Posts Tagged ‘leadership’
Quick thoughts on Service & Leadership
“The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. The last is to say thank you.”
Max dePree wrote that in his “Leadership is an Art” book over fifteen years ago. I once wrote a training class based on the contents of that book, and it is still one of the definitive pieces of leadership literature in my mind and library.
While this site is about service, I have to relate service to leadership and management. Leadership and management have been an integral part of my career from the beginning. I remember the first management training class I led as a brand new Training Manager in a huge company. There I was, a kid in his early twenties, trying to tell battle hardened frontline managers how to get the most out of their receiving dock workers… it was really intimidating. It would have been much worse had my new boss not sat me down and told me that “as a Training Manager, you have to be the ideal. You of all of the managers here MUST walk the talk, or you will have no credibility.” Then he handed me a copy of Robert Greenleaf’s paper “Servant as Leader”… Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: culture, leadership, service