Discerning the Servant’s Path: Applying Pre-Committal Questioning to Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership

Robert K. Greenleaf’s servant leadership has become an attractive approach for morally-motivated leaders. However, paradoxes found in servant leadership have the potential to create confusion among those individuals interested in its practice. To assist prospective leaders in deciding upon whether to follow the concepts of servant leadership, an exhaustive literature review was conducted by the researcher to find and code definitions from servant leadership-related writings. The results from the initial coding phase were the following themes: Personal Growth, Development, and Empowerment of Employees; Spiritual, Affirmational, and Ethically-Minded Approach toward Employees; Steward Dedicated to Service of Community and Placing Others First; and Traits-Based Leadership. The second round of selective coding yielded Repetitively Embracing Personal Sacrifice as its core theme. Three questions that arose from this specified theme were, “Am I willing to embrace personal sacrifice on a continual basis to practice servant leadership? If so, how do I stay motivated to sustain the concept of putting others first? If not, is there a way to negotiate an understanding where employees are supported in the leadership approach/style I feel most comfortable using?” These self-assessing questions were recommended for connecting Greenleaf’s (1977) questions-based logic on the practice of servant leadership between his call to service and the final decision of becoming a servant leader

Take Me To Your Followers

In 1954, Dwight D. Eisenhower, then 34th President of the United States, defined leadership as ... the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it, not because your position of power can compel him to do it, or your position of authority. No one disputes he was well-versed on the subject, seeing also that he had been Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during the Second World War. In 1933, Mary Parker Follett, a management scholar far ahead of her time, had likewise underscored the role of followers: Their part is not merely to follow, they have a very active part to play and that is to keep the leader in control of a situation. Let us not think that we are either leaders or - nothing of much importance. Alas, with the advent of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, insights such as these were blanked by the craze for captains of industry. Today, 30-40 years into the leadership industry, corporate shelves groan under the weight of handbooks on leadership theory and practice, all meaning to say leadership is a serious professional and personal responsibility. In spite of that, some such as Barbara Kellerman see a historical trajectory from autocracy to democracy that, with fast-paced cultural change, Baby Boomer replacement, and new information and communications technology, may soon end the leadership industry’s leader-centrism. The increasingly collective wisdom is that leadership happens in purposeful relationships in culture and context, not in individuals

Combining autocracy and majority voting: the canonical succession rules of the Latin Church

The autocratic turn of the Latin Church in the XI-XIII century, a reaction to the secular power interferences, concentrated the decision-making power in the hands of the top hierarchy, and finally in the hands of the pope. A fundamental step was the change and the constitutionalisation of the procedures for leadership replacement, which were open successions where the contest for power was governed by elections. The autocratic reform limited the active electorate to the clergy only and gradually substituted the episcopal elections by the pope’s direct appointment. Besides, the voting rules changed from unanimity to the dual principle of maioritas et sanioritas (where the majority was identified with the greater part by number and wisdom) and finally to the numerical rule of qualified majority. This evolution aimed at preserving the elections from external interferences and at eliminating the elements of arbitrariness. The most important succession, the papal election, was protected by institutionalising a selectorate and its decision-making rules. The selectorate and the elections did not insert accountability and representation mechanisms but only protected the quality of the autocratic leadership and its autonomy.Theocracies, Autocracy, Succession rules

“The hope – the one hope – is that your generation will prove wiser and more responsible than mine.” Constructions of guilt in a selection of disaster texts for young adults

This paper explores a range of definitions of guilt, and argues that fiction for young adults which is set after a major disaster that has been caused by humans has surprisingly little emphasis on guilt. Focusing on Brother in the Land by Robert Swindells, Nuclear War Diary by James E. Sanford (Jr), The Last Children by Gudrun Pausewang, The Carbon Diaries 2015 by Saci Lloyd and its sequel, The Carbon Diaries 2017, and Days Like This by Alison Stewart, the paper argues that in post-nuclear texts for young adults the emphasis tends to be on the perceived responsibility of the young adult reader&amp;apos;s generation to work towards preventing the disaster from becoming reality, rather than on the guilt of the adult generation that caused the disaster. However, in texts dealing with environmental disaster, the young adult reader&amp;apos;s generation can be seen to have some measure of culpability, and so the issues of guilt and responsibility become more complex<br /

Can a Wise Society be Free? Gilbert, Group Knowledge and Democratic Theory

Recently, Margaret Gilbert has argued that it appears that the wisdom of a society impinges, greatly, on its freedom. In this article, I show that Gilbert’s “negative argument” fails to be convincing. On the other hand, there are important lessons, particularly for democratic theory, that can be by looking carefully, and critically, at her argument. This article will proceed as follows. First, I present Gilbert’s argument. Next, I criticize her understanding of freedom, and then, using arguments from Christopher McMahon, criticize her understanding of a wise society. Finally, I discuss how what has been said can inform how one should think about democratic theory