Wade Westwood: An Assessment of Servant-Leadership

Wade Westwood

ORGL 530 Servant Leadership

Gonzaga University

Professor Larry Spears

5 December 2021

Wade Westwood is an engineering leader who describes himself as a change agent with the heart of a teacher,  and he enjoys driving bottom-line business impact for organizations. Wade is passionate about making the organizations and the organization’s people with whom he is associated as successful as they are willing to be.

Spears identified ten characteristics as markers of servant-leadership (Ferch et al., 2015), and while not an exhaustive list, comparing one’s actions and attributes against these characteristics can be an insightful way of measuring someone’s progress on their journey of servant-leadership. The ten characteristics of a servant-leader are Listening, Empathy, Healing, Awareness, Persuasion, Conceptualization, Foresight, Stewardship, Commitment to the Growth of People, and Building Community (Ferch et al., 2015). 

To be a servant-leader is to fulfill God’s purpose for us in this world. We are created in the image of God, “for we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared in advance, that we should live in them” (Eph 2:10). Good works are defined in the Gospel of John as loving one another: “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 14: 34-35). The Catholic Church says that, “to love is to will the good of the other” (USCCB, p. 436).  As servant-leaders, to will the good of the other before ourselves is to be more Christ-like; therefore, Wade should strive to be a servant-leader to better fulfill God’s will.

Greenleaf (2002) states, ““If one is servant, either leader or follower, one is always searching, listening, expecting that a better wheel for these times is in the making” (p. 23). While all ten characteristics are of course important, as a servant, while Wade is searching, listening and expecting, Wade should work to hone his five weakest characteristics of servant-leadership: listening, empathy, healing, stewardship and building community.

There are two ways in particular that Wade can improve his listening. Wade is an engineer by training, so listening as a superficial act may come easier to him than others – it is part of the problem-understanding phase of the problem-solving cycle. However, there is room for improvement for Wade to listen to others as a participatory exercise, rather than a one-way exchange of information. Secondly, Wade struggles with a desire to always be in control, and this desire for control can mute out the voice of God. 

As far as listening to others, Spears states “Greenleaf is very clear that the process of evolving as a servant-leader is founded upon a desire to want to listen to others, to listen more than speak, and he sees it for a very strong foundation for growth as a servant-leader” (Ferch et al., p.81). If one were to tally the number of times per day that Wade speaks and Wade listens, it is likely that the listening count would well outnumber the speaking count. However, Wade must consider why he is listening and how his style of listening affects his ability to lead. Is he listening only to be presented with information so that he can make a decision or act, or can Wade participate in the dialogue to create even more opportunities to listen and more importantly, to understand?

To consistently mute the voice of God would be a tragedy, yet that is the risk that Wade runs should he not actively seek to listen to God on at least a daily basis. Ann Mcgee-Cooper struggles with the control issues, and states that as a servant-leader, she has to regularly pray, “I will to will Thy will” (Ferch et al., p. 132). By creating time and space in the day to actively listen to God, Wade will be responding to an invitation to better align himself with God and God’s will. According to Thompson, God speaks, and God speaks first. Wade must make himself receptive to hearing the voice of God, and daily prayer is a response to an always-extended invitation. “God is continually inviting us to communion and communication” (Thompson, 2000, p. 248). 

According to Greenleaf (2002), “there is something subtle communicated to one who is being served and led if, implicit in the compact between servant-leader and led, is the understanding that the search for wholeness is something they share” (p. 50), The search for wholeness is a shared desire by both servant and leader, which can serve as a ground to sow empathy; a prerequisite of wholeness is healing, so empathy can enable and catalyze healing by both and among servant and leader. A leader must be empathetic to himself or herself in order to enable their own healing, and they must be empathetic to others to will their good, which includes ultimately healing and wholeness.

In Servant-Leaders in Training, Horsman (2018) quotes Hall, saying, “Empathy is ‘reflecting and experiencing other people’s feelings and states of being through a quality of presence that has the consequence of their seeing themselves with more clarity, even without any words being spoken’” (p. 93). Servant-leaders should not evaluate a person based on his or her results alone; their state of being must be taken into account. Wade is a results-oriented individual, so actively considering the state a person was in as they produced a result must be an intentional act in order to better serve.

In Conversations on Servant-Leadership, Ken Blanchard states, “One of the key aspects of being a good servant leader is not only to have empathy for others but also to have empathy for yourself. I think it’s about being willing to be vulnerable” (Ferch et al., p.145). Like how an adult in an airliner that experiences depressurization must put on their oxygen mask first before putting on the oxygen masks of others, a servant-leader must first be able to be empathetic, compassionate, and ultimately forgiving toward themself until it is possible to truly be empathetic and help heal others. Wade holds himself and those on his team to a very high standard, which has proven to be useful in producing organizational results; however, in order to truly serve the people within the organization, Wade must empathize with himself and with those around him to drive toward a goal of humanity and wholeness, rather than a shareholder-based definition of success. 

The Jesuits seek to find God in all things (Jesuits, n.d.). Finding God in all things means also finding God in our shortcomings and our foibles. “A critical aspect of this process is learning to become authentically empathetic with ourselves. Essentially, this involves a capacity for healing and forgiving ourselves, others, and moving on” (Horsman, 2018, p.92). Servant-leaders must reconcile themselves to God’s will and allow themselves to be made new in order to more fully live in his image. “Lead us back to you, O Lord, that we may be restored: give us anew such days as we had of old” (Lam 5:21).

“Imagine a progression in your understanding that flows from slave to servant – servant to steward – steward to Servant-leader” (Horsman, 2018, p. 89). Wade spent the professional days of his twenties first educating himself, and then using that education to judge others at the top of the organizational hierarchies for which he served for the actions they took or the decisions they made. In his thirties, Wade became a manager professionally and a father at home, which illuminated the power of servitude. To continue progressing, he should focus on developing his stewardship. 

Specifically, this means making a difference today, where Wade is one manager of 9 in an organization more than 80,000 strong. There is a proverb in business communities and continuous improvement circles that states, “The fish rots from the head”, meaning that an organization’s success or failure starts at the top of an organization. While this statement is not untrue, it fails to recognize how small acts by servants can make a difference on a grand scale. Greenleaf (2002) states, “if more serving institutions are to be built, individuals who want to serve must, on their own, become institution builders where they are. Much zeal to build a better society is wanted because too many well-intentioned people flail away in all directions and insist on chemical illusions of instant perfection” (p. 68). 

In the introduction to The Power of Servant Leadership, Spears writes, “The servant leader senses that much has been lost in recent human history as a result of the shift from local communities to large institutions as the primary shaper of human lives. This awareness causes the servant-leader to seek to identify some means for building community among those who work within a given institution” (Greenleaf, 1998, p. 8). 

The characteristic of building community can sometimes be held in tension with the other Servant-leader characteristic of Conceptualization. Wade excels at conceptualizing large, inter-connected systems (like a chess game) and setting a vision for an organization to get from A to B, to dream great things, but this can sometimes come at the detriment of building community. Conceptualizing is a strength, but the individual pieces should not go out of focus either. Horsman (2018) states, “the stewardship of the wise caring elder looks to the general good of the whole as well as the specific while applying system thinking and strategies essential to the long-term as well as the short-term micro, meso, macro and mundo vision” (p. 90). 

Servant-leadership is a journey, not a destination. While the five characteristics detailed above should certainly be improved, improvement in these characteristics should not come at the expense of Awareness, Persuasion, Conceptualization, Foresight, or Commitment to the growth of people. When considering the Servant-leadership Dispositions, Capacities and Skills Matrix, Wade must focus on the first three capacities: a Servant-leader models a principle-centered empathetic moral capacity, a Servant-leader promotes community, a Servant-leader listens first, seeking clarity before influence.

Especially insightful in the content of module three was the idea that a person should be empathetic toward themselves. This was a spark that ignited a blaze of Biblical and catechetical research. The words regarding self-healing and wholeness had been read and heard prior, but had never rang so true. 

The goal of servant-leadership is to be more Christ-like, which ultimately means finding ways as leaders to re-gift the love God has given us. “If I speak in human and angelic tongues, but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy, and comprehend all mysteries and all knowledge; if I have all faith so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing” (1 Cor 13: 1-3).

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Greenleaf, R. K. (1998). The power of Servant Leadership. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler. 

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