toward their vision and priorities; (3) Individual accountability: What gets measured also gets managed and accomplished; (4) Manner of goal execution:
In accomplishing your goals how will you build trust, promote involvement, provide structure, facilitate learning and provide generative thinking, and built a healthy organizational culture that improves morale and reduces conflict and cynicism. Servant leaders at Dayton are specifically asked to use their positions and influence to empower those they lead, working alongside those being led as partners and in community. As Max DePree has so eloquently observed: “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality, the last is to say thank you, and in between the two, the leader must become a servant and a debtor” (1989, p. 11).
Quite literally, until recent years, the power inherent in the servant leadership model had never been properly researched or made operational.Jim Laub (1999) undertook this task through an extensive research project in which he employed a team of fourteen experts in the field of servant leadership to come to consensus on the essential qualities of the servant leader. Those writers includedJim Kouzes and Barry Posner (1995),Larry Spears (1995),Bill Millard (1995), andLea Williams (1996). Laub used the results of his study to create an operational definition of servant leadership as well as an expanded servant leadership model. His Organizational Leadership Assessment resulted from this study and provided a model by which servant leadership could be studied and measured systematically in organizations. Library faculty at Dayton will soon adapt this model (Fig. 1) to use, as one touchstone for reflection during yearly and mid-year Portfolio Review conversations.
“Leaders are perpetual learners” (Bennis & Nanus, 1985, p. 176). Servant leaders know they don’t have all the answers. They know they are still growing and becoming. They are open to input from all levels of the organization because they understand that each person is a necessary, unique, and valuable part of the whole.
Servant leaders need people; they need their potential, creativity, knowledge, questions, and ideas. Servant leaders are committed to freeing people to fulfill their potential, thus allowing people to grow individually and to contribute to the shared mission of the organization and its teams.
Personal Authenticity as Essential Element
Leadership is a matter of how to be, not how to do (Hesselbein, 1966, p. 4).
Importantly, leadership is about becoming an integrated human being. Such integration includes one’s values, talents, personality, and self-image. Leadership excellence requires being in touch with one’s mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual aspects (Nahavandi, 2000), including one’s gifts, passions (Vicere &
Fig. 1. Servant Leadership at Dayton.
Fulmer, 1997), personality, intellect, competencies, personal aspirations, and family and community life (McCauley et al., 1998). Effective leaders understand themselves, learn to set personal goals, and work to achieve those goals through their self-selected plans and abilities (Kouzes & Posner, 1993). This type of self- understanding includes areas such as strengths, weaknesses (Nahavandi, 2000), authenticity (Ruderman & Rogolsky, 2001), and self-leadership (Sims & Manz, 1997). Personal development as a leader is a process that includes discovering
who you are, as well as what skills you possess (Bennis, 1989). Bennis (as cited in Kouzes & Posner, 1993) observed that, “Until you truly know yourself, strengths and weaknesses, know what you want to do and why you want to do it, you cannot succeed in any but the most superficial sense of the word” (p. 59). Specifically, Nouwen (1996)indicated that future leaders who embrace a Christian worldview will be most effective when they rediscover their true identities and stand before the world authentically.
That leaders should be authentic, self-aware, and able to act on the basis of that awareness is a key premise of the servant leader model at the University of Dayton libraries. M. N. Ruderman has concretely observed that: “Feeling authentic, living a life that is strongly connected to one’s belief system, is energizing and promotes growth, learning, and psychological well-being – all important elements of effective leadership and leadership development. Conversely, inauthenticity can often be recognized by others and become a disruptive, negative force in the orga- nization” (Ruderman & Rogolsky, 2001, p. 86). Authentic leaders are more agile in their behavior, more effective in decision making, clearer about motivations and expectations of others, and more flexible in adjusting to new situations (Lee &
King, 2001). Authentic leaders have a deep sense of purpose for their leadership and are true to their core values. They are people of the highest integrity who are committed to building enduring organizations. Authentic leaders see themselves as stewards of the assets they inherit and servants of all their stakeholders (George, 2003, p. 9).
Certain skills are necessary in order to remain authentic as a leader: learning to increase self-awareness, including discernment of things that are important and things that are not, and taking time to reflect on those things; learning to assess and evaluate one’s deeply held values; deciding to take action regarding priorities and potential life changes; and learning how to secure support for achieving one’s goals (Ruderman & Rogolsky, 2001). The benefits of practicing these skills are that leaders become more effective in working with others, and become more flexible and confident in their approaches to goal achievement (Lee & King, 2001).
Becoming the Learning Organization
To nurture leadership that makes a difference in the lives of others there is a com- pelling need for visionary leaders to demonstrate: (1) a commitment to build a collaborative culture of trust; (2) a personal mastery of the principles and practices to lead a generative learning organization; and (3) creative, conceptual, and col- laborative acumen to implement systems theory within one’s unit and throughout the organization. At Dayton, librarians and members of the Dean’s Leadership
Team are asked during yearly and mid-term appraisals to describe how they have assisted their colleagues in reframing approaches to leadership to better effect a servant modality and to derive actionable organizational learning.
Organizational learning is an interactive construction that transforms knowledge into informed practices. This occurs in a reflective process when accountability is assigned by the organization. Such learning is complete when it is internalized and acted upon by individuals and teams (Brown & Packman, 1999). The learning organization incorporates the full realm of theory, praxis, and practice in recognition of its norms and values. At the same time, it reflects on the organizational culture to generate further learning to foster self-renewal and self-organization (Argyris et al., 1985; Hodgkinson, 1991; Senge, 1990). Bennis summarizes the function of visionary leadership, within the context of a learning organization culture, by emphasizing the importance of purposes, beliefs, and vision as essential to the continuous improvement of people and programs (1984).
Without question, the work of Peter Senge has advanced the practice of systems thinking substantially. And,Senge (1990, 1994) promoted the building of learning organizations in which people continually expand their capacity to produce optimal results while fostering new and expansive patterns of thinking.
In a learning organization, shared vision and collective intelligence are set free, and leaders and employees continually learn how to learn and grow together (1990). Deming believed in the inherent desire of workers to learn, grow, and transform themselves and organizations through directed effort. He outlined his framework for leadership transformation in fourteen points. Two of the fourteen points focused on institutionalizing on-the-job training and a vigorous program of education and self-improvement (Deming, 1986). Senge built on the practice of learning in organizations by advocating the continuous testing of experience through reflective dialogue, and transforming that experience into knowledge accessible to the entire workforce in alignment with the mission, values, and vision of the organization (1994). Kolb (1984) promoted the concept of an individual learning cycle (i.e. reflecting, connecting, deciding, and doing) while Spears (1995)advanced the individual learning cycle.Handy’s (1990)concept of the learning wheel transformed into a variation that applied to teams (i.e. public reflection, shared meaning, joint planning, and coordinated action). Senge later incorporated team learning into his five disciplines (i.e. personal mastery, mental models, shared vision, team learning, and systems thinking).
Charan and Tichy (1998) discovered that winning organizations need to go beyond learning organizations and become teaching organizations. In their work with outstanding companies they suggest that teaching organizations are more inventive, agile, and come up with more responsive strategies.Dotlich and Noel (1998)furthered the concept of team learning and the work of Charan and Tichy
by institutionalizing the Action Learning framework at Honeywell and General Electric. Action Learning became widely recognized as a collaborative process through which to enable organizations to respond to major business problems and opportunities while developing key employees with the capacity to lead organizations in the desired strategic direction. Finally,Heifetz (1994)asserted that leadership is the process of influencing workers, units, and organizations to learn to solve their own problems rather than build dependency or co-dependency.
We would suggest that this is the essence of the learning organization.
Receptivity to Innovation and Change
Since organizations are most effective when the members share values, servant leader librarians learn that leaders should view organizational culture as a valuable resource to manage. However, if a leader takes up the difficult and time-consuming challenge to change the organization’s existing culture, the task may provoke anxiety because of the deeper levels of cultural assumptions. As students of leadership learn to reveal underlying assumptions within themselves, as well as develop a servant spirit that values the members of the organization (Laub, 1999), they become more adept at creating a culture of trust across their organizations.
An in-depth understanding of the dynamics of innovation and change is critical to understanding the very nature of leadership. The ability to be servant leaders who bring about informed and positive change in the world lies at the very core of the University of Dayton Mission Statement.Kotter (1996)contended that this ability to achieve positive change is essential to any kind of effective leadership, concluding that “leadership is a set of processes that creates organizations in the first place or adapts them to significantly changing circumstances.” Faculty and staff passion to become change agents, however, must come from a strong sense of value and purpose. Tellingly, Fullan (2001) proposed that moral purposes and noble crusades will lead to nothing more than martyrdom without an understanding of the dynamics of change.
Advisedly, any solid study of change theory must inform the astute servant leader. A review of the literature associated with Lewin’s (1951) unfreezing, move- ment, refreezing approach is helpful; but more critically, today’s focus must be on more modern approaches that would includeWheatley’s (1999)look at the new sciences,Senge’s (1990 and 1999)learning organization approach to change, and much earlier,Koesler’s (1967)landmark exploration of chaos theory. Additionally, Hord et al. (1987)stressed the need to address concerns in the change process and developed the Concerns Based Adoption Model.Millard (1994) expanded this concept to create the Change Concern Cycle, proposing that this process is
constantly cyclical because each previous cycle ends with the introduction of revisions and new ideas, which automatically initiates the process all over again.
Understanding the role and relationship between individuals and organizations is critical in the change process. Critically,Black and Gergersen (2002)observed that most approaches are backward, trying to change all layers of an organization in hopes that the individuals will follow. They concluded that lasting change occurs when individuals are changed first, with the organization following.
One of the most important components in developing a servant leader may be his or her dexterity in the application of ethical principles that must necessarily govern and administer the organization. Such principles are, unfortunately, rarely surfaced and brought to the conversation table. Pointedly, they need to be. Librarians at Dayton are urged to reflect on the organizational culture by attending to the details of organizational structure, organizational relationships, and the clarification of roles.
Such analysis includes not only structures and roles, but also operational processes and systems design. Moorhead and Griffin (1995) suggest that one of the most critical roles of understanding governance is “the structural policies that affect operations and prescribe or restrict how employees behave in their organizational structure” (p. 391). As library leaders grow to understand structural models, they likely will apply them to the servant leadership and collegial models (Laub, 1999). Each member of the Dean’s Leadership Team has attended, over recent years, the ACRL/Harvard Leadership Institute and, accordingly, is able to apply at learning experience’s focus on theBolman and Deal (1997)frames of leadership (the political, human resource frame, symbolic, and structural frames) through which to assist them with leading through governance issues.
The management of any organization must take place within an ethical framework. As a Catholic and Marianist university, the University of Dayton holds that the ethical context of an organization is central to its effective functioning. Greenleaf (1991) suggested that the ethical component is always a part of the servant leader mentality – a moral principle to be trusted. Library and information service professionals at Dayton are urged to evaluate ethical dilemmas in organizational leadership and suggest concrete means through which to resolve such dilemmas.