Greenleaf on Servant-Leadership: Who Is the Servant-Leader?

Robert K. Greenleaf coined the term servant-leadership in his seminal 1970 essay, "The Servant as Leader." The servant-leader concept has had a deep and lasting influence over the past three decades on many modern leadership ideas and practices. Greenleaf spent his first career of 40 years at AT&T, retiring as director of management research in 1964. That same year Greenleaf founded The Center for Applied Ethics (later renamed The Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership). He went on to have an illustrious 25-year second career as an author, a teacher, and a consultant. Greenleaf, who died in 1990, was the author of numerous books and essays on the theme of the servant as leader. His available published books now include The Servant-Leader Within (2003), Servant-Leadership (2002, 1977), The Power of Servant-Leadership (1998), On Becoming a Servant-Leader (1996), and Seeker and Servant (1996), along with many other separately published essays that are available through The Greenleaf Center. This short excerpt from Greenleaf's essay "The Servant as Leader" contains an essential understanding of the origin of the term and definition of servant-leader. Here Greenleaf relates how his reading of Hermann Hesse's Journey to the East led to his developing the servant-as-leader terminology.