Servant Leadership Quotes

“Don't assume, because you are intelligent, able, and well-motivated, that you are open to communication, that you know how to listen.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey Into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“The servant-leader is servant first, it begins with a natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first, as opposed to, wanting power, influence, fame, or wealth.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“Ego can’t sleep. It micro-manages. It disempowers. It reduces our capability. It excels in control.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“Ego focuses on one’s own survival, pleasure, and enhancement to the exclusion of others; ego is selfishly ambitious. It sees relationships in terms of threat or no threat, like little children who classify all people as “nice” or “mean.” Conscience, on the other hand, both democratizes and elevates ego to a larger sense of the group, the whole, the community, the greater good. It sees life in terms of service and contribution, in terms of others’ security and fulfillment.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“Moral authority is another way to define servant leadership because it represents a reciprocal choice between leader and follower. If the leader is principle centered, he or she will develop moral authority. If the follower is principle centered, he or she will follow the leader. In this sense, both leaders and followers are followers. Why? They follow truth. They follow natural law. They follow principles. They follow a common, agreed-upon vision. They share values. They grow to trust one another.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“Behind every great achievement is a dreamer of great dreams.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“Rabbi Heschel replied: “I would say: Let them remember that there is a meaning beyond absurdity. Let them be sure that every little deed counts, that every word has power, and that we can—every one—do our share to redeem the world in spite of all absurdities and all frustrations and all disappointments. And above all, remember that the meaning of life is to build a life as if it were a work of art.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“Now you can do as I do, stand outside and criticize, bring pressure if you can, write and argue about it. All of this may do some good. But nothing of substance will happen unless there are people inside these institutions who are able to (and want to) lead them into better performance for the public good. Some of you ought to make careers inside these big institutions and become a force for good—from the inside.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“One must not be afraid of a little silence. Some find silence awkward or oppressive, but a relaxed approach to dialogue will include the welcoming of some silence. It is often a devastating question to ask oneself-but it is sometimes important to ask it"In saying what I have in mind will I really improve on the silence?”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“Everywhere there is much complaining about too few leaders. We have too few because most institutions are structured so that only a few—only one at the time—can emerge.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“But perhaps the greatest threat is that we lack the mechanism of consensus, a way of making up our collective minds.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“There are legions of persons of good will who could sharpen and clarify their view of the more serving society they would like to live in and help build—if in no other way than by holding a deepened interest and concern about it and speaking to the condition of others. Is not such widespread action necessary if the climate that favors service, and supports servants, is to be maintained?”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“The outlook for better leadership in our leadership-poor society is not encouraging.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“There is a new problem in our country. We are becoming a nation that is dominated by large institutions—churches, businesses, governments, labor unions, universities—and these big institutions are not serving us well. I hope that all of you will be concerned about this. Now you can do as I do, stand outside and criticize, bring pressure if you can, write and argue about it. All of this may do some good. But nothing of substance will happen unless there are people inside these institutions who are able to (and want to) lead them into better performance for the public good. Some of you ought to make careers inside these big institutions and become a force for good—from the inside.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“Executive Growth and Selection. Every large institution that is to be optimal in its performance should produce leadership out of its own ranks. If it is to be exceptional, it should produce more leadership than it needs and thus export leadership to other institutions.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. Being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no “brief candle” to me; it is sort of a splendid torch which I’ve got to hold up for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“If foundations were substantially more creative, the first two of these conditions—the sentiment that foundations should be dispensed with and the ease of second-guessing their decisions—might be reduced to insignificance.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“If, as I have argued, all foundations have the obligation to be creative in the use of a substantial part of their funds, then trustees have the further obligation to set apart some staff members or consultants who are independent of the staff that deals with grant applicants. This separate staff should work on foundation-originated, creative projects exclusively, with complete insulation from involvement with grant applications and the decision process regarding them. In a large foundation this might work best if two wholly separate staffs were to report independently to the trustees.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“Foundations are the only category of institution that is wholly without a market test in the sense of clients or customers having immediate and direct sanctions at their disposal. All others—churches, businesses, schools, governments, hospitals, museums—have a market; that is, they have clients or customers whose support, or lack of it, has an immediate effect on the success of the institution. Foundations have only to meet the requirements of the law, and the only recourse of individuals is through the political process.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“But the conventional practice, particularly in a large foundation, is to delegate administration to a hierarchical staff structure, much as a business board would do it. And when bureaucratic inertia takes over, as it does—in time—in all institutions that are so structured, the usual remedy is to install a new top administrator who will build some new life into it.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“A foundation is essentially a group of trustees who manage a pool of uncommitted funds that can be used for a wide range of socially beneficial purposes. This is a very privileged role, not just for what can be accomplished by giving money, but for the opportunity for the foundation to make of itself a model of institutional quality, integrity, and effectiveness.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“The great asset of a broad liberal arts education, as I know it, is that it does not have much bearing on any vocation in particular but has great relevance to all vocations in general—provided that the college environment within which it is carried out is accepted as real, as real as any chapter in one’s life, and provided that an explicit effort is made to prepare students to serve and be served by the present society, using the college experience as the working laboratory.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“You can see in the way I have stated this that I reject the idea (which I have heard from both faculty and students here at Dickinson) that there is a real world outside beyond these walls and that what you have here is something else—a place where you prepare for the real world. If I hear you correctly, you have accepted a terrible limitation. This place is just as real as anything its students will ever experience. It is real because the ambiguities are here—as rich an assortment as will be found anywhere.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“Part of the ambiguity that students need to learn to deal with in the course of their preparation to serve and be served by the present society is that it is a high form of art to ask the right questions. But it is also unrealistic to expect that someone else has answers for them. I said at the outset that many of the questions students have asked me during these days I regard as unanswerable except as one ventures into some experience and learns to respond, in the situation, to the immediate problems one confronts. And to do this one must have learned how to open one’s awareness to receive insight, inspiration, in the moment of need. One must accept that only venturing into uncertainty with faith that if one is adequately prepared to deal with the ambiguity, in the situation, the answer to the questions will come. The certainty one needs to face the demanding situations of life does not lie in having answers neatly catalogued in advance of the experience. That, in fact, is a formula for failure—one is surprised, sometimes demoralized, by the unexpected. Dependable certainty (which we all need a lot of) lies in confidence that one’s preparation is adequate so that one may venture into the experience without pre-set answers but with assurance that creative insight will emerge in the situation when needed, and that it will be right for the situation because it is an answer generated in the situation. A liberal education provides the best context I know of for preparing inexperienced people to venture into the unknown, to face the inexactitude and the wildness, with assurance. But, having said that the conventional liberal arts curriculum is the best context for such preparation, I must also say that it usually does not contain the preparation—and it should.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“The world of affairs, as I have experienced it, is a very ambiguous one. The problem of preparing people to serve and be served by this society is, as Chesterton says, that the world is nearly reasonable but not quite. It is not illogical, yet it is a trap for logicians.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“The editorial in the current Dickinsonian (which I thought was a very good editorial) quotes a previous president as stating it in these words: “The grand design of education is to excite, rather than pretend to satisfy, an ardent thirst for information; and to enlarge the capacity of the mind, rather than to store it with knowledge, however useful.” My own inclination would be to state the goal in more operational terms: “to prepare students to serve, and be served by, the present society.” By this I mean that a college, operating through the program its faculty chooses to design, will influence its students to be a more constructive building force in society and to do this in a way that helps them find their own legitimate needs, psychic and material, better served, than if they had not participated in the college program.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“The faculty members who support these three contentions will tell you that the fundamental flaw in the structure of the university is that the faculty governs the institution, yet the primary loyalty of too many faculty members as individuals is not to their university or even to their students, but to their discipline, their professional expertise and reputation, and their colleagues that share these in universities generally. Perceptive faculty members know this, and the donors know it. And the donors are wise enough to accept that they cannot, and ought not, use their influence to try to change the predominant loyalty of faculty members. Perhaps this is what a good teacher-scholar has to be. The donors also know that the trustees have given the faculty so much power that the administrators cannot lead them in their educational goals. So the trustees must assume more leadership.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“But now that 50 percent of the young people are involved in some post-secondary education, the structure of the institution and its impact on values have become a matter of concern.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“D. The donors do not trust the governance structure of the typical university in which trustees are in a nominal and reactive role. They believe that if the usual process of university governance were going to produce an answer to the need they clearly see, it would already have done it. The need, as they see it, is not obscure. So if a better way is to be forthcoming, something has to change. The change they are proposing is that trustees shift their role toward more affirmative educational leadership.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness

“The cause of the oppressiveness and the precise circumstances are different, but the pervasive oppressiveness is very similar. And the remedy, I believe, is the same: raise the spirit of young people, help them build their confidence that they can successfully contend with the condition, work with them to find the direction they need to go and the competencies they need to acquire, and send them on their way. This is the task that is right for secondary education—and the time is right.”
― Robert K. Greenleaf, Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness