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SERVICE LEADERSHIP
This presentation was developed to increase the awareness of trustees about their role as leaders and pace-setters in the non-profit world. I extracted thought provoking phrases from the seminal work Servant Leadership, by the late Robert K. Greenleaf, and added my comments about their application to philanthropy during the presentation. To learn more, I recommend you read his book published by the Paulist Press.
Individual Initiative
| “The forces of good and evil in the world are propelled by the thoughts, attitudes, and actions on individual beings.
What happens to our values, and therefore the quality of our civilization in the future, will be shaped by the conceptions of individuals that are born of inspiration.”
Robert K. Greenleaf
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The Thesis
| “This is my thesis:
Caring for persons, the more able and the less serving each other, is the rock upon which a good society is built.”
Robert K. Greenleaf
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Institution as Servant
| “If a better society is to be built...
then the most open course is to raise both the capacity to serve, and the very performance as servant, of existing major institutions by new, regenerative forces operating within them.”
Robert K. Greenleaf
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Leadership Initiative
| “The leader needs more than inspiration.
The leader ventures to say, “ I will go; come with me!”
A leader initiates, provides the ideas and the structure, and takes the risk of failure along with the chance of success.”
Robert K. Greenleaf
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Trustee Leaders
| “Institutions need two kinds of leaders:
those who are inside and carry on the active, day-to-day roles, and
those who stand outside but are intimately concerned, and who, with the benefit of some detachment, oversee the active leaders.
These are the trustees.”
Robert K. Greenleaf
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Trustee Qualifications
| “The most important qualification for trustees should be that they care for the institution,
which means that they care for all of the people the institution touches, and that they are determined to make their caring count.”
Robert K. Greenleaf
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Delivery of Service
| “Too many people judge our institutions as not meeting the standard of what is reasonable and possible in their service.
Trustees have the primary responsibility to meet this critical judgement and to produce institutions that exceed expectations.”
Robert K. Greenleaf
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Trustees Set the Course
| “Set the goals:
What business are we in and what are we trying to accomplish?”
Robert K. Greenleaf
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State the Mission
| “The first thing an institution needs to do in order to start on a conspicuously higher course is to
State clearly where it wants to go, whom it wants to serve, and how it expects those served directly, as well as society at large, to benefit from the service.”
Robert K. Greenleaf
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Justifying an Institution
| “The only real justification for institutions, beyond a certain effeciency,
is that people in them grow to a greater stature than if they stood alone.”
Robert K. Greenleaf
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Trustees Set Objectives
| “Trustees will insist that the outcome be that people in, and affected by, the institution
will grow healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, and more likely to become servants of society.”
Robert K. Greenleaf
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Trustee Growth
| “Part of the Trustees' commitment to leading the institution will be their unrelenting effort to learn what they need to know, in order to oblige the institution to reach distinction as servant.”
Robert K. Greenleaf
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Where Leadership Starts
| “For anything to happen there must be a dream.
And for anything great to happen there must be a great dream.”
Robert K. Greenleaf
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