Afterword

JAMES P. SHANNON

Students of Robert K. Greenleaf should find the publication of this select collection of essays from his most productive years both timely and useful. Timely, because the number of his followers has grown geometrically in the last two decades; and useful, because this growing company of students is currently very much in need of a single source book that brings together the best of Greenleaf’s separate essays, now available in print only in several discrete publications.

As a young man, Greenleaf was fascinated by his father’s ability to “get things done.” Greenleaf’s father was an engineer and a tinkerer in Terre Haute, Indiana. Through the rest of his life Robert would be searching for those persons who could emulate his father’s ability to actualize their own potentialities by helping other persons learn how to “get things done.”

Armed with his B.A. degree from Carleton College in 1926, and motivated by the counsel of his sociology professor, Oscar Helming, to seek employment in a company large enough to prepare its employees to become leaders in a society increasingly in need of leaders with vision, he sought and got his first job, with Ohio Bell Telephone, a subsidiary of the giant AT&T.

His first assignment at Ohio Bell was digging postholes for telephone poles. It is a tribute to his supervisors there that they soon made him a teacher to train other entry-level construction workers how to become foremen. In this role, between 1927 and 1929, he once said, he spent “the most formative years” of his life. It was here that he found his life’s work: to identify people of talent and to help them obtain the skills they need to move into leadership positions. During the next three decades, Greenleaf and AT&T prospered jointly by his remarkable success in identifying and developing generations of promising employees who would come to be known in his vocabulary as “servant-leaders.”

In essence, Greenleaf was AT&T’s in-house talent scout. The “comers” he spotted tended to be persons who were motivated primarily by a creative desire to be effective in doing whatever had to be done to make their organization work. They also tended to be persons who were generous with their time, their talent, and their training. They tended to be nonjudgmental and benevolently disposed toward their co-workers. They also tended to be good listeners who favored collegial decision making, who knew themselves well, respected themselves, and had those qualities Greenleaf considered essential: sound values, personal strength, intuition, and spirit.

Throughout his life, Greenleaf would insist that his theses on leadership were based on empirical evidence in the workplace, not on deductive corollaries from some abstruse philosophical or theological premises. Even though he would spend his life as a teacher, he continued to have an innate suspicion of “education with a capital E.” The epitaph he chose for his tombstone reflects both his modesty and his commitment to grass-roots learning. It reads, “Potentially a good plumber, ruined by a sophisticated education.”

Readers of this book should bear in mind that AT&T and Greenleaf were consciously motivated by their mutual desire to find, train, and empower young people who would be able one day to lead that enormous company to new heights of success and profitability. To achieve such results, all parties to this joint venture had to agree that wanting to become a leader and being a leader are good and wholesome, human objectives. They are not signs of hubris or self-seeking. John W. Gardner, in one of his earliest and best-known essays, warned that the egalitarian and democratic thrust of our educational system, left to itself, will inevitably inoculate our children with what he calls the “anti-leadership vaccine.” To counteract this predictable perversion of democracy, we must teach our children that it is good mental hygiene for them to want to become leaders and that our healthy society eventually depends on our continuing ability to raise up generations of visionary and energetic leaders in every sector of our national life.

An essential element in this educational process, according to Greenleaf, is our ability to teach our children that true leadership ultimately depends on the legitimacy of one’s appointment, election, or promotion to a position of authority and on one’s subsequent ability to validate or confirm this role by the quality of one’s performance, called “the authority of service.”

The authority of service is that additional level of legitimacy or validation that is earned after one is elected mayor, appointed chief of police, or elevated to the rank of bishop. These two levels of authority can exist separately; but ideally they co-exist, with each level giving added legitimacy to the other. The authority of service is that added distinction that good parents, good teachers, and good pastors enjoy by reason of their dependable performance over time, and which beginners in any career envy and covet. This kind of authority is built slowly and depends on one’s ability to do one’s homework, to treat others fairly, to meet one’s deadlines, to get the job done right, and to tell the truth habitually.

Leaders who see their strength only in their alleged “power” are understandably reluctant to share that strength. Leaders who see their strength in the quality of their performance are eager to share it, and, in so doing, to multiply it.

In Herman Hesse’s novel Journey to the East, the servant Leo is the person who has the greatest legitimacy as a leader because he has earned the authority of service by his performance. Reading this novel helped Greenleaf crystallize his own thinking that true leadership is always a result of performance. In the Greenleaf economy, power shared is power multiplied, not lessened. This kind of generous participation in the workplace turns followers into peers and peers into new leaders and builds new levels of trust among persons mutually committed to the pursuit of desirable shared objectives.

Management consultants who diagnose corporate strengths and weaknesses typically focus their studies on customers, products, or shareholders. Robert Greenleaf opted to focus his analyses on employees, the persons he considered the neglected stakeholders, the persons whose goodwill, energy, and loyalty are too often taken for granted. In his view, if employees received the care, training, and attention they deserve, shareholder and customer satisfaction would inevitably follow.

One reason that Greenleaf’s essays are in such demand today is that modern corporate restructuring has indeed tended to take the employees for granted. In Greenleaf’s value system, if the human persons who do the work of the company are neglected, shareholders and customers will suffer; and conversely, employees who are carefully selected, well trained, and appreciated will give shareholder and customer satisfaction higher priority.

Entirely apart from his appeal to business leaders today is Greenleaf’s attractiveness as an advocate of humane values across the spectrum in all human relations. To the extent that we could practice his style of servant-leadership, we would not only be better employees; we would be better parents, better spouses, better friends, better human persons. We would be more civil, more courteous, more thoughtful, more gracious, more generous. One need not be a professional anthropologist to realize that these attractive human qualities are in short supply in our frenetic society. Nor need one be a psychologist or psychiatrist to see why so many thoughtful persons see Greenleaf as a welcome voice for our time.

One of Greenleaf’s favorite aphorisms was, “Organization kills spirit.” If he were with us today, I would bet that he would be a fan of the “Dilbert” cartoon. When he took early retirement from AT&T to work as an independent consultant, he was intrigued by the irreverence of the college students of the sixties. He regularly prowled campus book stores to find out what the students were reading and singing. He saw himself as a dedicated change agent, and he saw the young people of that age as his likely allies in this pursuit.

In my decade as director of the General Mills Foundation, I became a practitioner and a true believer in the teachings of Robert Greenleaf. In that period, our company decided to restructure. The downside of that process for me was that my staff was cut from 6½ persons to 4 persons. The upside was that our corporate profits rose dramatically and my grants budget doubled, from $4.5 million to $9 million. But in our office we had to cut back on “site visits” to the local turf of our grant applicants because we lacked the personnel to do it. There is one school of thought in the field of philanthropy which holds that site visits are the single best indicator of the quality of any grant-making program, and our ability to make site visits was slipping away.

Taking a page from Greenleaf, I made quiet personal visits to about a dozen persons in our company, none of whom reported to me, to ask whether they had any interest or desire to volunteer some of their free time to help our staff make up for our loss of personnel. Wonder of wonders, they were eager to help us! Sometimes on holidays, sometimes on weekends, sometimes in the evening after work, these generous fellow employees pitched in to help us do our work. They were truly servant-leaders. Their only reward was the psychic satisfaction they got from helping our small staff maintain some of the community outreach we needed so desperately and that was slipping away from us.

Please bear in mind that I had no mandate from management to use Greenleaf’s ideas or to recruit in-house volunteers. I neither sought nor asked permission from above. The point here is that Greenleaf’s ideas are portable and can be productively used by anyone, anywhere—in a family, in a school, in a church congregation, in a soccer team. All it takes is a decision by two or more persons to explore ways to help one another actualize more of their individual potential.

There is an expression among pilots who fly float planes off the lakes in my native Minnesota: When a plane is at rest in the water, the surface tension of the water “holds” the plane. Prior to take-off from water, the pilot must take enough time and generate enough speed so that the water loses its “grip” on the floats and the plane gets “up on the step”—that is, out of the water but not yet in the air—before the pilot can actually take the plane airborne.

In my view the organization that Robert K. Greenleaf founded in 1964—now called The Greenleaf Center—is “up on the step.” It is poised for take-off to new heights. This book itself is a graphic illustration that the center and its energetic director Larry Spears are responding to the growing need in our society for the ideas of Robert Greenleaf and to the growing number of students of Greenleaf who need and want a single source compendium like this welcome volume.