14 Strategic Leadership
Leadership as Service
For a number of contemporary commentators, these ideas lead to the con-
clusion that leadership is best understood as a form of service to others and to
shared values. The influential reflections of Robert Greenleaf have given the
notion of servant leadership an important place in discussions of the role and
responsibilities of leaders. As he puts it, “A new moral principle is emerging
which holds that the only authority deserving one’s allegiance is that which
is freely and knowingly granted by the led to the leader in response to, and in
proportion to, the clearly evident servant stature of the leader” (1977, 10). The
practices of leading through deep listening, persuasion, and empathy, and by
articulating a vision of new moral possibilities, are some of the components of
servant leadership.
Implications of the Contemporary Concepts of Leadership
Our description of some of the defining elements of relational leadership points
in many directions both to understand and practice leadership. To offer a working
definition for our purposes, we propose that leadership is an interactive relation-
ship of sense making and sense giving in which certain individuals and groups
influence and motivate others to adopt and to enact common values and purposes,
and to pursue shared goals in responding to change and conflict.
If leadership takes us to the fundamental conditions of human self-enactment
in groups, it also reveals essential human possibilities and needs. Leadership
ultimately has to do with the human condition (Goethals and Sorenson 2006).
A person does not live without values and commitments that make the human
enterprise itself worthwhile in facing the limits and threats with which he or
she must contend. Ultimately it is the protection and flourishing of their values
that humans seek in the leadership of their organizations and institutions. The
ultimate tests of leadership end up as moral and spiritual criteria because of the
way humans are constituted.
Implications for Higher Education
The framework that we have constructed gives us the insights, concepts, and
vocabulary to assess and to critique various theories of leadership in higher educa-
tion, and to draw useful perspectives from them. Most importantly, our phenom-
enology of relational leadership will serve as a central point of reference in our
efforts to describe a process of strategic leadership. We can already see in broad
terms the criteria that it will have to satisfy. The process will have to be
- Sense making and sense giving
- Collaborative and empowering
- Direction setting and values driven