Spirit Is of the Essence

Robert K. Greenleaf, The Servant As Leader (Excerpt)

Greenleaf’s seminal essay The Servant as Leader was published in 1970. In it, he proposed that the best leaders were servants first, and the key tools for a servant-leader included listening, persuasion, access to intuition and foresight, use of language, and pragmatic measurements of outcomes. In the next four years, two more essays explored ideas that an entire institution—and a society—could act as servant, and that trustees should act as servants. In 1976, Paulist Press published Servant Leadership, a book that combined these and other essays. Greenleaf always claimed that although he was informed by the Judeo-Christian ethic (he became a Quaker in mid-life), servant leadership was for people of all faiths and all institutions, secular and religious. He knew that he was not a perfect servant-leader, but it was his ideal, and the arc of his life bent in that direction.

Along the way, Bob and Esther made friends with luminaries of their day like Rabbi Abraham Heschel, Norman Vincent Peale, Peter Drucker, Jungian analyst Ira Progoff , semanticist Alfred Korzybski, and hundreds of others. Bob loved to sing bass, attend lectures and concerts, play the recorder, read, fly giant kites, and take and develop pictures. His work and writings continue to have an impact on fields as diverse as systems thinking, management, leadership, organizational development, religion, assessment and evaluation, and a baker’s dozen other disciplines. Greenleaf, however, did not describe himself a philosopher, academic, theologian or writer, but as a businessman and a seeker. He died in 1990 and is buried in Terre Haute, Indiana, with an epitaph that shows his wit: “Potentially a good plumber; ruined by a sophisticated education.”

–Don M. Frick [The biographer of Robert K. Greenleaf].

Vision for Our Times: Where Is It? [Excerpt from Robert K. Greenleaf’s The Power of Servant-Leadership]

“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” This language (Proverbs 29:18) from the King James Version of the Bible stays with me even though modern translators make something else of that passage…

Our restless young people in the 1960s wanted to build a new society too. But their elders who could have helped prepare them for that task just “spun their wheels.” As a consequence of this neglect, a few of those young people simply settled for tearing up the place. And, in the absence of new visionary leadership to inspire effort to prepare our young people to build constructively, some of them may tear up the place again! Do not be surprised if they do just that. The provocation is ample. We simply are not giving the maturing help to young people that is well within our means to do. Instead, we are acting on the principle that knowledge, not the spirit is power. Knowledge is but a tool, The spirit is of the essence.

Perhaps the older people who could help them do not do what they know how to do because, as in the 1960s, they are not inspired by a vision that lifts their sights to act on what they know. No such vision is being given in our times. And the paralysis of action that restrains us in preparing young people to live productively in the 21st century is still with us. We may be courting disaster by our neglect.”

—Robert K. Greenleaf [The Power of Servant-Leadership, Vision for Our Times: Where Is It?].

Additional Robert K. Greenleaf Quotes

“Moral authority is another way to define servant leadership because it represents a reciprocal choice between leader and follower. If the leader is principle-centered, he or she will develop moral authority. If the follower is principle-centered, he or she will follow the leader. In this sense, both leaders and followers are followers. Why? They follow truth. They follow natural law. They follow principles. They follow a common, agreed-upon vision. They share values. They grow to trust one another.”

―Robert K. Greenleaf [Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness].

“vision, without which we perish, is required to open us to willingness to use what we know and to work to extract hard reality from a dream.”

―Robert K Greenleaf [The Power of Servant-Leadership].

“Rabbi Heschel replied: “I would say: Let them remember that there is a meaning beyond absurdity. Let them be sure that every little deed counts, that every word has power, and that we can—every one—do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments. And above all, remember that the meaning of life is to build a life as if it were a work of art.”

―Robert K. Greenleaf [Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness].

“Behind what is said in the collection presented here is a twofold concern. My first concern is for the individual in society and his or her seeming bent to deal with the massive problems of our times wholly in terms of systems, ideologies, and movements. These have their place, but they are not basic because they do not make themselves. The basics are the incremental thrusts of individuals who have the ability to serve and lead—the prime movers. My second concern is for the individual as a serving person and the tendency to deny wholeness and creative fulfillment to oneself by failing to lead when there is the opportunity.”

―Robert K. Greenleaf [Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness].

“In the context of religious leadership, tinkering with structure is not a first choice of means for building or sustaining quality in an institution. Leadership is the prime concern!”

―Robert K. Greenleaf [The Power of Servant-Leadership].

“There is very little sustained performance at the level of excellence—of any kind, anywhere—without continuous coaching.”

―Robert K. Greenleaf [Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness].

“The grand design of education is to excite, rather than pretend to satisfy, an ardent thirst for information; and to enlarge the capacity of the mind, rather than to store it with knowledge, however useful.”

―Robert K. Greenleaf [Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness].

“To live is to change; to live well is to have changed often.”

―Robert K Greenleaf [The Power of Servant-Leadership].