The Servant

by James C Hunter

  If I had to describe the great servant leaders I have known over the decades, I think a more accurate description of them would be pit bulls. The great ones hug hard and spank hard.

  When it’s time to appreciate, honor, and value people, they are first in line. When it’s time for their teams to perform, they demand excellence and have little tolerance for mediocrity. They have learned the secret of accomplishing tasks while building relationships for the future.

  The essence of being a servant is finding that sweet spot between the hugging and spanking. Most managers fall off the horse one way or the other.

  Everyone Agrees, So What’s the Problem?

  ANYBODY DISAGREE so far?

  I am in my fourth decade of lecturing on leadership, teaching the principles of servant leadership seventy-five to a hundred times each year to organizations around the world. In all my years of teaching these principles, I have never had a person in any part of the world raise their hand and say, “I disagree with the principles of servant leadership.”

  I mean, pray tell, Sergio, which part do you disagree with?

  In the climax of The Servant, the monk and teacher Simeon reveals to the students that leadership, character, and love are synonymous. He explains that the two-thousand-year-old definition of love read at literally millions of weddings around the world each year is a verb. He demonstrates to them that love is patience, kindness, humility, respectfulness, selflessness, forgiveness, honesty, and commitment.

  Can you imagine following a leader who is impatient, unkind, arrogant, disrespectful, selfish, unforgiving, dishonest, and uncommitted? Is that a person who would inspire and influence you to action? Someone you would sign up to follow?

  Again, the principles of servant leadership are self-evident.

  In the early years after The Servant was published, I began to receive correspondence from executives and supervisors containing a similar concern. They would say things like, “Mr. Hunter, thanks for the great book and the wonderful principles—I mean, who can disagree with this stuff? It’s Mom, apple pie, and the flag. But here’s the problem. I have ten crazy, command-and-control, Gestapo-like supervisors in my building, so I told them to read your book. They liked your book. They agreed with your book. But they are still crazy! How do you get them to change?”

  If everyone agrees, why isn’t every leader behaving in the way they know they should behave?

  Where are all the servant leaders?

  Therein likes the crux of the problem.

  Leadership Is a Skill

  YEARS OF teaching experience has clearly demonstrated to me that getting people to agree with the principles of servant leadership is an easy task. Getting people to change and get the principles into their game is another matter altogether. The greater challenge is how to move the principles from their head to their heart, and from their heart into making it their habit.

  It can be a long journey from head to habit.

  The part most fail to grasp is that leadership is a skill, a learned or acquired ability. It is not something you are born with. Indeed, I have never met a two-year-old who displayed the qualities of a servant leader. Have you ever met a two-year-old full of gratitude, appreciation, a willingness to be second in line, who insists upon others getting their needs met before their own? Ever met a two-year-old who marches around the house demanding, “How can I help here? Who can I serve?”

  Every year in America, organizations spend billions of dollars on leadership training and development, and most of it is a waste of time and money. Admittedly, I am a complicit and guilty party in this because I used to teach a lot of leadership courses wrongly believing people would change after going to a seminar, watching a PowerPoint deck, or reading a book.

  Becoming an effective leader is precisely analogous to becoming an accomplished musician or athlete. Has anyone ever learned to swim reading a book? Has anyone ever become an accomplished pianist studying piano history? Has anyone ever become a great golfer watching Tiger Woods DVDs? Like any skill, leadership has to be practiced regularly in order to develop the skills and facilitate true change.

  I have met many people over the years who know all about leadership but don’t know leadership. It’s like the armchair quarterback on Sunday who watches football all day while yelling and criticizing the players and coaches. They think they know all about football, but probably have never set foot on a football field. The truth is, they know about football but they don’t know football.

  Only a very small percentage of people actually make sustainable changes after attending leadership seminars or reading books. There is a world of difference between knowing about something and knowing it. You can learn about leadership reading books and attending seminars, but you will never know leadership doing those things.

  Think of the qualities of a great leader: humility, respect, self-control, honesty, commitment, determination, gratitude, communication skills. Does anybody really believe you develop those qualities of character by reading books, going to seminars, or watching DVDs?

  Leadership Development and Character Development Are One

  LEADERSHIP IS not about style or personality.

  If you doubt this, just check out the great leaders in history who had very different styles: John Wooden and Bobby Knight; General Patton and General Eisenhower, Martin Luther King Jr. and Billy Graham; Jack Welch and Mary Kay; Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan—completely different styles, but nevertheless all were effective leaders.

  My wife (the psychologist) tells me that our personality is pretty well fixed by age six and can be easily labeled in less than an hour by means of a Myers-Briggs or DiSC profile. Your IQ is established by age fifteen. But not your character, hence the term maturity.

  Leadership has little to do with your style (personality) and everything to do with your substance (character).

  General Norman Schwarzkopf (pretty much a legend in the U.S. Army) flatly asserts, “Ninety-nine percent of leadership failures are failures of character.” Warren Bennis of USC, one of America’s leadership gurus for decades, declares, “Leadership is character in action.”

  It took me many years to understand that leadership and character are one.

  What is character? That person you are in the dark when nobody is looking. Character is doing the right thing, winning those battles in your heart and mind between what you want to do and what you should do.

  Character is having the moral maturity to do the right thing even if it costs you something—especially if it costs you something, because I’m not sure it can be an act of character unless it costs you something.

  And isn’t leadership simply doing the right thing for the people entrusted to your care? It’s the right thing to have self-control, to be kind, to be humble, to give appreciation, to listen, to be respectful, to meet needs (to be selfless), to be forgiving, to be honest, to be committed. Character is doing the right thing. Leadership is doing the right thing. Leadership is simply character in action.

  If you want to improve your leadership skills, you must improve your character skills. And that’s the rub. Developing new character habits and breaking the old habits takes time and a great deal of effort. It means we have to behave in new ways. It means we have to change.

  There are no short cuts.

  Developing Character

  I OFTEN ASK AUDIENCES, “How many of you believe in continuous improvement?” Predictably, virtually all hands will rise. Then I ask, “Can you improve if you don’t change?” Heads will shake as I quote a common definition of insanity, “continuing to do what you’ve always done and hoping for different results.”

  “So,” I continue, “what you are telling me today is that you are ready and willing to grow and change, is that correct?” Most will enthusiastically “lie” while nodding their heads.

  Changing is the hard part: other than wet babies, who really likes change? It is not easy to change, but it can be done and is being done by many great serva
nt leaders I know.

  I spend roughly two thirds of my time these days doing what I call “Preaching the Sermon,” that is, unpacking the principles of servant leadership for my audiences. I spend the remaining one third of my time working with organizations and individuals assisting them in getting these principles into their game. The key is to get people practicing the new behaviors even if they have to fake it to make it.

  All habits (good and bad) move predictably through four stages, and developing character/leadership skills is no exception.

  1. Unconscious/unskilled: The person is unaware and therefore unskilled in the habit.

  2. Conscious/unskilled: The person is aware but not good at it. This is the “awkward” stage that must be pushed through.

  3. Conscious/skilled: The person is aware and starting to become skilled.

  4. Unconscious/skilled: It’s now drilled into your game. You don’t have to try to be a good leader, you are a good leader.

  Again, the key to all of this is action and getting people to practice new behaviors and moving them through the four stages of habit development.

  Three Steps to Developing Character/Leadership Skills—the Three Fs

  SO WHAT are the steps to becoming a servant leader?

  When working with individuals or organizations and assisting them in implementing the skills of servant leadership, I take them through a three-step process that I refer to as the Three Fs: Foundation, Feedback, and Friction.

  Foundation

  “Set the standard” of what great leadership looks like. What is it you wish to change and become? What are the principles you are committed to? What is it that you truly believe?

  Toward that end, training in the principles of servant leadership is essential and can be readily accomplished in four hours or less and can also be accomplished through studying books, CDs, DVDs, and the like.

  Keep in mind, however, that this is the easy part (agreeing with the principles). The training (reminding) is only the first step.

  Feedback

  “Identify the gaps” between where you are now and where you need to be as an effective leader. There are several ways to get clarity on your gaps (opportunity areas). The most obvious is to ask the people who are subjected to your leadership. There are some great 360-degree feedback tools available to help you clearly discover your gaps. (In the appendix of my second book, The World’s Most Powerful Leadership Principle, I include an effective-leadership-skills inventory tool for self-assessment as well as for feedback from peers, subordinates, superiors, and other key people in your life.)

  Please do not just assume you have a clear understanding of your gaps. My experience is that about one-third of folks have a good handle on their gaps, another third have some ideas but a few blind spots, and the remaining third are clueless about their gaps. (It does not mean you are a bad person if you’re unsure about your gaps—remember, your behavior patterns have been habits for many decades.)

  The key is getting good data so you are not changing things that don’t need changing. You need to be sure you are scratching the right itches.

  Friction

  “Eliminate the gaps” between where you are now and where you need to be. Once the gaps have been identified, we ask participants to write out in details a minimum of two specific and measurable goals around the gap.

  Then comes the radical part. We ask the team to share their results with one another (we call this the “open the kimono” session). Creating this friction is essential to getting people serious about change and raising their games.

  Using 360-degree feedback is not new, and roughly two-thirds of corporate America utilizes some form of this tool. The problem is that very few organizations create the necessary friction (or “healthy tension,” if you prefer), required to get people focused and disciplined about behaving in new ways and making sustainable changes. It is also a great way to build community with the team because when people share on this level with one another, they go much deeper together.

  Vince Lombardi, the late, great Green Bay Packers football coach, used to tell his teams, “Gentlemen, we are going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because nothing is perfect. But we are going to relentlessly chase it, because in the process we will catch excellence.”

  We will never arrive as the perfect servant leader. (If you think you have arrived, you now have some humility issues you need to look at!) The goal of any aspiring leader (whether manager, parent, spouse, coach, or teacher) should not be perfection, rather continuous improvement—being able to say every few months, “I’m not where I want to be, but I am better than I used to be.”

  Keep moving the ball up the field with continuous change and progress. Over time, you will end up in a completely different place.

  IN SUMMARY, I am convinced that the success of The Servant is simply a result of a deep hunger (need) being experienced by millions in the world today. And that human need is not only a desire for better leaders to lead them, but a desire to becoming better leaders themselves in their roles at home and at work.

  The good news is that servant leadership, though centuries old, is an idea whose time has come. The good news is that the principles are universally accepted and agreed to (at least intellectually) and are, in fact, self-evident. The good news is that we have the technology of how to help people change and incorporate these principles into their lives.

  The bad news is that being an effective leader is a skill that requires commitment, discipline, and the willingness to change. There is no magic dust.

  But people can and do change. In fact, I believe one of the truly magnificent things about human beings is that they can make different choices and truly change.

  Dramatically change.

  Over the past twenty years, I have personally worked with better than 2,200 individuals in developing servant leadership skills and have known a great many who were able to make significant and sustainable changes in their lives.

  I can tell you, watching people change is a beautiful and inspiring thing.

  Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you I have made significant personal changes in my life and continue to make changes. After all these years teaching and writing about servant leadership, I can assure you that I am not yet where I need to be as a servant leader. (My wife, who I have known since the first grade, would agree with that statement!)

  I am not where I need to be, but I’m better than I used to be. (I’m pretty sure my wife would also agree with that statement!)

  So my prayer for you is that the information contained in this book might inspire and influence you to action. Make the choice to keep moving and growing. As the farmers are fond of saying, “You are either green and growing or you are ripe and rotting.” Pick one, because nothing living stays the same. Even if you think you are the same as you were last year, the world is moving by at such a high rate of speed that by definition you are going backwards!

  As Gandhi put it, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

  Best wishes on your journey toward servant leadership.

  Jim Hunter

  May 1, 2012

  The Prologue

  The ideas I stand for are not my own. I borrowed them from Socrates, I swiped them from Chesterfield, I stole them from Jesus. And if you don’t like their ideas, whose ideas would you rather use?

  —DALE CARNEGIE

  I MADE THE CHOICE TO GO. There was no one else to blame.

  As I look back at it now, I find it nearly impossible to believe that I—a busy general manager of a large manufacturing facility—left the plant to look after itself while I spent a week in a monastery in northern Michigan. Yes, that’s right. A monastery. Complete with monks, five chapel services a day, chanting, liturgies, communion, shared living quarters, the whole nine yards.

  Please understand, I fought it kicking and screaming.

  But in the end, I made the choice to go.

&nbs
p; “SIMEON” WAS A NAME that had haunted me from my birth.

  As an infant, I was baptized at the local Lutheran church. The baptismal record showed that the Bible verse selected for the ceremony was from the second chapter of Luke about some guy named Simeon. According to Luke, Simeon was a “very righteous and devout man, full of the Holy Spirit.” Apparently he had an inspiration about the coming Messiah, mumbo jumbo I never really understood. That was to be my first—but certainly not my last—encounter with Simeon.

  I was confirmed in the Lutheran church at the end of the eighth grade. The pastor selected a Bible verse for each confirmation candidate, and when he came to me during the ceremony he read out loud the same section in Luke about this Simeon character. “Pretty bizarre coincidence,” I remember thinking at the time.

  Soon after that—and for the next twenty-five years—I had a recurring dream that I came to dread. In the dream, it is late at night and I am completely lost and running for my life through a cemetery. Although I cannot see what is chasing me, I know it to be evil, something wishing to do me great harm. Suddenly, a man wearing a black hooded robe steps out directly in front of me from behind a large concrete crucifix. As I crash into him, the very old man grabs me by the shoulders, looks intently into my eyes and shouts, “Find Simeon—find Simeon and listen to him!” I would always wake up at this point in a cold sweat.

  To top it all off, on my wedding day the pastor referred to this biblical character Simeon during his brief homily. It stunned me to the point that I messed up reciting my vows, which was rather embarrassing.