[Originally Published in Update - a publication of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, Spring 2019]
By Patricia M. Bombard, BVM, D.Min., Director, Vincent on Leadership: The Hay Project, DePaul University
“Leaders are not trained, they evolve.” —Robert Greenleaf
Today, a number of publicly held companies are proving the leadership development model first described by Robert K. Greenleaf in 1970 as “servant-leadership” can produce results that make even shareholders happy, including The Container Store, Southwest Airlines, and Starbucks.1 Greenleaf described the servant-leader as someone with “the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first.” It is this feeling that draws an individual into wanting to lead by serving others.2
For me, Greenleaf’s ideas raise two questions: (1) What is the origin of this “natural feeling”? and (2) How, as faculty and staff of Catholic universities, can we cultivate that feeling more strongly in ourselves and in our students?
I have the same questions about the body of writings known collectively as Catholic Social Teaching (CST). As I consider Greenleaf in light of CST, it seems to me there is an important intersection between these two sets of teachings that might help answer my questions.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops lists seven themes found within CST on its website. One of these is an “Option for the Poor and Vulnerable.” The basic moral test of a society, this theme suggests, is “how our most vulnerable members are faring.” The Gospel story of the Last Judgement (Mt. 25:31-46) compels all Christians to be attentive to the needs of the hungry, thirsty, homeless, sick and imprisoned.
Greenleaf also suggests there is a “best test” for the servant-leader within institutions and organizations: “I prefer to say that all of those persons who are touched by the institution are served and, while being served, they grow as persons; they become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants. Furthermore, whatever the action, the least privileged in society will benefit, or, at least, not be further deprived.”3
There is yet another point of intersection between CST and Greenleaf: the call to build community. Larry C. Spears, former president and CEO of The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, says, “The servant-leader senses that much has been lost in recent human history as a result of the shift from local communities to large institutions as the primary shaper of human lives.” He goes on to say, “Servant-leadership suggests that true community can be created among those who work in businesses and other institutions.”4 Greenleaf himself advised: “All that is needed to rebuild community as a viable form for large numbers of people is for enough servant-leaders to show the way, not by mass movements, but by each servant-leader demonstrating his [or her] own unlimited liability for a quite specific community-related group.”5
Greenleaf’s admonition to servant-leaders to build community echoes another theme of CST: “the Person in Community.” The authors of Catholic Social Teaching: Our Best Kept Secret speak to this point, suggesting that, “Human dignity can be recognized, developed and protected only in community with others.”6
While CST and Greenleaf certainly point the way, I have long believed that no statements of principles, guidelines, teachings, or commandments from outside oneself will create a caring human. I have written elsewhere about how we are wasting our most needed human resources by not attending adequately to developing the potential for good in each person alive on the planet. I want to quote here the spiritual teacher and author, Eknath Easwaran, who called for a new Manhattan Project dedicated to understanding human development. Referring to the research project that led to the atomic bomb, Easwaran wrote: “We study how to remake the world, but not how to remake ourselves.”7
Along these lines, we might note that Hamilton Beazley, writing in the foreword to The Servant-Leader Within: A Transformative Path, suggests that servant-leadership is a concept more “caught than taught.” He explains: …” the teaching of servant-leadership requires a practice component as well as formal instruction because servant leadership is largely experiential, it is intellectual only in its foundation.”8
Now we are at the crux of the answer to my questions. Cultivating a servant-leader must happen through experiences and reflection on those experiences. It must be modeled and encouraged. What might a university do to provide such opportunities for experience, reflection, and role-modeling? Certainly, the growth of service-learning has been one response to both CST and Greenleaf. Yet I have another thought: Might a Catholic university become a model of servant-leadership by focusing its efforts first and foremost on serving “the least privileged” on its campus?
Who are these least privileged? You may be surprised to learn, as I was some four years ago, that hunger and homelessness now are widespread among students on college campuses. A recent survey published by researchers at Temple University and the Wisconsin HOPE Lab and reported by National Public Radio revealed that more than a third of college students “don’t always have enough to eat and lack stable housing.”
As an example of a servant-leadership response to this crisis, I want to tell a story unfolding at DePaul University in Chicago. DePaul has as its namesake St. Vincent de Paul, who founded the Congregation of the Mission (also known as Vincentians), who in turn founded DePaul University in 1898. The university is part of the larger “Vincentian Family” that includes other organizations connected to the legacy of St. Vincent de Paul, such as the Daughters of Charity (DC) and the St. Vincent de Paul Society.
The issue of homelessness among DePaul University students was highlighted by a university staff member at the fall 2014 Vincentian Family gathering in Chicago. It was estimated at that time that there were approximately 50 homeless students every quarter.
Following that initial revelation, members of the Vincentian Family in Chicago responded. A core group of DePaul University faculty and staff began meeting voluntarily to understand more fully the challenges and opportunities facing DePaul’s under-resourced students, especially students facing hunger and homelessness. The group invited students and representatives from various DePaul student services departments to provide input and join in our explorations. We learned a lot in the process about our own assumptions and the struggles students face within the university community, while also growing together in our desire to serve.
Meanwhile, the staff of Depaul USA, another Vincentian Family organization focused on ending homelessness, also responded. They created the “Dax Program,” named after the French village where St. Vincent de Paul lived as a college student. The program is coordinated by Sister Judy Warmbold, DC, who regularly visits frontline campus departments and students.
The success of the DAX Program in just three years has been remarkable. Nine students have graduated from DePaul after receiving housing assistance in host homes, rented apartments, rented rooms, donated dorm rooms, and a Dax House. Twenty-one students remain enrolled in school. About half of the 21 found stable housing and no longer need assistance. The program was featured in January 2019 on the CBS News Sunday Morning show as one of several responses to the thousands of homeless college students in the United States.
There is still a lot a university can do to be of help, and perhaps in the process build a stronger community wherein faculty, staff, and students cultivate and practice servant leadership. Responding to the “least privileged” among us must happen both inside and outside the classroom. Beazley suggests that in addition to teaching servant-leadership, role modeling to illustrate servant-leadership principles and an environment designed to facilitate its learning are critical elements.
One of our core group’s learnings over the past several years has been that, while the university has many resources available for students, many of the truly needy do not or are not able to seek them out. One reason is the stigma of being homeless. For example, one of the first students to be helped reported being bullied by other students in the dorm after they found out he was there because he was homeless.
What small step could you take to help model the way toward building a university community more deeply steeped in servant-leadership and CST? Perhaps Greenleaf’s final words in his 1970 essay say it best: “In the end, all that matters is love and friendship
1 James W. Sipe and Don M. Frick, Seven Pillars of Servant Leadership: Practicing the Wisdom of Leading by Serving (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2015), 3.
2 Larry C. Spears, “Understanding the Growing Impact of Servant Leadership,” in The Servant-Leader Within: A Transformative Path, Robert K. Greenleaf (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2003), 16.
3 Robert K. Greenleaf, The Servant-Leader Within: A Transformative Path (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2003), 132.
4 Spears, “Understanding the Growing Impact of servant leadership,” 19.
5 Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey Into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1977), 39.
6 Edward P. DeBerri and James E. Hug, with Peter J. Henriot and Michael J. Schultheis, Catholic Social Teaching: Our Best Kept Secret (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2003), 23.
7 Eknath Easwaran, The Compassionate Universe: The Power of the Individual to Heal the Environment (Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1989), 60.
8 Hamilton Beazley, foreword to The Servant-Leader Within: A Transformative Path, by Robert K. Greenleaf (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2003), 3.
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