What Is A Servant-leadership Culture? Corporate Leadership Training Programs
Q: What is a servant-leadership culture? Corporate leadership training programs
A:-Interesting question. One organization that comes to mind is one that I know very well, my Catholic church parish here in New Jersey.
For the past ten years plus, we have been endeavoring to operate under a model called "shared wisdom." The phrase comes to us from the work of Sr. Mary Benet McKinney whose book SHARING WISDOM (now out of print sadly) has been our guide.
In a shared wisdom culture, a number of attitudes and behaviors are critical and we have worked hard over the years to try to adopt them. For example, in shared wisdom, we say:
- that decison making is guided by the Spirit and
- that everyone has within them some piece of the wisdom that the group needs to discern the right course of action
- the group needs to create a space and a time for the Spirit to come through, and to use techniques (e.g. the Talking Stick) that facilitate such discernment
This is easier to say than it is to practice.
For many of us, it has been difficult to shift from our Corporate World selves, where we labor all day long, to the shared wisdom approach needed at our evening council meetings.
In the Corporate World, we are quite used to hierarchy and bureaucracy, to giving orders, holding meetings, tracking deliverables, and meeting deadlines. In a shared wisdom organization, it's both similar and quite different. Yes, the parish has a pastor and there is an org