FROM
GENERAL TO SERVANT

Topics: Leadership; Relationships; Servanthood; Team; Trust

References: Matthew 20:20–28; John 13:34–35

I’ve led from a place of servant leadership, and I’ve led from a place of top-down leadership—and there’s no question which kind of leadership is more effective.

My classmates at Harvard Business School used to call me the Prussian general because for many years that was my approach to leadership. Then I was hit by a series of personal and professional setbacks. My wife died. A mail-order venture that I had started went bankrupt. Rather than launch another business, I accepted a friend’s offer to head an aquarium project in Tampa.

I spent the next six years in a job that gave me no power, no money, and no knowledge. That situation forced me to draw on a deeper part of myself. We ended up with a team of people who were so high-performing that they could almost walk through walls. Why, I wondered, was I suddenly able to lead a team that was so much more resilient and creative than any team that I had run before?

The answer: somewhere, amid all of my trials, I had begun to trust my colleagues as much as I trusted myself. And that is the essence of servant leadership.

—Jim Stuart, cofounder of the Leadership Circle, Fast Company (September 1999)