fox's sacrificial commitment to lead them out of danger. When people believe their leaders will offer their very lives in service to them, they in turn become servant leaders to others in response. Just knowing that Rev. Fox served a congregation so geographically close to me is inspiration in it's own right!

Reading Greenleaf's Servant Leadership today creates a sense of temporal distortion. The writing style and examples that Greenleaf employs often feel dated or even obsolete. That makes the reader wonder if the book might be irrelevant today. The approach Greenleaf takes, which is admittedly non-scientific and based on his own hunches, seems particularly out of place in our data-driven, evidence-demanding world. And yet, Greenleaf's insights are often quite interesting and profound. He is clearly making his suggestions and observations based on a wealth of experience and good sense. It is a worthy read.

There is an excellent preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition I own, written by Stephen R. Covey (remember that guy!). I would suggest that the preface is probably a better introduction to "servant leadership" as an idea for contemporary readers than the first chapter of the book itself. Nevertheless, once Greenleaf starts hitting his stride (or I just became more accustomed to his writing style) the first chapter offered much upon which to reflect.

Greenleaf was writing in the late 60's and early 70's - a period of time when our country was facing significant social transformation and turmoil. While the dynamics were different than our current conditions, remarkable similarities can be found. A few of note:

• a deep loss of trust in institutions
• generational shifts
• social upheavals along racial/gender lines

Greenleaf speaks powerfully and directly to all of these issues. His answer is the development of servant-leaders to lead the transformation of essentially all social institutions. The servant-leader is defined as servant first. That is the critical distinction. Greenleaf is really more interested in results, and the test of the successful leader ( servant or otherwise) is expressed clearly:

That series of questions merits our consideration in light of our current crop of national leaders. Are they asking these questions of themselves? Are we measuring their success on those terms?

Greenleaf goes on to describe the basic character of a servant-leader. A few key quotes:

I picked these quotes in part because of how strongly they contrast with our current cultural moment. Our leaders do not listen, but demand to be listened to. Exposure of any kind, positive or negative, is considered a win, while any kind of withdrawal is a sign of weakness. Followers aren't so much cared for as manipulated and coerced.

These are the fundamental observations that have led me to think that "servant leadership" is due for a revival in our institutions. Greenleaf found hope in his troubled times, though he cautioned:

I fear he was right here. We have progressed in some areas, regressed in others, but we find ourselves again divided over cultural issues that have allowed authoritarian-minded leaders to wedge their way to the highest offices of our nation. Is there any other way forward besides servant leadership?

A few additional notes:

• I initially thought I would be able to read and write a lot over the last few days, but I have been much slower than I expected. Some personal matters have taken my time, and they will not be resolved for a few more weeks, so I expect my pace to be slow.
• I have mixed feelings about Substack. I like the social integration features, but I hate the iOS app, which doesn't have the kind of granular control over notifications I wanted. So I silenced them all. Also, I always worry about how long services like Substack will last, as many similar services have come and gone. So I will be cross-posting my content on my personal blog, Overstatement where I have more control.
• No one reads this stuff anyway. I just do it for myself.
• Finally, a statement from Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America responding to accusations of mismanagement and fraud at the ELCA aid organizations. The statement is a powerful contemporary example of what servant-leadership looks like.

Note: I originally posted this on Substack, but have decided to cross-post my content here on Overstatement.

Watching the current administration take the reigns of the most powerful institutions in the world has caused me to wonder where exactly we slipped off the rails. Social media, renewed culture wars, economic woes all have played a part in destabilizing our society and creating openings for extremism of one kind or another. But I also think that leadership as a concept has been lost along the way. It seems that those who assume positions of power are not able exhibit the kind of leadership we need. Our leaders are hollow representatives of our worst inclinations and lowest ambitions. While I am concerned about the broader political agendas of the current administration, regardless of your political orientation effective leaders provide immense value in generating desirable outcomes.

Leadership is fundamentally broken today.

In 1968, Robert Greenleaf wrote his essay “The Leader as Servant.” A few years letter, this essay along with a number of related essays was published in book form as Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness. The book became enormously influential in the years that followed, shaping ideas on leadership in government, business, nonprofit and religious organizations. Yet reading it today, much seems to have been forgotten. I recalled “servant leadership” as an idea as I watched the campaigns and elections last year, precisely because the concept seemed so absent in and alien to our politics.

For this substack, I am going to read through the chapters of Servant Leadership and offer some thoughts and reflections. I suspect the book will seem a little quaint; a remnant from a past that wasn’t really all that long ago, but that has been buried by some very strange and curious turns of history. I am hopeful that some of its observations and lessons will seem viscerally relevant to our moment. Even more than that, I hope we can reflect on our collective resources and find within them a renewed leadership that can address the crisis of our times.

I look forward to reading.

By the way, it is worth noting that Greenleaf didn’t come up with his ideas in a vacuum. Others were also thinking along the same line. Because of this, I intend to read another book after this. Martin Luther King’s 1967’s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community is a powerful reflection on the struggles of King’s time. No doubt some of this words will resonate well with our struggles too. And no one in the last 100 years embodied “servant leadership” as well as Dr. King.

Recently, I decided to move this blog, which is a very poorly maintained blog, I admit, to AWS. I wanted to do this more or less as a learning excersize and also because I figured AWS would be an inexpensive option.

I have been a happy customer of serices like Linode, Heroku and Digital Ocean for years. These companies provide a great solutino for web apps and web sites, and they have been improving and expanding their offerings lately. Generally speaking you can reserve a virtual instance with your flavor of linux and attach some storage and a database and get a basic project up and running. For projects like that - with a modern, but basic stack - these tools are perfect. I love how easy it is to fire up a Linode node and get to work.

But, for a simple static site, they seem like a bit of overkill. If you are just serving HTML, CSS and JS, Amazon Web Services seems like a better option. AWS has tons of different services, so if your project expands to include more needs, AWS allows you to take advantage of the vast resources AWS has to offer. Decide later you want to add DB functionality? What to add some basic API endpoints? What to run some maintenence workers? AWS has you covered. If you are sure you only want a static site, perhaps GitHub Pages is a better option since it is totally free. But AWS also allows you to integrate with your GitHub repo and update your static site with a simple push command.

But...and this is a big but...AWS doens't go out of it's way to make life easy. If anything, AWS is overwhelming with options. For any given problem there are multiple different paths to a solution. And AWS can be confusing becuase of it's sheer scale. There are loads of tutorials out there on setting up a static stie on AWS. And yet, AWS can still mess with your head.

Is it worth it?

I think so. I reduced my hosting costs from around $10/month to less than $1/month. The initial configuration and set up was a bit of work, but once things were all wired up, I could push up to my GitHub repo and AWS does the rest. It works. And it saves me a lot of money.

DHH and the 37 Signals team have been moving away from AWS, and DHH has recently talked about the reasons why. I think he makes some good points, and organizations in similar situations would do well to ponder the lessons they've learned. At the same time, no one should shy away from AWS. It remains an amazing service with a low cost to entry. The biggest barrier to AWS is the learning curve.