CAN CORPORATE CEO'S REALLY BE SERVANT-LEADERS? - PART I

Servant-First Versus Leader-First

Over the years I have read a number of books written by and listened to talks given by Chief Executive Officers of Corporations and other upper management types, who are proud to announce their adoption of the “servant leader” moniker.  It is my opinion that the title proclamation has little if anything to do with the servant-leader as defined by Robert Greenleaf.  Greenleaf came up with the hyphenated version of the name and clarified what he meant by it in his 1970 essay THE SERVANT AS LEADER. 

Greenleaf answered the question “Who Is the Servant-Leader”, by describing two extremes of leadership that he believed existed.  There is the servant-first version where “becoming a servant-leader begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, serve first.  Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.”  And then there is the opposite extreme of the leader-first who follows the leadership path because of “the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions.  For such people, it will be a later choice to serve – after leadership is established.” 

The other day I received an email from the Wisconsin ServantLeadership group that contained a link to an excerpt from a talk titled Who I Am Vs. What I Do from Ted Teske with the tagline “Servant-Leader and CEO of Briggs & Stratton”.  As a former student of servant leadership, the email perked my interest so I clicked on the link and watched Teske’s talk.  Finding the excerpt interesting, I went to the Wisconsin Servant Leadership’s web page and found another link to Teske’s entire talk and listened to that as well.  You may read a transcript of Teske’s talk that I produced here.   

Teske’s talk provides some good insights into the life and thought of a corporate CEO and how the journey of leadership unfolds based on life changing events.  It also reveals the many leadership hats CEO’s can choose from in adorning their corporate head with as they guide their vessels around or into the rocks. And I also believe it reveals some of the inner motivations of CEO types, and that despite Teske’s claims to servant-leadership fame, he and his fellow CEO’s are really not worthy of the title as defined in the writings of Robert Greenleaf discussed above.  It is my belief that for corporations to be successful in their ultimate mission of serving the share-holder and growing the corporation through profits, mergers, and acquisitions, a leader-first  CEO must follow the path of power, profit, and material possession if they want to succeed in the world controlled by global corporations, even if who they are is not what they do. 

The successful corporate leader needs to be flexible in the image they portray to the selected audience if they hope to remain on top of the ladder, and so they have to be willing to change their leadership hat many times to keep up appearances.  But in the end what the audience should pay attention to is not the hat the leader is wearing, or the talk that they talk, but rather to look back at the path they have followed and find out what has or has not been trampled along the way.  For it is the walk they walk that defines them, not the talk they talk.  More on determining what the CEO walk is, after the talk, which includes some of my color commentary in Part 2 of this topic.