In choosing the path of leadership, one must ask two fundamental questions:
Why would anyone want to follow you?
Why do you want to lead?
Answering the first question is the core purpose of my book, Joyful Leadership. Drawing on over 30 years of research and practical experience, Joyful Leadership highlights two fundamental elements crucial to effective leadership: the leader’s character and their dedication to service.
Dedication to service hints at the second question, “Why do you want to lead?” Let me share where I was first exposed to that question.
Back when I was in college studying psychology, a new book came out: Servant Leadership, by Robert Greenleaf. My professor had just given me a gift certificate to the bookstore in thanks for a project I had helped him with. I had heard two of my professors discussing the book, saying it would change how people thought about leadership. So, I went and picked it up.
Here’s what I read:
“The idea of the servant as leader came out of reading Hermann Hesse’s Journey to the East. In this story we see a band of men on a mythical journey, probably also Hesse’s own journey. The central figure of the story is Leo, who accompanies the party as the servant who does their menial chores but who also sustains them with his spirit and his song. He is a person of extraordinary presence. All goes well until Leo disappears. Then the group falls into disarray, and the journey is abandoned. They cannot make it without the servant Leo. The narrator, one of the party, after some years of wandering, finds Leo and is taken into the order that had sponsored the journey. There he discovers that Leo, whom he had known first as a servant, was in fact the titular head of the order, its guiding spirit, a great and noble leader. ”
I still think about that paragraph frequently; it has had an immense impact on the way I’ve thought about my own leadership and how I have taught others. Imagine an organization where every leader gave an answer of servanthood. What’s your answer?