Servant Leadership Essay

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REGENT UNIVERSITY The Understanding and Practice of ServantLeadership Servant Leadership Research Roundtable – August 2005 Larry C. Spears President & CEO The Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. The best test is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? —Robert K. Greenleaf The mightiest of rivers are first fed by many small trickles of water, and an apt way of conveying my belief that the growing number of individuals and organizations practicing servant-leadership has increased from a trickle to a river. Servant-leadership is also an expanding river, and one which carries with it a deep current of meaning and passion. The servant-leader concept continues to grow in its influence and impact. In fact, we have witnessed an unparalleled explosion of interest and practice of servant-leadership in the past fifteen years. In many ways, it can truly be said that the times are only now beginning to catch up with Robert Greenleaf’s visionary call to servant-leadership. The idea of servant-leadership, now in its fourth decade as a concept bearing that name, continues to create a quiet revolution in workplaces around the world. This article is intended to provide a broad overview of the growing influence this inspiring idea is having on people and their workplaces. In countless for-profit and not-for-profit organizations today we are seeing traditional, autocratic, and hierarchical modes of leadership yielding to a different way of working—one based on teamwork and community, one that seeks to involve others in decision making, one strongly based in ethical and caring behavior, and one that is attempting

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