Lead in the Service of Others

I recently had the privilege of delivering the keynote address to honors graduates at the Opus College of Business at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. Here are excerpts of my remarks. 

I’ve chosen to talk to you this afternoon about leadership. 

Let me say from the outset that I believe completely in core principles. I believe that if you get them right, anything is possible. If you don’t, nothing else matters. 

I believe the key to being an effective leader is to know – which is to say, to discover and learn over the course of your life, through as many different and varied experiences as possible, by making mistakes just as importantly as achieving successes – what the core principles are that you believe in. 

Rarely, if ever, in your career or even in your personal life, will the path forward be clear and straightforward. The typical environment a leader operates in is confusing, chaotic. Events move quickly. That’s more true today than ever before. Information is imperfect. Advice is contradictory. One person tells you one thing. Another person you respect just as much tells you something different. Uncertainty is the norm rather than the exception.

Only if your feet are planted squarely on solid ground, only if you are standing with absolute conviction on core principles, can you be an effective and authentic leader.

Former Medtronic CEO Bill George, my friend and mentor and one of the most respected corporate leaders in America, writes in his book, True North:

“Authentic leaders, people of the highest integrity, committed to building enduring organizations… have a deep sense of purpose and are true to their core values”.  

I spent 35 years running financial services businesses. Finance is a challenging, dynamic, self-disrupting industry in the best of times. Without question, the biggest challenge I ever faced was running a wealth and asset management business during the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009.

Few people outside the industry realize just how close we got to a complete meltdown of the world’s financial system. We walked right up to the edge and looked over into the same kind of abyss that is known in history books as “The Great Depression”. 

During that period, investors lost 50% or more of the value of their life’s savings. Stocks and bonds and mutual fund they had invested in with the understanding they could get their money back whenever they needed it to pay college tuition or make the down payment on a new house, those investments suddenly turned illiquid, overnight. Which was the equivalent, during the Great Depression, of banks locking their doors while depositors lined up around the block. 

The most frequent topic of my conversations with our financial advisors was what sleep medication or anti-anxiety medication they were taking.

I felt my career was at risk. My own financial situation was deteriorating even more quickly than our clients’. My head was spinning. I couldn’t sleep. I felt like I was falling down a metaphorical elevator shaft. 

At which point I remember thinking “You better get it together. If you don’t get your head straight you are going to lose control of your company and fail spectacularly at your job”.

I told myself, keep going down the elevator shaft until you hit bottom. Until you find solid ground. Which is ultimately what happened. 

At the bottom of that elevator shaft, I experienced a sort of epiphany – the realization that I didn’t matter. My own problems didn’t matter. My purpose, in that moment and going forward, wasn’t to worry about myself. It was to help others.

I remember having absolute conviction about that. And armed with a sense of conviction, I was able to act and to lead my company to the other side of the financial crisis.  

I now realize that in that moment, I discovered for myself what lies at the core of servant leadership, a construct developed and made popular by businessman Robert Greenleaf in a 1970s article, “The Leader as Servant”. 

“Servant Leadership,” wrote Greenleaf, “…assumes first and foremost a commitment to serving the needs of others. True leadership emerges from those whose motivation is a desire to help others.”

What a radically different view of leadership than what we see in the world today. 

We are living in an age of grandiosity. The imperial Presidency. The superstar CEO. In order to do what it takes to be elected to high office or to become a CEO, it seems necessary these days to have more than a little bit of narcissism in one’s character. The ubiquitous nature of media – traditional media and social media – has given rise to self-aggrandizement as an advancement strategy. 

But true leadership is exactly the opposite. It is about suppressing ego in the service of others. 

True leadership, in any organization, means understanding that as a leader, you hold a type of “office”, be it formal or informal, in which you have a responsibility to your constituents – employees, clients and customers, shareholders and the communities in which they live and work.

There is a close relationship between Servant Leadership and Stewardship, defined as responsibly managing what others have entrusted to your care. 

There is a close relationship between Servant Leadership and Community, underpinned by the notion that we are all responsible for the well being of other members of the community. 

Today, we inhabit a planet alongside billions of other people. More people than ever before in human history. We live in a globally interconnected “flat world” in which it can no longer be argued than any action by a private party does not have an impact in some way on someone else somewhere else in the world. 

In short, we live in a global community. 

And in that global community, leaders who stand on the solid ground of Stewardship values, who recognize that their primary responsibility is to others, not to themselves -- servant leaders, the kind of leaders you have the opportunity to one day be -- servant leaders are literally the key to our survival in the years ahead. They are the key to turning over to your children and my grandchildren a functioning society and an inhabitable planet.

Thank you, congratulations, good luck. Go forth and lead in the service of others.