Today was the first day of the National Servant Leadership Forum hosted by Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida. My dad and I came all the way out for it this year because of its emphasis on servant leadership and the quality of presenters. Our flight out was rough as we had a connecting flight get canceled, but we made it. We’re thrashed, but we made it. I’ll be posted my thoughts on the forum over the next couple weeks. I’ll give some brief summaries as well as some original thoughts (if I ever have any truly original thoughts).
Today was awesome though. The President, Mark Rutland, spoke first and he did a great session on stylistic range and servant leadership. I saw the presentations from last year on DVD and he really made a great improvement from last year. Ken Blanchard closed out the day and was great as always.
The best presentation of the day by far was Patrick Lencioni who spoke on both The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and his most recent book The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. Many of you may be familiar with Lencioni’s stuff. I’ve read articles by him, but have never finished one of his books. I’ve heard him before, but this presentation blew the socks off of all the others. One of the reasons may be that it was the first time that I really found him linking his work to the Biblical concept of servant leadership. Both my dad and I noticed a pretty dramatic increase in the amount of spiritual depth that he brought to his presentation and he referenced several times how much influence Ken Blanchard has had on him spiritually over the past few years. It was really cool to see Lencioni’s spiritual development and how it was impacting his scholarship as well as the kind of witness and impact Blanchard is having with his peers.
If you’ve read the book, you’ve seen the model below. The model captures the building blocks of a healthy team and he walks you through those levels as well as the role of the leader in overcoming the dysfunctions.
It’s a solid model, but here are some of the questions I’ve been thinking of since this talk…
- How does this model play out in a non-white or non-western context? It would seem that vulnerable trust (the cure for absence of trust) and passionate debate (the opposite of fear of conflict) are really hard to come by for some cultures – and I’m thinking more specifically Asian Americans because of my current ministry calling. How is vulnerable trust and the security and boldness to have passionate, ideological debates fostered in such a culture?
- How do you walk a team through this when so many leaders are insecure and seem to lack awareness of their own lack of vulnerability or openness to being influenced by others? I’ve heard of supervisors just giving teams or leaders “in trouble” the book 5 dysfunctions and then just expecting the teams to “work it out.” I think there is a lot to consider when trying to figure out how to foster vulnerability in a team and create openness, yet many leaders seem to want to demand trust. It’s as if they think, “If my followers would just trust me, then we would have a healthy team.” Hmmm. Lencioni was clear on articulating that servant leadership should inform this situation in the form of the leader taking it upon him or herself to foster that kind of vulnerability and trust. In other words, the leader more or less earns trust by demonstrating openness and vulnerability first and foremost and then by inviting the same from the team. Besides, it’s so effective when leaders communicate explicitly or implicitly that it’s the followers fault that they don’t trust the leader (hear sarcasm here).
That’s where I’m going to end now, but there’s more here that I’ll be getting to. But I love the emphasis on servant leadership and it’s relevance and application for all forms of leadership.
