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You know, the number one mistake that nearly every Christian makes about servant leadership?
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They think it's based upon how Jesus led, how Jesus served. It isn't, yeah, sure he washed their feet ONCE! But it's not how He led His disciples. I mean, that was after three years.
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But he transformed this group of average Joes from a backwater province in the Roman Empire into a force that helped Him change the world.
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In fact, modern day servant leadership is not even biblical.
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Well, so where did it come from?
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A lot of Christians assume that servant leadership is inherently biblical, but it's actually rooted in secular origins,
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based upon a 1970s essay by Robert Greenleaf. Now that was inspired by a book written by Herman Hess
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called Journey to the east. He wrote Steppenwolf and Siddhartha.
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And it's inspired by that. It's not inspired by Jesus. And basically in the journey to the east, there is this group called the League, and they are headed east to this enlightenment, I guess, journey of enlightenment. And there are various people on this,
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on this, on this journey.
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One of them is the servant named Leo. Great guy, well-liked, well respected. He's the guy that kind of works behind the scenes to make things happen and
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and apparently really good at whistling, always upbeat and positive. And
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one day he disappears, and the whole expedition falls apart.
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So our protagonist, the author, he wants to write his memoirs or a book about this journey, and he can't seem to get it together. And so a friend says, Well, you ought to go find Leo and talk to him.
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So he goes on his hunt for Leo, and lo and behold, Leo turns out to be the leader of the League. Was the whole time, and this, this masquerading as a servant for him,
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was actually
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a test, and everybody on the excursion failed,
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but our author has a chance to get back into the League's good graces,
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and so he does, and then comes to find out that he is, one of his things he wants to do is become more and more like Leo,
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and that's basically it. Spoiler alert, that's pretty much it.
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Well, in the late 50s, Robert Greenleaf reads this story.
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Now he is
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part of the organizational leadership group at atnt. He's also a visiting professor at MIT and at Harvard, so has some chops.
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And as he noodles on this, he comes up with the idea of the servant as leader, and writes an essay about it.
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And it, I mean, oh my gosh, it's groundbreaking. Because, you know, think about it, most of us have worked with a higher, hierarchical, top down prior military leadership role. And so this was a real this was a real change, really putting turning things on its head.
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And in the 1990s Larry spears, who is the by that time, President of the Robert Greenleaf Foundation,
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he identifies 10 characteristics. So he boils it down to 10 characteristics of what servant leadership is. And by the mid 2020s we got over 8000 articles, 100 over 100 books, hundreds of dissertations on servant leadership.
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And as I look at that, I'm thinking a lot of this is really good. And I think first we ought to define what is servant leadership. So let's go through the 10 characteristics that Larry Spears identified.
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So number one is listening. He said, servant leaders listen intently and receptively to others what is said and unsaid, prioritizing deep understanding over quick communication or decision making.
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Number two, servant leaders strive to understand and accept others for their unique spirits, recognizing people as individuals worthy of empathy, rather than just roles or tasks. So he calls that empathy.
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Number three is healing. Servant leaders focus on helping others and themselves become whole, addressing emotional or relational brokenness as a powerful force for trans transformation. And number four is awareness general and.
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And self awareness, especially around ethics, values, power dynamics, it acts as a disturbing, disturber and Awakener, rather than providing comfort.
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Number five is persuasion. Servant leaders rely on convincing others through reason and dialog rather than positional authority or coercion, to build consensus.
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And number six, for servant leaders, is conceptualization, thinking beyond day to day realities, to envision a broader purpose and long term goals, balancing conceptual thinking with practical needs.
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Number seven, of the servant leader characteristics is foresight, the ability to anticipate future consequences based on lessons from the past and present, rooted in intuition.
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Number eight, stewardship,
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servant leaders hold the organization and its resources in trust for the greater good of society, with leaders seeking, with leaders seeing themselves as caretakers rather than owners,
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coming to the end here, number nine
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for servant leaders is a commitment to The growth of people.
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Servant leaders have a deep dedication to the personal, professional and spiritual growth of others, nurturing their development as a primary responsibility
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and 10 for servant leaders, building community, fostering a sense of belonging and shared purpose within the organization, creating environments where people feel connected and supported.
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So
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those 10 characteristics, listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people and building community. Those are the 10
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characteristics of a servant leader. And look at that and think, How can this not be biblical? This is awesome. And I, I mean, I agree with you, these characteristics, there's not that, not that they're wrong. Fact, I think most of them are what good leaders strive for. It's what I strive for.
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It's that they're treated as the definition of leadership, not as expressions of it.
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What this leads to is a people first focus, prioritizing individuals over the needs of the mission. And this is what causes burnout, causes inefficiency.
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And as we were going through that, you'll notice none of this was about God. It was all about people. And there's, again, it's I know that as leaders, we can't get things done without people.
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But we've got a mission, particularly as Christians,
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we've been told go make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to do the thing, all the things I've commanded of you, and lo I am with you, always, even to the ending of the world.
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Well, if I'm so focused on people that I'm not focused on a mission, if I want to be liked more than I want to bring people to Christ,
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then I'm probably not doing what I'm supposed to do.
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Well, so how did this mainstream? Particularly, how did this become mainstream Christian thought? I
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mean, in the late 1970s you know, got adopted by the YMCA Salvation Army, even Chick fil A
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Andrews University
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and the church imported it during a crisis of authority. In the late 1970s
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Western churches were facing some cultural backlash, particularly the Protestant churches, we had televangelists who literally crashed and burned. Think of Jim and Tammy Faye Baker. They're getting millions of dollars pouring in and lo and behold, they are not who they claim to be. Jimmy Swaggart,
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seeking out prostitutes, making millions. But I mean, so we had this, this exposure of pastoral abuses and failures of institutions the Catholic Church.
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So there was a lot of anxiety about hierarchy, lot of anxiety about power and control, and this fear of appearing unchrist Like in leadership roles. I mean, by the by the 1990s 2000s there was an annual servant leadership assembly for church leaders. Because servant leadership arrived, arrived, really as a as a ready made moral solution. It affirmed care. It reduced anxiety about authority. It certainly sounded like Jesus, and it required no deep rethinking of mission, stewardship or responsibility.
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I mean servant leadership.
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Didn't become mainstream because it was biblical. It became mainstream Christian because it sounded biblical.
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Oh, I'm a servant leader. I mean, we look at Christ washing the disciples feet. He did it once, and that was after three years,
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before three years of being, of being the rabbi, the teacher.
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Now, should we still use it?
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Well, servant leadership is good, but it's not enough.
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I mean, according to Gallup, they did a state of the global workplace, specifically focused on manager burnout, and they found that managers experience higher burnout than individual contributors, especially in cultures where they're expected to absorb the emotional labor, shield employees from consequences, solve problems that others should own. In fact, Gallup explicitly links the burnout to role ambiguity and decision avoidance, not to the workload.
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McKinsey in 2120 23 had a in 2021 2023 had a leadership well being study, they found that empathetic Leadership Without decision clarity increases the emotional exhaustion leaders who feel responsible for everyone's well being but lack authority to enforce, enforce standards. They burn out faster.
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There's a book called Talent magnet, and it talks about high performers, one of our A players. They they want challenge, they want people who care about them,
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but they want purpose and mission and focus.
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I mean, servant leadership that emphasizes care without authority converts leaders into basically emotional support animals.
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It's, there's just so many downsides of focusing on people the so that, I mean, whether it's, I mean, Harvard business review studies demonstrated MIT,
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Bain and Company.
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I mean literally, Stanford, all of this is has talked about the fact that when we focus on people instead of the mission, it
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creates inefficiency, it creates frustration. And I, I think it could really be safely said that organizational inefficiency isn't because leaders care. It's because they hesitate.
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They're thinking, how is this going to be
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perceived?
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It takes the focus off of the mission. And for Christians, the mission is God's calling on our life.
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I mean, what did Jesus do?
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Jesus is mission first, not people first. He consistently identified himself as sent, not on assignment, as sent.
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He was defined by obedience to the will of the Father, not responsiveness to what you and I wanted of him
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and and so as we look at it, Jesus did a couple of things he really He demonstrated perfect servanthood.
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He demonstrated how to follow
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His compassion was real.
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It was always expressed within the mission.
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Because he was a perfect servant,
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he was able to show us how to be perfect leaders as well the kind of leadership that produces transformation, not dependence.
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Yes, people were served. They were healed, they were taught, they were empowered, transformed and sent. They were not indulged.
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And those are that mean those and that's that's borne out by the facts. The Journal of Business Ethics in 2026
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empowerment boosts innovation by 32%
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indulging people taking care of their needs without accountability, increases dependency by 24% in
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2026 Google's Aristotle update, empowered teams retain have 40% higher retention than teams that are not empowered, that are teams that are indulged
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Amazon in 2025 pivoted their leadership from empathy alone to mission empowerment. Reduce the burnout by 22% increased output by 30.
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I mean, it's the difference between training runners and carrying them. The first builds endurance, the second creates reliance.
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And so as we think about servant leadership today,
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it's not the focus is not on the people. The focus should be on the mission. And I've seen.
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Seen this. I saw this in my own in my own career. When I was in the Navy. I remember coming down to the mess decks one day. We had just pulled into Newport, Rhode Island, and there's a guy that I've never seen before,
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and we have this all hands meeting, and he says, Yeah, my name, my name is Lieutenant manager, chemka. I'm going to be the engineer, Chief Engineer, for the next two months, and I'm sent here to do one thing to help you guys pass this inspection. And I guarantee if you do what I ask you to do, you'll get
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it done. It's going to be hard, but we can make this happen, because what had happened a few months before is we had failed a major inspection, an operational propulsion plan examination, Oppi,
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every ship has to pass it every two or three years,
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and we had failed. And it's significant enough that when you fail this, somebody gets relieved, somebody gets fired. We had a brand new Skipper. So our, our engineer got fired, so we now had a brand new engineer.
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In the meantime, our, our, our ship had moved from being a reserve, an operational asset, to the reserve force to the Navy Reserve force. So we had now had a different chain of command, and our new boss was no longer in Charleston. He was in Rhode Island, Newport, Rhode Island.
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The problem is, all of the all the repair facilities in Charleston, responded to someone who was not our boss, and so we didn't have anybody to fight for us to get the maintenance done that we needed done to pass this inspection. And so we were, we were really in a kind of between a rock and a hard place. And surf group four
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reached out and said, if you guys will come up here,
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then we will, you know, I've got the maintenance facilities. We'll get you guys ready for this inspection. So that's all we had to do, is get from Charleston to Newport Rhode Island. Well, it took us six separate attempts to get underway over the course of about four or five weeks before we finally got or able to get out of Charleston and limp up to Newport Rhode Island. We showed up in February. I remember we pulled into port, and I could see our Commodore standing, our new boss, standing on the pier, looking at this ship. There was big streaks of running rust down the side. Everybody on the weather decks was in mismatched cold weather gear. I mean literally, we looked like a bunch of Somali pirates that had captured a ship and taken it to the nearest port.
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And he just he looked up, shook his head, turned and walked away. And I remember thinking to myself, this is going to be a long two months.
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So the next day, Lieutenant Commander chemca shows up and gives us his his speech. Well for the next two months, that's what he did. That is all he did. Our new engine, our new engineer was gone. I don't know where he went, but he functioned as our chief engineer. And he said, I'm here to make sure you guys pass this inspection. And he was really good. And so the XO and the captain wanted him to take on some other shipboard projects. And he said, No, I am not here to do that. If you want someone to do that, you find somebody else. I'm not doing that. I'm doing this thing here.
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And what was fascinating
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was that over the course of two months,
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everything on that ship changed. When we left that port, we were ready, people were trained, equipment was fixed. The ship, it looked almost brand new, and it there was a different sense, a different a different belief that we had in ourselves and our ship. When we pulled in, we called ourselves the mighty, mighty warship, Blakely, heavy, heavy with sarcasm. When we left the mighty warship, Blakely was a was, was something we called ourselves proudly. And for the next two and a half years and I was assigned to that ship, we won everything. We passed that operational inspection, we passed it with flying colors. We kicked it literally just out of the park,
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and then we won everything else for the next two and a half years, it was amazing. Was proud to be part of that ship, but that happened because he came aboard and he served the mission, and the mission served the people.
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And so that's what I think we need to be be doing today,
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as leaders. We talk about servant leadership. We have to serve the mission. The mission will serve the people, and when we do, when we serve it well, when we actually are the kind of servants that Christ was. And we're going to talk more about how to do that. That is going to set us up to be the kind of leader that he was,
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because Jesus showed us the real path, missing mission, first service that allowed him to lead and transform and multiply his disciples. And this is what the word has been saying all along. The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many he was serving the mission. It was always in obedience to the Father.
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And so as we wrap this episode, what we're really talking about is you.
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Where's your focus? Are you focused on serving? Do you focus on serving your mission? You focus on pleasing people? And
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if you're not sure, then you're going to love this next one, because the next one is about clarity. We're going to dive into clarity Jesus style, and it's going to change everything
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until then lead faithfully and go and make disciples you.
