Servants of the Times: Process-Relation and Complexity in Servant First Leadership

Abstract

A bus seat in the first Colored row, an unusual flood of White commuters, a testy bus driver, a recently minted young minister, and a U.S. court order for desegregation, none of these are static items. Each is a happening in itself. Each is the product of a precipitating flood of moments leading up to an event or more than an event, a protracted event that history has dubbed the Montgomery Bus Boycott. On the other side of the 381-day ordeal Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as the nationally recognized leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) (Williams, 1996/2009). Common turns of phrase refer to the metal of such leaders suggesting their stance against the turbulence of the times is wrought from an ore deep within, implying that King was all he needed to be for that moment long before it arrived. Ella Baker, who worked closely with King in the SCLC, saw it differently. In her words “the movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement” (as cited in Williams, 1996/2009, p. 13). I cite Baker from Lea E. Williams’ prestigious volume because of Williams’ reflection on those words and on the leaders that grace her pages: “The confluence of unpredictable events created leaders appropriate for the times” (p. 13). The distinction in phase is perhaps subtle enough for a reader to overlook the seismic shift between those two ways of viewing leadership. If not apparent yet, by the end of this article I hope it is evident that Williams’ statement arises from a completely different ontology than the colloquial, “he rose to the occasion.” Instead of would be leaders stepping up to their moment on a timeline with cause and effect efficiency adding their desired effect to the cause, a confluence of unpredictable events is involved in a continual flow of time that at once encompasses profound bits of past, the very edge of the present, and the virtuality of what is yet to be. Williams (1996/2009) called her tome Servants of the People in reference to a leadership approach articulated by Robert K. Greenleaf in the years shortly following King’s assassination. Greenleaf (1977/2002) identified this approach in terms of what comes first: “It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first, then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first” (p. 27). Hints throughout Greenleaf’s works on Servant-Leadership reveal his perspective on the nature of time and of being that suggests not only is a servant first leader a servant of people, but I dare even to say a “servant of the times.” My hypothesis is that those who endeavor to be servant first leaders, not only as servants of people but as servants of the times, benefit significantly from: (1) adopting process-relational ways of viewing time and reality, (2) accepting that primary experience in social interaction continually shapes their identity, and (3) applying complexity theories from the physical and biological sciences to the social sphere of their leadership endeavor.