1. In Preparation for Creating a Servant Leadership
Curriculum for Young Adults
Six Sections
A Leadership Disconnect
The Leadership We Have
Re-thinking the Leadership Lessons Young People Receive
Tenets of Servant Leadership Literacy
Interdisciplinary Insights for Servant Leadership
Design Questions For Developing a Servant Leadership
Curriculum
2. A Leadership Disconnect
Prevailing leadership understandings and behaviors
contribute to a global culture of economic and social
dysfunction.
Catastrophe for Billions of people
Our education systems operate in support of prevailing
leadership behaviors
3. The Leadership We Have
Current leadership understandings and practices are
sourced in a pre-historic archetypal mythology of
conflict and competition.
4. Re-thinking Leadership Lessons
Young People Receive
leadership is learned in a paradigm of market forces,
transactional authority, competition, winners/losers.
Servant leadership is introduced as a modern
alternative leadership paradigm
5. Tenets of Servant Leadership Literacy
Robert Greenleaf (1970) The Servant as Leader
“The servant-leader is servant first”
Larry Spears (1998) Insights on Leadership
Listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion,
conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, commitment to
growth, building community.
6. Listening, Empathy, Trust
Greenleaf describes a patient and empathetic style of
listening:
“I have seen enough remarkable transformations in people who
have been trained to listen to have some confidence in this
approach.
It is because true listening builds strength in other people”
7. Interdisciplinary Insights for
Servant Leadership
Servant leadership curricula are being developed and
included in regular coursework.
Literature, philosophy, the arts
Steinbeck, Daoism
Personalism, Feminist ethics
Music instruction, direction and performance
8. Design Questions For Developing a Servant Leadership
Curriculum
Examples
How can we develop curricula that assists students in identifying the difference between
parroting established norms and leadership.
How might young people’s experience of leadership be re-framed using principles of
equity and justice in contrast to authoritative power and competition?
What are some examples of, as Boggs describes, “processes and practices of a
disappearing industrial era” still being used in our schools and universities?
How does a focus on measures of economic success contribute to our current concepts
of leadership? and the way (i.e. pedagogy) young people learn about leadership?
What are some current educational practices that “fix or remediate” students in order that
they fit into the prevailing leadership paradigm of business?
What new practices could provide students the required skills to re-create the world they
want from shared values of justice and equity?
9. Design questions continued
Greenleaf describes “true listening” as the singular key quality of a servant leader.
How are students currently taught about “listening”?
How might students be taught this empathetic and patient style of listening?
How might this understanding of listening, framed as a leadership skill, be incorporated
into curricula and the daily activity of students?
If current curricula are seen to be structured in the context of productivity, how might
curricula be re-framed in a context of student well-being?
Describe how traditional, authoritative educational settings and activities could be re-
framed in the context of a servant leader approach.
How might athletics, student government, or club organizations, where student work
together using a leadership framework, be envisioned as servant leadership led
organizations?