The Servant

by James C Hunter

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction to the 2012 Edition

  The Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Definitions

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Old Paradigm

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Model

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Verb

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Environment

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Choice

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Payoff

  The Epilogue

  About the Author

  More Praise for The Servant

  Copyright

  To the Glory of God

  Acknowledgments

  Of course, this work would not have been possible without the help of a number of people. My heartfelt thanks go out…

  • To my first business mentor, Phil Hoffman, who taught me that being the boss and being a gentleman are not mutually exclusive roles.

  • To my business associates and clients who have taught me valuable lessons over the years, especially Kevin Alder, Ed Danner, Russ Ebeid, Greg Goodman, Mike Hipsher, Mike Panther, and George Treglown.

  • To authors Tony Campolo and M. Scott Peck for their skills in articulating some of the great truths of life.

  • To Debra Venzke and Steve Martin at Prima for their skills and assistance throughout the editing process, and to Paula Munier Lee for her guidance and especially for her vision in recognizing the importance of the theme contained herein.

  • To Simeon, monk and archabbey librarian, St. Meinrad Monastery, St. Meinrad, Indiana, for sharing “the ropes” of the monastic life with me.

  • To my editors and cheerleaders, including Eric Bacon, Phyllis and Jack Hunter (my parents), Karen and Mark Jolley, Pam and Mickey Krieger, Elizabeth Morin, Karen and Bill Rajki, Colleen and Craig Ramquist, John Riley, Patty and Scott Simonson, and especially Theresa and John Vella, whose ideas and encouragement were invaluable to me.

  • To my precious little girl Rachael (well into her Terrific Two’s) who has been a blessing (literally) to me beyond words.

  • And finally, to my life partner Denise, for her love and commitment (especially when I’m difficult to be around) as we journey together on our paths of spiritual growth. I love you, honey.

  Introduction to

  the 2012 Edition

  I have been both surprised and humbled by the impact of The Servant since completing the manuscript some fifteen years ago this month.

  At that time, if someone had suggested to me that this simple story would become an international bestseller with better than 3.5 million copies sold, I would have considered asking them if they were taking drugs.

  My surprise lies (in part) in the fact that the principles of servant leadership are such basic, commonsense notions, indeed self-evident. I mean, let’s be honest—these are not my ideas. These principles have been around for many centuries (everything I write and talk about I stole—I’m a thief; I admit it!). There’s nothing new under the sun.

  One of the main reasons I wrote the book was that I felt I had found a unique way to frame the material so people could easily understand these simple yet profound truths.

  The principles are so basic that I experienced a fair amount of anguish after submitting the manuscript to various publishers for consideration, fearing they might react with, “Really? How about telling us something we don’t already know.”

  There have been more surprises.

  Prior to writing The Servant, I was a self-employed labor relations consultant working primarily in the secular business world in southeast Michigan, the home of the American labor movement and arguably one of the toughest and most mature labor arenas in the world.

  Working and living in that world caused me to debate the inherent hazards of including in a business book themes some would consider “namby-pamby” and others controversial. These days it can be risky talking about politically incorrect topics like faith, the monastic life, selflessness, humility, meeting the needs of others (even before your own needs), Jesus, and, yes, even love.

  I feared if I addressed business audiences and started talking about love, Human Resources people might go into spontaneous human combustion with cries of “Mr. Hunter, we’re trying to get sexual harassment out of the building! What are you talking about love for?” I could practically hear them lamenting (along with Tina Turner), “What’s love got to do with it?”

  I mean, let’s face it—if you write business books or conduct business seminars talking about love and sprinkle a little Jesus in there, it will probably cost you some readers and clients, probably lots of them. I nearly lost my courage and spent weeks debating just keeping things superficial and “vanilla” so as not to upset or offend (and also to protect my business!).

  In the end I made the choice to include those risky themes for one very basic reason. I simply could not be intellectually honest about servant leadership while leaving out concepts like love, humility, and selflessness.

  Why? Because the great servant leaders in history talked about those very things. Jesus, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr. Even sports coaching legends like Vince Lombardi and John Wooden and business icons as diverse as Jack Welch and Max De Pree have spoken often of love. Herb Kelleher, who founded Southwest Airlines on the basic principles of servant leadership, utilized the advertising slogan “The airline that love built” for many years. Still today, this highly successful airline’s New York Stock Exchange ticket symbol is LUV.

  So I plowed ahead and wrote this simple story about the true essence of leadership incorporating those very themes. The book just poured out of me and was completed in about six weeks. (For perspective, my second book took me six years to complete—book number three is eight years and counting!)

  Upon publication in 1998, I was pretty sure that if The Servant was to have any success at all, the primary audience would be faith-based organizations. And if any lecturing and consulting came as a result of the book, I resigned myself to the fact that I would be spending my time in the faith-based world.

  Wrong.

  One of the great ironies of my life is that I spend 98 percent of my time lecturing and consulting to secular groups including business, military, health-care, educational, and many other profit and nonprofit organizations. Only on rare occasions do I address faith-based groups.

  At first I was shocked by this.

  I think I now understand it.

  The World Is Changing—Fast

  VICTOR HUGO famously remarked, “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”

  The concepts of servant leadership had been around for a few thousand years prior to gaining some acceptance in American business circles beginning in the early 1970s. The initial twenty-five years was a period of limited growth in the servant leadership movement, but over the past fifteen years, we have witnessed a major shift in leadership thinking and an explosion in interest in servant leadership. As an example, when I did an Amazon.com search for “servant leadership” in 1998, there were eight titles listed, the majority of those out of print. That number is now 4,600 and rising quickly.

  Another example of this shift is in the attitudes of young people today toward those in leadership positions. Young people do not respond well to the old-fashioned command-and-control style of leadership, evidenced by polls showing nearly 70 percent of the “millennial” generation (those born after 1980) who voluntarily terminate their employment do not quit their organization—they quit their boss.

  Organizations are learning quickly (many the hard way) that the management styles of the past simply do no
t inspire and influence to action the new generation of workers. Organizations are learning that developing good managers is no longer good enough and that they have to change their focus and work on developing great leaders (more about the difference shortly).

  This phenomenon of change and rebellion against bad leadership is happening not only in the United States. In many other parts of the world, there are huge, unprecedented changes occurring as people are rising up against dictatorial and corrupt leadership, evidenced by uprisings in Russia and Africa and by the “Arab Spring” phenomenon in the Middle East.

  A great example of the servant leadership movement occurring internationally is in the country of Brazil, which is emerging as one of the largest and fastest-growing economies in the world. Brazil is the fifth largest country on earth both in population (193 million) and land size (roughly the size of the continental United States), and ranks sixth in GDP. Brazil possesses tremendous untapped internal natural resources and yet remains a comparatively poor country (financially), being hampered by corrupt leadership for centuries. Only relatively recently (1985) has it come out from under military dictatorship.

  In 2005, The Servant—renamed O Monge E O Executive (Portuguese for The Monk and the Executive)—was released in Brazil and has been on the top ten bestseller list to this day. When I first visited Brazil in 2005 (I have now returned more than twenty times to speak on servant leadership), The Servant was selling 60,000 copies per month. (For perspective, the number two book in Brazil at that time, The Da Vinci Code, was selling fewer than half that number.) To date in Brazil, The Servant has sold roughly 3 million copies, and my second book (on implementing servant leadership) has sold 500,000 copies.

  These sales numbers in America would put The Servant as one of the top selling business books ever, and yet these numbers are from Brazil, a relatively poor country, ranking 76 in the world in per capita income and certainly not a country known for buying books.

  I am not sharing these numbers to boast but to give evidence of the dramatic change occurring in the world. (Believe me, no one has been more surprised than I by its success—I mean really, Brazil?)

  So what is the draw?

  Servant Leadership Is Simple

  WHEN LECTURING, I often tell my audiences, “You are not going to learn anything new from me today! Everything you need to know about leadership you already know. It all boils down to one simple little rule you learned a long time ago. And that simple rule is to treat people the way you would want to be treated. The Golden Rule. You know, be the boss you wish your boss would be, the parent you wish your parent had been more fully for you, the neighbor you wish your neighbor would be. Today, I am not here to instruct you. Today, I am here to remind you.”

  One would think leadership is a complicated subject with all the interminable books and seminars. Not true. I routinely teach leadership to Boy and Girl Scouts, teenagers, and Sunday school kids, and they easily grasp the principles. In fact, they are typically amused at how simple leadership really is.

  Simple but by no means simplistic.

  Leadership Is Influence

  MY THIRTY-THREE YEARS of experience working with literally hundreds of organizations and thousands of managers, supervisors, and executives have convinced me that leadership is a very misunderstood word. And servant leadership even more so.

  I should begin by defining my terms—first leadership, then servant.

  Let me start by stressing the point that leadership is not synonymous with management. Management consists of the things you do like planning, budgeting, organizing, being tactical or strategic. You can be a great manager and an awful leader. Indeed, I have met many skilled managers who were dreadful leaders and I’ve known some great leaders who were awful managers. I have met many managers who were skilled at problem-solving or whizzes around balance sheets yet couldn’t successfully lead two people to the drinking fountain if their lives depended upon it. And let me be empirically clear: if there is nobody following, you are definitely not leading.

  Nobody ever accused Winston Churchill or Ronald Reagan of being a good manager. But they knew how to inspire and influence people to action, evidenced by Churchill’s leadership during the dark years of World War II or Reagan’s leadership following the “malaise” of the 1970s. Neither of these two men were particularly good managers, but they knew how to inspire and influence people. This is the essence of leadership.

  Management is what you do; leadership is the person you are and the influence and impact you have upon the people you come into contact with. Management is not synonymous with leadership. Leadership is synonymous with influence.

  Ken Blanchard, author of The One Minute Manager, has been one of America’s leadership gurus the past four decades. He sums up his entire leadership experience by simply saying, “Leadership is an influence process.” John Maxwell, who has penned more than sixty leadership books, sums up his experience by saying, “Leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less.”

  Everyone is a leader because everyone influences other people every day, for good or not so good, which is why you don’t have to be the boss to be a leader. Many of the great servant leaders I have met are found nowhere near the top of their organizations. Herb Kelleher used to say his most important leaders at Southwest Airlines were his flight attendants, because they were influencing thousands of customers every day. Customers he would never come into contact with.

  Great organizations are a group of all leaders, where everyone is taking personal responsibility for the success of the team and their individual influence on the customer and one another. A group of all leaders, each with different responsibilities. A place where everyone is engaged and fully committed—not 50/50 but 100/100. (Anyone who ever said marriage was 50/50 probably wasn’t married very long.)

  In the great organizations I visit, they no longer ask, “Who’s the leader here?” That’s an ancient, twentieth-century question. The question is no longer “Are you a leader?” but rather “Are you effective?”

  Indeed, the final test of leadership is: Do you leave things better than you found them? Will your employees get promoted, have a better career, even have a better life because they spent a few seasons with you? Have they learned and grown as a result of your influence? Will your children be ready when they leave your home? Will they be effective parents, neighbors, coaches, spouses, and teachers—have you done your job, Dad? How about you, Mom?

  Leadership is influence—the mark we leave on other people and the mark we leave on the organizations we involve ourselves with.

  We all leave a mark.

  The real question is: Will people be glad you were there?

  What Is a Servant?

  BEING THE servant is simply the business of identifying and meeting the legitimate needs of the people entrusted to your care. Meeting their needs, not their wants—being their servant, not their slave. And what they need may not be what they want. What your children or employees may need will probably look a bit different from what they want.

  So, if you are in a leadership position, you need to make a list of what people need. And if you get stuck, just ask yourself a simple question. What do I need? That will get you going again. (Remember the Golden Rule?)

  What is the difference between a want and a need? A want is a wish or desire without regard to the consequences or where the choice will lead. “I want to be out until three in the morning, Dad,” or “I want to take an hour break period today, boss.”

  But the leader must always be concerned with where the behavior is leading. “I care what happens at three in the morning, son,” or “I care what the rest of the employees will think if you take an hour break.”

  So a need is a legitimate physical or psychological requirement for the well-being of an individual.

  What do people really need?

  Of course, food, water, and shelter are the basic needs, but people have higher-level needs as well. Like the need to be appreciated, respe
cted, valued, communicated with, encouraged, listened to. They also need accountability, including healthy boundaries, rules of the house, consistency, and honesty about their performance. Feedback is a huge human need.

  Servants then get about the business of identifying and meeting the legitimate needs of those entrusted to their care, and therein lies the secret of leadership.

  When you identify and meet the legitimate needs of others, you will build influence with them. It is the Law of the Harvest—you reap what you sow. When you sow service and sacrifice by identifying and meeting needs, you will reap influence.

  And influence is the essence of leadership.

  In 2001, author Jim Collins published Good to Great, one of the highest selling hardcover business books of all time. This book contains the empirical evidence for servant leadership. Mr. Collins scoured the planet for the best organizations he could find that were able to achieve excellence and make it sustainable over a long period of time. Once he found the best organizations, he studied their leaders and was shocked by what he found. His expectation was that these leaders would be larger-than-life types, charismatic, ego-driven, like General Patton or Julius Caesar. But that was not what he found. He could not deny the data.

  Collins found two qualities in all of the great leaders. First was humility, described as “other-focused” (that is, focused on their people and not on themselves). The second quality was a strong professional will to do the right thing for their people and for their organization. (We have an old-fashioned word for that: character.)

  Early in the book, Mr. Collins said his team debated calling these humble, strong-willed yet selfless leaders “servant leaders” but decided against it, fearing people would get the wrong idea if he used a term like servant. He said the team settled on the term Level 5 leader instead.

  I have found the same barrier in my travels. When you mention being a “servant,” that term can conjure up some negative images in the minds of many. (For example, “Does that mean I need to be a wimp, turn the org chart upside down, and give the asylum over to the inmates? Sounds special!”)