Before Robert K. Greenleaf wrote his seminal essay, The Servant as Leader, in 1969 which started the ripples, then waves of servant-leadership washing over the world he had co-founded The Center for Applied Ethics in 1964. He was concerned that large institutions were not behaving as ethically as they could. It seems to me, then, that he was interested in ‘moral action.’ It also seems to me that a first step, if not ‘the’ first step, toward enacting moral action lies in the ability and commitment we have to think morally. To me, this entails the work of thinking together and together to speak from the heart of the mind while listening with love and rigor. I am speaking of the ethics of thinking together, of, if you will, philosophical love [in his initial ‘inspired’ essay, The Servant as Leader, Greenleaf’s last sentence reads: In the end, all that matters is love and friendship.’ ].
Greenleaf wrote a great deal about the search and the seeker; I assume he also thought a great deal about both. There are many philosophers who have helped me – and us – engage the search. I keep coming back to Socrates. He continues to help me search; for him the search entailed thinking together; thinking together was an act of love. His goal was, and continues to be, to help you, me, us grow [ties directly into Greenleaf’s ‘Best Test’ for the Servant ‘Do those served grow as persons. . .?’ – Socrates was, indeed, a servant in this sense]. For Socrates, ‘truth,’ and ‘wisdom’ were not born in the seeking for answers; truth and wisdom were born in the deepening of the questions – in the dialogue, in the search, that occurred between the teacher and the pupil and, perhaps more importantly, within the teacher and the pupil [this is directly connected to one of Greenleaf’s important admonitions – it begins ‘in here,’ inside of the servant and not ‘out there’]. Socrates often claimed to be a man who understood nothing and by his questioning of who we are he also helps us understand that we, too, know nothing. We know opinion, we know what others offer us; we know the words between the quotation marks. We do not know our self, we do not know what we deeply think – we are fond of quoting others as if their thought was our own. Yet, Socrates believed that ‘our truth’ lies within us and that we have an obligation to seek for it, to emerge it, to name it and to bring it to our world. Paradoxically, it seems, that ‘my truth’ can only be found as a result of deep searching conversations [dialogue], rooted in aching questions [questions that are ‘life-essential’ and questions about which we do not know the answers]. This, for me, is the wonder of thinking together, of searching together, of exploring together, of learning together and of tapping into my ‘wisdom,’ your ‘wisdom,’ and our ‘wisdom.’
[NOTE: If you are interested in Greenleaf please visit my blog: http://servant-as-leader.com ]