Finding Leo: Servant Leadership as Paradigm, Power, and Possibility

By Philip Mathew, Larry C. Spears and Shann Ray Ferch

Transform yourself and your organization through the power of servant leadership. In this informative and inspiring book, Mathew traces the true life stories, struggles, and enduring wisdom of ten men and women who changed the world by serving others. Based on Larry C. Spears's ten characteristics of a servant leader, Finding Leo engages the reader in a clear and compelling portrait of this powerful leadership philosophy through a vivid analysis of contemporary and historical servant leaders including Southwest Airlines CEO Herb Kelleher, Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman, missionary to the poorest of the poor Mother Teresa, educational activist Malala Yousafzai, Quaker abolitionist John Woolman, freedom fighter Mahatma Gandhi, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Greenbelt Movement founder Wangari Maathai, Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. From the classroom to the boardroom, the leadership lessons found in Finding Leo form an essential and practical guide for individuals, organizations, and communities looking to live for a higher purpose and seeking a path forward through others-centered leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Oct 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781725293311

Philip Mathew

Philip Mathew is program director and professor of organizational leadership at Weatherford College. He holds a PhD in leadership studies from Gonzaga University. He is coeditor of Global Servant-Leadership: Wisdom, Love, and Legitimate Power in the Age of Chaos and a member of the editorial review board for the International Journal of Servant-Leadership.

Book preview

1

Herb Kelleher: The Servant-Leader and Listening

Most multimillion-dollar business plans aren’t sketched on the back of a cocktail napkin.¹ But for Herb Kelleher, co-founder and CEO of Southwest Airlines, business as usual was rarely an option. In 1967, Kelleher’s friend Rollin King shared an idea with him that would change the way the airline industry did business. Fortunately for Southwest, Kelleher was all ears. Kelleher and King would shake up the airline business with an unusual plan—operate a low-cost, no-frills airline routed through regional airports to ensure speedy connections and even shorter turnarounds.² Fares would begin as low as $10. The Southwest Effect, a phrase coined by the United States Department of Transportation, would change flying forever.³ Today, hanging on the wall of a Southwest boardroom, pinned to a wooden plaque, is a cocktail napkin—sketched in the middle is a golden triangle connecting the cities of Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio. It was a simple idea that would disrupt an entire industry.⁴ A closer look at Southwest Airlines reveals, however, that its success was not based solely on an innovative business model.

Kelleher’s response to King was representative of an organizational culture deeply rooted in the first characteristic of servant-leadership—listening. Robert Greenleaf considered listening to be the foundational characteristic of servant-leadership, for the other nine flow out of this fundamental practice.⁵ Larry Spears described it this way,

Leaders have traditionally been valued for their communication and decision-making skills. Although these are also important skills for the servant-leader, they need to be reinforced by a deep commitment to listening intently to others. The servant leader seeks to identify the will of a group and helps to clarify that will. He or she listens receptively to what is being said and unsaid. Listening also encompasses hearing one’s own inner voice. Listening, coupled with periods of reflection, is essential to the growth and well-being of the servant-leader.⁶

Servant-leaders listen first. They listen authentically to the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of others. Kelleher considered listening to be a business advantage. The Dalai Lama echoed this notion, When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.⁷ As we examine this first characteristic of servant-leadership, let us begin with a look at Kelleher’s formative years to see how they set the stage for a listen-first model of leadership.

Listening as a Core Value

Born on March 12, 1931, Herb Kelleher was the youngest of four children. His mother, Ruth Moore, served as his first role model. She explained that leadership begins with an attitude of care and concern for others. He recalled,

She was very ethical. . . . We’d sit up and talk to two, three and four o’clock in the morning when I was quite young, about how you should behave, the goals that you should have, the ethics that you should follow, how business worked, how politics can join with business, and all those sorts of things.⁸

Ruth modeled the core values that Herb would carry into the business world. As described by leadership researchers Yeh and Yeh,

Kelleher attributes his fundamental value of ‘doing good for others’ to his mother, who taught him that a person’s essential worth comes from the contribution that he or she makes. It’s not surprising, then, that throughout his life Kelleher has never been concerned about position or title and stands out as one of the few great American CEOs truly without ego.⁹

After graduating from New York University’s school of law, Kelleher opened a firm in San Antonio, Texas. It was there that he would meet Rollin King, one of his clients. When Kelleher first heard King’s proposal, he actually thought it was a bit crazy, but he was willing to hear him out. In all likelihood, King’s idea would have failed to germinate if Kelleher had engaged in what leadership consultant Stephen Covey described as autobiographical listening.¹⁰ An autobiographical listener enters a conversation with his or her own frame of reference (e.g., Oh yes, that reminds me of the time that I . . .). It has been said that the opposite of talking is not listening, but waiting to talk!¹¹ This attitude blocks our ability to listen to others.¹² A more effective way is the practice of active listening.

Rather than waiting to reply, an active listener responds by restating a paraphrased version of the speaker’s message, asking questions when appropriate, and maintaining moderate to high nonverbal conversational involvement.¹³ According to Covey, great leaders seek first to understand and then to be understood.¹⁴ In my work as a counselor, active listening became the center of my practice and laid the foundation for successful client outcomes. Likewise, listening can transform individuals, families, organizations, and society itself. Later, we look at the skills involved in active listening.

Listening as a Business Value

Kelleher’s commitment to listening was evident in his role as Southwest CEO. In the high-stress world of airline customer service, Kelleher placed people at the center of his company. Southwest hired first for attitude and then for skill—welcoming those who could handle pressure with a positive attitude and empathy. Kelleher rechristened the Human Resources department as the People Department.¹⁵ Rather than organizing around a traditional hierarchy, Kelleher placed responsibility and authority for problem-solving in the hands of employees. He encouraged them to listen to customer needs and then empowered them to respond quickly. At Southwest, there was no need to wait for a green light from a supervisor because Kelleher believed the people closest to the problem could be trusted to solve it .¹⁶ He noted,

We’ve tried to create an environment where people are able to, in effect, bypass even the fairly lean structures that we have so we don’t have to convene a meeting of the sages in order to get something done. In many cases, they can just go ahead and do it on their own. They can take individual responsibility for it and know they will not be crucified if it doesn’t work out.¹⁷

When it came to managing workplace conflicts, Kelleher placed listening at the center as well. He replaced a traditional conflict reporting system with face-to-face dialogue sessions. Framed as information-gathering meetings and learning experiences, he encouraged people to come together to resolve their differences. The goal was to discover and learn, rather than assign blame and find fault. At these meetings, conflicting parties shared their thoughts, perceptions, and feelings in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the issues at hand.¹⁸ This approach is supported by research on high-performance teams, which indicates that constructive conflict management promotes higher-quality decisions and positive organizational outcomes.¹⁹

In their extensive study on Southwest Airlines, Freiburg and Freiburg described how listening influenced Kelleher’s vision as a servant-leader,

Lots of assistants and big corporate staffs, for example, promote a ‘My people are here to serve me’ attitude that is antithetical to Southwest’s family philosophy. . . . Instead of just walking up to the second floor to talk with a colleague, an empire builder communicates through assistants, fostering communication that is distant and cold that increases the probability that information will be transmitted