Some Thoughts On Servant Leadership

At a Chi Alpha con­fer­ence in St. Louis I just heard Dick Schroed­er use an inter­est­ing phrase to com­pli­ment some­one — “he puts ‘us’ before ‘me’.” Here are some off-the-cuff and unpol­ished thoughts inspired by that phrase:

“Us before me.” What a beau­ti­ful phrase to describe ser­vant lead­er­ship.

“Us” puts the lead­er­ship into ser­vant­hood: “us before me” leads to the over­all good of the group where­as “you before me” can lead to the detri­ment of the group.

To be clear, the Bible does com­mand us to “in humil­i­ty con­sid­er oth­ers bet­ter than our­selves” (Philip­pi­ans 2:3). Does­n’t this lead direct­ly to “you before me”?

Yes. It does. But the prac­ti­cal ques­tion for me as a leader is how to be self-sac­ri­fi­cial in a way that hon­ors my oblig­a­tions to those I am serv­ing. And I have learned that there is a healthy way to pri­or­i­tize oth­ers and a destruc­tive way to pri­or­i­tize oth­ers.

To serve as ful­ly as pos­si­ble there is a cer­tain amount of self-main­te­nance that must take place. Bound­aries must be estab­lished and main­tained. Recre­ation and sab­bat­i­cals must be incor­po­rat­ed. Growth and learn­ing have to take place.

All of these things are self-serv­ing. They require us to say no to oth­ers and yes to our­selves. At times, we wind up say­ing “me before you today because I want to be able to serve you tomor­row”.

But at the same time, all of these things flow from a mature under­stand­ing of “you before me” — putting our fol­low­ers’ long-term good above their short-term desires. For an orga­ni­za­tion, a leader who says “us before me” builds strength. A leader who naively/hyperspiritually says “you before me” leads the orga­ni­za­tion to implo­sion (and like­ly to high lead­er­ship turnover).

Clear­ly, there is the poten­tial for “us before me” to become a pre­text for putting “me before you.” The anti­dote is to keep expand­ing our def­i­n­i­tion of “us”. When­ev­er we begin to sus­pect that our “us” is too com­fort­able, we need to rede­fine the group we are serv­ing in a larg­er way, and con­tin­ue to put “us before me.”

And so a big thanks to Dick Schroed­er for giv­ing me my new favorite phrase: “us before me”. It will prob­a­bly be my favorite for at least a week. 😉

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