Notes on servant leadership
Organizations often, though, confuse stability with health. It is possible to do genuine good while also consolidating power.
Servanthood, at its most authentic, calls for deep mutuality. No display of personal virtue can substitute for the structural courage required to redistribute authority.
Not offering content; he was modelling a discipline. Just as important as Greenleaf’s ideas was the form he chose to write them in. His early work was not a systematic leadership theory but a set of reflective essays. In writing as he did, Greenleaf was not merely offering content; he was modelling a discipline. He practiced a way of thinking, listening, and discerning in public, slower than a framework and more demanding than a slogan. The essays are deeply contextual, shaped by a social landscape he found increasingly fractured. His central question was not “How can a leader be seen as virtuous?” but “How can a leader be of use to a society in pain?”
In Greenleaf’s vision, the servant leader is a listener, a healer, a practitioner of mercy in public life. Yet as his work became institutionalized, particularly in business schools and religious circles, his questions were translated into formulas. Presence became posture. Empathy became technique. And the attic door quietly closed.
This work begins with storytelling, because narrative has the power to reshape us. But I am not referring to the familiar stories of heroic leaders triumphing over adversity. What we need instead are stories of communities empowered, of shared decision-making, of leadership reimagined in non-traditional and relational ways. The classroom must become a space where voices from the margins are not just included but centred. Curriculum should move beyond the classic texts to embrace the contextual and lived experiences of those who have long been excluded from the leadership table. These are the stories that disrupt inherited hierarchies and invite a more just and generative vision of leadership.
Finally, leadership programs must resist the pressure to turn servant leadership into a marketable tool. Institutions that frame it as a productivity strategy or morale booster are missing the point. Greenleaf’s challenge was not to optimize systems but to reimagine them, to raise new questions, to listen to the silenced, and to lead with love, even at the cost of power.
Again, Greenleaf did not set out to create a model for moral performance. He saw a broken world and broken institutions and sought a different path. He called for leadership that heals, listens, and empowers.