Dialogues with Maria Pattison (4)
On servant leadership (Part 2)
A: So how does that work within the business model, the capitalist model…?
M: Well, there is another interesting area of ethics around leadership, which is called leadership and self -deception. And there is training and thinking around how people interact with another person, for example, in business you know there was a lot of talk about how do you motivate people? But now, people talk about how you can’t motivate another person but you can demotivate them, so instead of trying to think about these carrot and stick ways of getting people to do things that you want them to do, or even deceiving them by saying its one thing and then its not, you know… I think that’s why people think that ‘ we are all in it together’ is a deceptive kind of slogan because we are not all in it together, equally So leadership and self-deception asks the question, always brings it back to the individual leader that says ‘What am I not seeing?’ and of course the way to find out what you’re not seeing or hearing is to ask.
A: Like ‘What’s my blind spot?
M: Yes, the spirit of enquiry, asking people and therefore respecting another. And I think that’s where the financial impact comes in because if people feel more valued and therefore more respected they will perform better. That’s why you can demotivate people by not doing this. I mean a lot of business models, although the talk is around human resources, I mean I actually think the term ‘human resources’ is vile. I mean a human is not a resource, a human is a human being, you know! So it’s how we change that that view of the value of a human being, and I think that’s where, everybody has blind spots about other people, their attitudes and judgments, their preconceptions about how another human being will behave, so moving away from that particular position into one of empowering other people by asking questions as opposed to telling them what to do, so the servant leader is placing themselves and their skills at the service of not just the org to make money but the people who are part of that organization to make money but also the people who are part of that organisation, whose lives and families depend on it..
A: Who’s an example?
M, Mandela and Gandhi
There is a really nice saying about Gandhi which I love which is that, he had a practice of meditating an hour everyday before he did anything as a leader and then he was asked what he did about his meditation if conflict broke out, could he afford the time to meditate? And he said ‘No, no what I do is, I meditate two hours a day…’
A: Yeah that totally makes sense, because you have to go deeper to know how to deal with it.
M: And so wisdom is a quality of servant leaders…
A: So…can you train people to be servant leaders, or is it something that is coming innately as a gift…you have to be quite self aware don’t you?
M: You do have to be quite self-aware yes, so you can train them to be much more self-aware. Jim Collins talks about level 5 leaders, says that there is always a seed in that person and you can’t train a level 4 leader, an executive to be a level 5 leader but you can awaken he seed of level 5 leadership. I think its probably seeded quite young in life, where values of generosity and compassion are ones that are part of somebody’s background.
