Servant Leadership: Serve to Be Great

Culturally, women have been educated to serve. At least in my generation this has been that way.

From little kids, our games have to do with the care of others. When they give us dolls that we pretend are our children, we play to feed them, dress them, take care of them.

When we play to be a teacher, we develop our protection and care for our fictional or even, sometimes real students.

In my case, I was fortunate to have many siblings, and the students of my games were flesh and blood. My younger siblings were the victims of my first practices in teaching. And, maybe I was a good teacher, or maybe they were very clever, but the truth is that they learned very well and very fast.

And not only in games were women influenced to service to others. Girls also had to help Mom in the housework, help Mom to serve the table, and be on the lookout for everything Dad and brothers needed.

That is to say that we have very much incorporated service to others as part of our "being woman".

I do not want to judge whether this is good or bad.

I do not have enough knowledge to know if we do good or bad in continuing to give dolls to our own daughters and let them play as a teacher.

What I do want to rescue, is that women who grew up in that environment, are naturally prepared to serve.

And, as a result, female leadership has a much to do with servant leadership.

Women leaders often look out for other people, care about their well-being, what they need, and how they can help themselves grow.

Many authors assign to women the characteristics of being more sociable, with a greater tendency for cooperation, inclusion and care of people, forming teams that look like families.

We know that it was Robert K. Greenleaf, who in the 1970s coined the term "servant leader" - helpful leadership or service leadership, inspired by the book "Journey to the East" by Herman Hesse, where a group of travelers Travel and take a servant to perform the less important tasks. The interesting thing is that when the servant leaves them, they cannot continue. Greenleaf finds in this novel that the leadership of the journey was exercised by the servant, in silence, and from his tasks of service to others, he was the true leader of the group.

As stated on the Center for Servant Leadership- Robert K. Greenleaf website, "The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead... ".

From the above, I think we can say that in general women leaders naturally develop a style of servant leadership as a result of our training of women by women.

To conclude, I would like to recall a phrase from a great woman leader, a servant leader par excellence, Mother Teresa of Calcutta:

"He who does not live to serve, does not serve to live”.