servant leadership, starbucks, and football

so – defining leadership is hard enough. but what about defining servant leadership?



If we think hard enough, servant leaders do spring to mind: Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela, the Dali Lama, Mother Teresa, Jesus.




In Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, the trainer, Frankie noted that boxing is "an unnatural act, that everything in boxing is backwards. Sometimes the best way to deliver punches is to step back. But step back too far, you ain’t fighting at all."

This paradox is not unlike Greenleaf's claim in The Servant as Leader that there are many other leadership styles that are more comfortable, more plausable, and less demanding than the path of the servant leader. Greenleaf says that servant leaders should strive "to relate to (people) in . . . more creatively supporting ways." Greenleaf goes on to say that as servant leaders, we are "asked, then, to accept the human condition, its sufferings and its joys, and to work with its imperfections as the foundation upon which the individual will build wholeness through adventurous creative achievement."

In the following clip, note how Coach Chris Hogan of the Grapevine Faith Lions, uses his leadership role as football coach as his team prepares to take on the opposing team, the Texas Tornados. Witness Coach Hogan achieve something extraordinary though a simple game of football by approaching the game in a completely backward and unexpected way.