In his 1977 book Servant Leadership Robert Greenleaf tells of a journey, and a man named 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 servant, was in fact the titular head of the Order, its guiding spirit, a great and noble leader.
The first priority for a board is to commit, like Leo, to the role of servant and that of leader.
The Servant-Leader Role. The role of a servant leader requires that we take responsibility. Servant-leadership balances the idea of responsibility for (the role of leader) with that of responsibility to (the role of servant). Before it can successfully lead, the effective board first chooses to serve. This is the main reason professions such as the military demand that its leaders learn first to obey authority, before they learn to wield authority. A board must adopt an attitude of service to the entity (members, citizens of the municipality or district, stock owners…) that created it, and that selected or elected its members, and the staff and beneficiaries who look to it for leadership. As trustee, the board takes on a servant role when it accepts responsibility to answer to its stakeholders for everything in the organization, including the bottom line of organizational success or failure.
For these two personality types (servant and leader) to work together, balance is essential. In writing about the balance required of boards, Petersen and Fusarelli describe, on one end of a continuum, boards that think of themselves as “far superior to mere educators such as the superintendent,” and on the other end, boards that “seldom question the professional expertise of the [chief executive].” Servant leadership allows neither of these two extremes to dominate.
Greenleaf advises that the effective board of directors chooses first to become servant to all those who are or may be affected by its leadership: those to whom it officially answers, the organizational members of the organization it leads, and beneficiaries/customers served by that organization. This ‘servant-first’ decision is symbolically represented in the oath of office (or statement of individual board member expectations or commitment, if no formal oath is sworn) that may be part of the ceremony when a new member joins the board. The board also must intentionally ‘step up’ to its leader role by assuming responsibility for and taking charge as ‘owner-representative’ of the district. Regardless of the level of talent, knowledge and skill possessed by its staff, the board is fully responsible for all district performance. Greenleaf describes this role for a board of directors as follows:
Trustees are accountable to all parties at interest for the best possible performance of the institution in the service of the needs of all constituencies – including society at large. They are the holders of the charter of public trust for the institution.
The board’s core accountability function is directly connected to responsibility, as they constitute two of the three legs (responsibility, authority, accountability) of a leadership “stool.“ It is equally important to be willing to hold accountable those who answer to the board and to account as a board to the community it serves.
Commitment to Serve. An effective board works on behalf of the community to serve the needs of all children. The board collectively commits to the same oath of office each of its members has taken, and to a role as servant of the state and the local community. An effective board knows the community of those to whom it must answer, and whose interests, needs, and values the board must represent. Governance author Doug Eadie describes how some boards have a misguided view of service, bringing…
…a constituency representation mindset to the board room, feeling more committed to dealing with the needs and interests of particular constituencies than to the concept of the board as a “corporate” governing entity. This…obviously militates against the idea of the board’s collective accountability for building a solid working relationship with its [chief executive], or even governing for that matter. My guess is that this essentially legislative view of [public] boards is basically the result of their being elected; it is certainly true of city councils and other elected governing bodies, which tend not to work together naturally as cohesive teams, and far less true of appointed or self-appointed boards.
In order to lead, Greenleaf suggests that the board should first seek to serve not only the “owners” of the school system but also those who work within that system. The board acknowledges its responsibility to answer for all aspects of performance – everything the district does or fails to do – and for its own performance as a board. As trustee over the public schools, the board is committed to serve the state (the creator of the board, and the source of its legal authority) and the local community (on whose behalf it serves). It is also dedicated to serve customers for whose benefit it is given authority. Finally, it accepts a moral obligation as leader of the organization to serve organizational members over whom it exercises authority.
The servant-leader is servant first – as Leo was portrayed. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions.
Commitment to Lead. At the same time as it commits to a servant role, the effective board accepts an obligation to exercise the governing authority granted by bylaws, and is therefore willing to lead, directly through board actions and indirectly through the actions of the chief executive and staff who operate under the board’s guidance. Since its members are part-time actors, the board commits to using board policy and delegation of authority as its primary tools for directing the staff. And it commits to a regimen of monitoring to see that its leadership responsibilities are successfully carried out. Governance author Jim Brown points out the fact that exercising leadership by ‘directing’ is not an easy thing for boards to do.
The most fundamental discipline of a board of directors is to direct the organization for high performance. Directing is a proactive discipline, focused on the future. But an alarming problem exists with many boards: they refuse to direct!
Another reference to this board reluctance to take the reins of leadership comes from L. Zeigler:
Boards “behave like typical schizophrenics. On the one hand they willingly (indeed eagerly) give power away to the experts…On the other hand, they espouse an ideology of [board] control.”
Greenleaf urged boards to step up to their leadership obligation, exercising their power in an oversight role:
The role of trustees is to hold what approximates absolute power over the institution, using it operationally only in rare emergencies – ideally never. Trustees delegate the operational use of power to administrators and staffs, but with accountability for its use that is at least as strict as now obtains with the use of property and money…In essence, this view of the use of power holds that no one, absolutely no one, is to be entrusted with the operational use of power without the close oversight of fully functioning trustees.
We must do both. Although vital to the success of the organization, the board’s leader role is often reluctantly assumed and incompletely executed. Nevertheless, we have a double duty as board members:
- We must lead.
- We must serve.