Cultivating a Servant Heart: Insights From Servant Leaders

By Caitlin Mae Lyga Wilson

Take a journey of leadership development and community service with # of prominent servant leaders.

Follow along the inward journey of Servant Leaders as # of community leaders and influential businesspeople share insights and stories about their life's work. These stories, woven together with the unifying threads of our past, present, and future, are filled to the brim with inspiring insights and life lessons.

Whether it be a nonprofit, large corporation, faith community, or the city streets, these leaders take readers along through their childhoods, leadership development, visions for the future, and the passions that continue to energize and cultivate their servant leadership lifestyle. Readers will learn exactly how servant leaders have, and continue to, nurture hearts of love, and do the work of softening the heart—a task that is never done.

Readers will learn lessons about:

Community building

Sacred listening

Leadership development

While the contents of the book read like a well-told story, it also works as a guide for all those who seek to serve others, build compassion, open hearts, and develop strong bonds within their community. Whether you are a practitioner of traditional servant leadership or not, these insights can be applied to any person in any situation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing
• Release date: Oct 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781682753767

Book preview

Opening

In this opening I offer what feels intuitive to share right now with you, beloved reader, as you hold the important question of how to cultivate a servant heart.

If we listen closely to fear, anger, and division that surrounds us, we may really hear we are living in a time of collective yearning for deep connection.

Indigenous author, teacher, and advisor Sherri Mitchell writes of the great difference in values between Euro-American societies and Indigenous Peoples. Our larger society has valued individuality, youth, competition, aggression, speaking, conquest, arrogance, saving, exclusivity, fragmentation, and winning. Traditional Native American values run in stark contrast: community, elders, cooperation, patience, listening, harmony, humility, sharing, inclusivity, wholeness, and collaboration.

One may look at our times and see an era where the greatest choice we can make is to reimagine what we value. A re-returning to precolonial, prepatriarchal society principles. Today’s prophets are speaking ancient wisdom into modern life. They are pointing to what our elders taught us: We are living in a time of prophecy.¹

We are beautifully complex humans, full of emotions, stories, hormones, and an overriding, intuitive capacity to love, should we choose it. Once we become aware, we can choose it; once we choose it, we continue to choose it; once we have ingrained it into our way of living, we can inspire others to live in this way; when we are inspiring one another, we tend our collective yearning.

To inspire a life of love over self is to be a servant leader. And now, we need awakened servant leaders to awaken the servant leader inside all of us more than ever—in all walks of life, all corners of the world, all dimensions of living.

There is something special about the heart of a person who lives her life this way.

The short novel The Journey to the East, written by Herman Hesse and published in 1932, inspired the life work of Robert Greenleaf, the founder of the modern servant leadership movement. Within its pages, Greenleaf saw our human dilemma: Except as we venture to create, we cannot project ourselves beyond ourselves to serve and lead.²

One may claim Greenleaf dedicated himself to the questions, What is servant leadership, and why servant leadership?

The next question is, How? How do we cultivate servant hearts?

The inspiring insights and stories that follow were shared by servant leaders in the field. Humans who have made it their life work to serve in several different types of environments—schools, organizations, faith communities, city streets. They describe their childhoods, journeys, visions of the future, and passions—all of which continue to cultivate their servant hearts.

This is a book about how servant leaders have begun—and continue to—cultivate hearts to love. Continue to because the work of softening the heart is never done.

This book was the idea of my teachers and mentors, Dr. Rick Kyte, Tom Thibodeau, and Sam Scinta. It was their vision for a book of interviews with people practicing servant leadership in the field, organized by seven key questions, instead of topics. This instinctive, rather than premeditated, approach may be better suited to reveal truths to each of us, for it is through intentional action woven with contemplation and reflection that we best answer our own life questions.³

The people we chose to interview represent the diverse range of applications to which servant leadership can be applied. Our interviewees are not just working in business settings, but among those experiencing homelessness, as part of faith communities, in schools, and in families. The decision to expand beyond business and institutions was deliberate; servant leadership in this experience may be thought of more as a way to live one’s life rather than a theory of management.

Kyte emphasizes, Human Beings are storytelling creatures. We live not just in the present, but in the future and past as well, and our lives are interwoven into the lives of others: our real lives and our possible lives are interwoven with the real lives of others, and the threads weaving them together are named hope and regret.⁴

I wanted to go as deep as I could into each person’s heart, so I structured our conversation around an arc of past, present, and future. Reflection in the past, intention in the present, aspiration in the future.

One of the more poignant moments of the interviews came when an interviewee told me he felt seconds away from transcendence at any given moment—and then our call disconnected. This was a message to me: focus on the inner life. The inward journey. A concept I have become passionate about through my own life experience.

Another particularly moving moment was a story another interviewee shared about a tree that saved his life. This first caught my attention (two months prior my son’s life was saved by a tree—a lower branch slowed his fall from a higher branch enough that it softened the impact). He went on to put himself in the shoes of the tree, and its life purpose: to save him. His message, Be the tree, left me with the questions: Who was I born to save? And am I intentionally cultivating a heart, the inner conditions, to save?

Orientation: Intention of the Work

In sifting through these interviews that illuminated the inner lives of servants—people who have cultivated the heart to save—I hope to provide you, my beloved reader, and all of us, collective wisdom that inspires us to embrace wherever it is we are on our inward journey toward service—and to continue it.

Vietnamese Buddhist monk and mindfulness teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote a book in 2014 called How to Love. It’s a little manual of teachings on how to love other humans. I like to think of this book as How to Serve.

The reflections and stories come from people serving a wide variety of humans—humans who are experiencing homelessness, learning, working, addicted to substances, teaching. The insights can be applied anywhere.

If you are on a servant leadership journey and looking to deepen your experience and soften your heart, these insights are for you.

Interviews with Servant Leaders

Stories and Insights from the Field

PAST

Reflecting on Foundations of the Journey (Where We Have Been)

Who were your earliest examples of leadership, and how did they shape you?

If we were all born with a map that revealed itself to us as we travel through life, what map were you born with? We can look to our roots for clues. Whether predetermined, serendipitous, or something else entirely, our earliest teachers ingrain our neural pathways with memories and stories that shape our identities.

Sue Rieple Graf

I had what some people would have considered an unconventional childhood. My grandpa, Stanley Sims—my mom’s dad—was my first leadership impression. He was administrator of Lutheran Hospital and retired just as I was going into middle school in 1971. My grandpa knew everybody in the hospital by name. The cleaning staff, the housekeeping staff, the nurses, the doctors.

I think a lot of leaders know their inner circle. They don’t always know the people at the bottom really doing the work. They don’t really get to know them, make a relationship with them, know enough to call them by name. My grandpa, I felt, valued everybody who contributed anything in the patient care circle. And those people who are sometimes overlooked, like your housekeeping at your hotel, your coffee maker. I think we don’t recognize those people enough and thank them for what they do.

A lot of people over the years have told me, Your grandpa always treated me like I was his equal. So I thought that was pretty cool. And my grandpa also had a vision to grow the hospital—he was a big-picture person. He looked at contingency plans when those weren’t even a thing. In 1961, there was a major fire at Lutheran Hospital, and more than a hundred people were evacuated safely in fifteen minutes. Now in 1961, there were not cell phones.