Robert K. Greenleaf is generally credited with developing ideas we now refer to as “servant leadership.” As he explains in his eponymous essay (first published in 1970), and later developed into a book,

“The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

“The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?”

In Serve to Lead®: Your Transformational 21st Century Leadership System, James M. Strock provides a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effect system that will enable aspiring leaders to understand what Martin Luther King, Jr., meant when asserting that “everyone can be great, because everyone can serve…You don’t have to have a college degree to serve, You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve…You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.” You also need what Strock offers in this book: an abundance of practical advice that will provide invaluable assistance as the reader proceeds through the four-week process which is central to Strock’s “Serve to Lead” system. Throughout his lively and thought-provoking narrative, he anchors his insights in real-world situations and rigorously examines the major leadership styles and those who best exemplify them.

I recently re-read Greenleaf’s and Strock’s books because our nation is in desperate need of servers who lead as well as leaders who serve.

Servers who lead may not have impressive titles or positions of authority but they do have something far more important: The moral authority of a sincere desire to take initiatives that will make a positive difference, a determination to make the world better or at least more humane. For example, those Christians in Europe who sheltered Jews from the Gestapo during Hitler’s reign of terror did so knowing that, if caught, they and their loved ones would be summarily executed or forced to accompany Jews into the ovens.

We also need more leaders who see themselves as servants, women and men who are in positions of authority who consider it a privilege to serve the best interests of those entrusted to their care, for whom they have fiduciary responsibility.

According to an ancient African proverb, it takes a village to raise a child.

What must a nation do to raise the leaders it needs? I have some ideas. What do you think?