servant leadership

Greenleaf attributed the idea of servant leadership to Herman`s Hesse`s book Journey to the East. The narrator of the story is on a journey with a band of men, looking for enlightment. Leo is the servant who does the group`s menial chores, but who also sustains them with his presence, his spirit and his song. The journey lasts for years and all goes well through all kinds of travail until Leo disappears. The group finds they cannot make it without Leo. They fall into disarray,they become lost, and the narrator almost dies. After years of wondering, the narrator finally finds Leo and is taken to the order that sponsored the journey.

There he (Greenleaf) discovers that Leo, whom he had first known as a servant, was actually the head of the order, its guiding spirit, a great and noble leader. Leo, by the quality of the inner life that was expressed by his presence, had served to lift the group up and make their journey possible.

The essence of leadership, says Greenleaf, is the desire to serve one another and to serve something beyond ourselves (Greenleaf 1977: Chapter 11).