Challenging and Critiquing Notions of Servant Leadership: Lessons from My Mother

Abstract

In this chapter I offer a critique of Greenleaf’s notion of servant leadership through a feminist lens. I reflect on my own formative experience as the child living in the servants’ quarters of an English estate home where my mother served in the combined role of housekeeper, cook, maid, and scullery maid. I discuss the sense of perpetual humiliation and shame she felt living as a servant and how she emphasized the importance of education as a means to lift oneself out of poverty. I consider servant leadership as romanticized approach that fails to consider the aspects of servitude such as the subjugation of those who serve because they have no other choice. I consider how servant leadership has evolved to have an almost-pathological following, but without deep scholarly considerations of the limitations of this approach. I note that previous critiques of servant leadership have been dismissed by its proponents, resulting in a lack of criticality about this approach to leadership that was popularized by a white, middle-class American man whose lived experience never included working as a servant as his only means of survival.