Anzalone, F M --- "Servant Leadership: A New Model for Law Library Leaders" [2008] LegEdDig 8; (2008) 16(1) Legal Education Digest 27

• Servant leadership: a new model for law library leaders

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Servant leadership: a new model for law library leaders

F M Anzalone

Boston Coll LR Research Paper No. 146, 2007, pp 793–812

Servant leadership is a way to encourage healthier organisations and to rid the people in them of energy-depleting dependency and self-interest. Most readers probably would consider the words servant and leader to be diametrically opposed. In common parlance, a leader is powerful; a servant is not. A leader gives orders to be followed; a servant takes orders and follows them. In this article, however, I would like to introduce the reader to a concept of leadership that turns this paradigm and traditional word association on its head.

The origins of the servant leadership model can be attributed to Robert Greenleaf, who described the idea in this way:

The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. The best test is: Do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants?

Greenleaf sensed a crisis in leadership at the end of the twentieth century. The sixties and seventies were a period of upheaval and questioning of authority. Greenleaf saw this time as offering a ripe opportunity for people to take ‘[a] fresh critical look ... at the issues of power and authority ... to relate to one another in less coercive and more creatively supporting ways.’ Servant leaders presented an invigorating alternative to the use of coercive power in management positions. Such leaders would guide with moral authority; loyalty would be freely given to them, not forced. Greenleaf envisioned servant leadership as transformative at both the personal and the institutional level.

Today there is a plethora of commentary in both business and sociological literature on the amazing rates of change that we have witnessed in the past quarter of a century. Two trends have been identified over and over again. The first is the nature of the workplace and the second is the erosion of confidence in the moral authority of traditional organisational leadership.

Greenleaf’s prophetic vision of humanistic business environments that value workers has been echoed by management cognoscenti in their prescriptions for the ideal workplace for the twenty-first century. Organisations of happy, productive employees who are encouraged to do their best work are organisations that will have better customer service reputations than their competition. A more humanistic work environment makes sense both for business purposes and to promote employee welfare.

In the modern law library, especially in academia, workforces are better educated than ever before.

Inspired, creative leadership is necessary to improve human effectiveness. Servant leadership offers a fresh perspective for such inspired leadership in law libraries.Although Robert Greenleaf is credited with conceptualising servant leadership, it is Larry Spears who has identified its ten essential characteristics: listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualisation, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people, and building community.

One of the major job requirements for effective leadership in law libraries is to have the capacity to listen empathetically to others. To lead effectively, law library leaders must know not only themselves but also their followers, including what their concerns are, what excites them or what deadens their enthusiasm, and how they feel about the law library’s mission.

Listening is not just a passive exercise. In fact, true active listening requires a surfeit of energy; it is hard work. To really hear, the listener looks beyond him or herself for the moment and presents an open mind, and heart, to the follower. A true servant leader, then, is passionately invested in appreciating the opinions and ideas of his or her followers.

Traditional leaders listen and test or sample ideas with staff, faculty, and users. The subtle difference

is that a law library servant leader would ask followers how they see the problem and invite them to suggest a solution. A true servant leader would relentlessly and bravely question while listening and would show utmost respect for followers by not allowing even the slightest amount of careless or dismissive thinking to creep into a conversation.

Listening would be an empty exercise without empathy. A servant leader demonstrates respect for followers by knowing them and seeing them as more than a pair of hands or a body occupying a cubicle or desk. The servant leader accepts the humanity of employees and empathises with them. The willingness to be receptive to colleagues, employees, and teammates does not mean, however, that a servant leader accepts either bad behaviour or shoddy work product.

Like most workplaces, many law libraries may have individuals, both professional and support staff, who are at a point in their careers where they have begun to cut corners or practice a less than rigorous work ethic. Common symptoms include habitual tardiness or leaving work early on a routine basis. Such workers complain about their workload while being unproductive, never shoulder their fair share of the reference hours, constantly miss deadlines, and produce substandard work product.

If a manager does have a conversation with an underperforming employee, he or she usually is

seeking to use the meeting as a recordable milestone in the disciplinary process of the institution — whether it is a university, court, or law office. A servant leader would approach the problem from a different vantage point. Out of respect for the errant employee’s humanity — and out of concern for the other employees in the department — a servant leader would address the behavioural issue with the employee and unequivocally demand greater effort, an attitude alteration, or whatever else is needed to alleviate the poor performance. A more traditional manager would, of course, be delighted if the conversation could produce a change in behaviour, but it would not be the driving force for the encounter. In contrast, the impetus for behavioural intervention on the servant leader’s part is to help the employee realise his or her full human potential. The servant leader (manager) serves the follower (employee) by enabling the employee to honestly face the mistakes of the past and to develop strategies to ameliorate the poor work habits. There is no doubt that such a meeting with an underperforming employee would be difficult, but the true servant leader is concerned with the good of the employee and the organisation, not the comfort of the servant leader.

The choice to heal instead of being destructive when we deal with one other in the workplace is an essential feature of the relationship between servant leader and follower. Leaders who see themselves as servants first are approachable and open to discuss difficult topics and emotionally charged issues. Healers are interested in their staff members as whole people.

The capacity to be open to others requires self-awareness. A servant leader has to honestly discern

answers to such questions as: Do I favour the predictability of a tightly controlled work environment with no surprises? Does my own need for security and predictability thwart the growth of others? Am I aiding in creating a culture of dependence and loyalty, not freedom and service?

In the illustration of servant leadership principles above, we looked at the leader having a difficult and honest conversation with a below par employee. It can be equally difficult to carry out a self- reflective examination of our own leadership performance. Nonetheless, to be an effective manager of others, it is necessary to make regular self-appraisals. Awareness leads to self-knowledge and emotional maturity for both the servant leader and followers.

The ability to lead by persuasion, instead of by the power of one’s position, is another mark of the

servant leader. A leader who has spent time talking to followers usually does not need to rely on coercion.

In addition to persuasion and influence, servant leaders must have the ability to conceptualise. A

servant leader has to be able to conceptualise a goal, hold it, work toward it, and also focus on the

ay-to-day issues. Scholars of leadership have many appellations for the quality of conceptualisation and its communication to the team.

Sharing ideas about initiatives to move a law library forward — that is, sharing conceptualisations

— is not only healthier for all parties, it encourages dialogue between leaders and followers. Servant leaders empower others to find their voices and, with blended voices, change happens. This is truly a wonderful metaphor to illustrate conceptualisation and the power of influence in the servant-led organisation.

Foresight is another quality necessary for an individual who wishes to lead an organisation forward. Moving toward a goal requires leaders who are acutely aware of the present, able to learn from history, and able to divine possible consequences of proposed future actions. Greenleaf wrote that the abilities to ‘know the unknowable’ and to ‘foresee the unforeseeable’ are intellectual capacities that are not academically taught.

Servant leaders are committed to the growth of others and do not treat employees as fungible instruments to be used. The servant leader sees and cares for followers in a way that reaches beyond each person’s contributions as an employee of the organisation. On a more global level, the servant leader is acutely aware that the growth and complex nature of society and the creation of large, impersonal institutions have made the need to build community more exigent than ever.

Self-interest simply does not have a place in this paradigm. The community that the servant leaderbuil ds is a team that works synergistically since the true servant leader is interested in developing leaders and does not hoard decision making. For many of us, especially in law libraries, steward is often used synonymously for guardian or fiduciary. If we were to closely examine the meaning of the word, however, guardian expresses control, as in guardians of a legacy; whereas the precise meaning of steward has more to do with being entrusted with another’s property or managing another’s affairs. It is closer to the word fiduciary. A servant leader has such a stewardship relation with his or her staff; the emphasis is not on control, but empowerment.

Servant leaders do not coerce or manipulate staff members into compliance. They serve their staff by enabling them to do excellent work. In cases where the leader/follower relationship is not coalescing, the servant leader has the courage to act and the fortitude to have meaningful dialogues with negative staff members for whom responsibility and accountability are foreign. This is very important in law libraries; passive aggressive tactics such as back benching and playing ‘gotcha’ rob energy and delay staff’s abilities to make exciting programmatic progress.

There are a number of possibilities for the disconnect between the workplace and the authentic persona. One explanation for the dissonance is the generic masks of professionalism. If you are willing to try servant leadership, there is a way. Servant leaders suspend ego-driven motivation so that there is no need to put on masks. Authentic leaders never have to worry about telling workplace ‘white lies’ because they are trustworthy and truthful. A genuine servant leader does not say anything behind someone’s back that he or she would not say directly to the person. That is the freedom of practicing servant leadership.

To better understand what servant leadership is and how to apply its principles in law library program planning, imagine a library that wishes to launch a faculty research training program. The library leader is interested in helping faculty members learn about the library’s new electronic journals and databases. To plan for the event, a traditional leader might attend a reference meeting, identify the fact that faculty could use more information about electronic resources and how to access them, outline a solution to meet this need, talk for a few minutes about what should be included in a training program, and then leave. At this point, the staff would be charged with designing a program to fit what the manager wants. The project may or may not hit the target for the training that the faculty actually requires, or it may or may not be what the staff can successfully provide.

A servant leader would have a different approach to initiate this project. Such a leader would attend the reference meeting, state his or her perception of the faculty service needs, and then ask the reference librarians for their diagnosis of faculty needs. Some of the librarians might agree with the leader, but others may have encountered faculty with more pressing needs, such as building a course Web site, organising research notes, or using technology in classrooms. They don’t say that doing a workshop on electronic journals would be the wrong thing to do — perhaps the faculty would benefit from workshops on all of these topics. However, in the short term and to best serve the library client, the law librarians may triage to determine priorities and adjust the sequencing of the workshops as needed. The servant leader would employ the characteristics of empowering and listening to arrive, with the staff, at this point of decision making. In the course of planning for faculty workshops, the true servant leader would not micromanage the deployment of staff. Rather, the leader would guide the staff members, perhaps in a dialogic pattern and only as necessary, to make their own decisions about staffing, workshop content, timing, and other related issues. The servant leader would empower the followers to be leaders of their own destinies. The staff would own the project and would be given the responsibility and authority inherent in that control. But servant leadership is not a synonym for laissez-faire management. Communication with the staff during the planning process and a sincere desire to help via listening, finding resources for the project, suggesting alternatives, and offering constructive criticism when necessary are all emblematic of the servant leader’s way of proceeding.

In a world where very little is stable except the fact that change is here to stay, the hierarchical,

pyramidal organisational chart faces its own obsolescence. Although the predictability of upward and downward communication may be facilitated somewhat by the traditional pyramidal structure, hierarchical organisational structures also contribute to communications complexities and other dysfunctions in a large number of workplaces, including law libraries. One solution to this conundrum is to turn the outdated pyramid on its head. In such an organisation, staff at all levels are charged with the mission of the organisation. Every member of the law library staff, for instance, understands the big picture of the organisation’s short- and long-term goals, and as many individuals as possible are involved in decision making. Customer service and the well-being of library users are everyone’s concern. And what does the leader do in such a law library? The leader serves as the fulcrum of the pyramid, at its base, guiding the organisation by serving the employees and making sure that they have the proper resources to do their jobs.

There are a number of ways to imbue your law library with the principles of servant leadership.

One scholar of servant leadership suggests the TDOEE method. In TDOEE training, the leader is responsible for teaching the staff about servant leadership. The leader accomplishes this predominately through demonstrating servant leadership in action. The leader observes the staff members in action, and encourages and evaluates their progress. The best way to start a TDOEE training program in your library or law school would be to first select a few people who are open to the concepts of servant leadership. Meet with the small group of your staff or law school colleagues and teach them about servant leadership. Attend a servant leadership seminar together, discuss some servant leadership literature that you have all read, make plans for the organisation using servant leadership as your model. The most important element during TDOEE implementation is that you, yourself, are demonstrating servant leadership in your own actions. As your servant-leader mentees understand and use servant leadership in their departments and with their staffs or co-workers, observe their progress, give them feedback, and be sure to encourage them when the going gets tough. As a servant- leader mentor in your organisation, meet with your mentees and evaluate their progress. Ask them to evaluate your growth as well. One of the best ways to demonstrate servant leadership in action is to exercise humility by admitting your mistakes without putting up defensive barriers.

Another way to introduce the concept of servant leadership to your law library colleagues would be to start a servant leadership reading group. Begin with Journey to the East or Greenleaf’s essay, The Servant as Leader. In addition to these two seminal pieces, there are a plethora of derivative works to fit all levels of interest and leadership and management savvy.

Watching films or portions of films with your staff or an interested small study group, followed by discussion about the qualities of servant leadership depicted in the film, is another way to introduce servant leadership into your law library.

The Greenleaf Centre is a font of information about how to become and how to develop servant leaders. The Greenleaf Centre also sponsors servant leadership conferences and seminars.

Some management consultants specialise in servant leadership. For instance, at the annual Greenleaf Centre conferences, speakers, some of whom are former acolytes of Robert Greenleaf himself, share information about their professional consulting services in the exhibit area. There are a number of institutions of higher learning that have instituted degree programs in servant leadership. Finally, in addition to an online bookstore and catalogue, the Greenleaf Centre staff usually runs a conference bookstore at servant leadership seminars and meetings.

In Built to Last, the authors titled one chapter ‘Try a Lot of Stuff and Keep What Works.’ This is excellent advice about how to introduce servant leadership principles into your own work environment. Try a mix of methods: educate yourself, talk with others, make some small changes, experience success, try a little failure, let the folks that you work with see you fail, and then try again. You will not get anywhere unless you are in motion!

Servant leaders are stewards, coaches, and facilitators who ask such questions as: 1) What am I doing that helps you succeed? 2) What am I not doing that you need to succeed? 3) Where and how am I micromanaging? 4) What am I doing that you would like to do? 5) When and how do I shoot the messenger?

Our positions in law libraries are not immutable; we must look inward to know when our talents are called on to further the goals of our organisations in the role that best suits us and the institution at that particular moment. The process requires that we put ego aside and open ourselves to new ways of thinking about leadership: what it is and what we are able to contribute. Servant leadership offers a stimulating and life-enhancing alternative for the leadership of law libraries today and in the future.