The second myth of servant leadership is that it won’t work in organizations because people cannot be trusted.
A corollary to this myth is that the organizational “leader” must hold workers accountable because they do not hold themselves accountable. In reality, when leadership fails, it is because the leader does not hold trust as a value.

In a book entitled, Focus on Leadership, Leadership for the 21st century, edited by Larry Spears, the former Executive Director of the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, Max Depree writes in his article, Servant Leadership: Three Things Necessary, that good servant leaders work to build mutual trust. He cites a note written by an industrial designer which said “Your trust is the grace that enables me to be creative.”

Understanding the importance of trust is better understood by contrasting trust with its absence in the workplace and elsewhere.

In one institution, the President was famous for circulating the hallways. Ostensibly, he circulated because he wanted to be a “hands-on” manager, to know his workers and to solicit input.

When performance evaluations came due, it became clear what was his real purpose. Each employee who was not present for even one time when the President was passing through was marked down on “initiative” or “meets responsibilities.” In the opening meeting of the following year, the President emphasized the importance of being accessible to the customer, which meant to him that employees should always be at their desks. In reality, most contacts with customers occurred in the field, not in the office.

This approach stemmed from a basic view of humanity that humans can’t be trusted. Workers must be constantly monitored lest they not follow rules. Absence from their desks meant they were avoiding work in this leader’s eyes.

The end result was that more and more employees found reasons to be in the field. Some workers even arranged to have colleagues arrange to open their office, turn on their computer in their cubicle when they weren’t present. When no customers were present, office doors were closed. Lack of trust evolved into a toxic work environment whereby workers communicated less and less, did their best to avoid the President except to appear visible only when they were required to do so.

Contrast that to the statement “Your trust is the grace that enables me to be creative.”

Contrast the lack of trust to an adminstrative assistant who once worked for me who went out of her way to communicate to me the rare occasions when she commited an error. What I tried to do was to make sure that when errors occurred and they will in any organization, that we pulled together to fix those errors. It wasn’t long before she would report the error but nearly always reported that it had already been fixed. She also had no hesitation in identifying my errors-and then doing her utmost to help me correct them!

We all know or have worked in situations where a leader has trusted, has modeled trust, has avoided the punishment mode for redressing mistakes. What results is greater creativity, greater initiative, a tendency for mutual support to arise throughout the enterprise.

In the book, Learning to Serve, Serving to Learn, it is the “grace of sense, white light, still and moving. . ,” a line from T.S. Eliot which, in some ways, describes the very high level of trust to which servant leaders must aspire. It is this level of trust, once achieved, which allows the philosophy of servant leadership to have a powerful impact on the health of organizations and the persons working within it. To the extent that servant leaders foster such trust is the extent to which their colleagues will become strong servant leaders themselves. To the extent trust is negated by oppressive or deceptive leadership practices is the extent to which organizations can be harmed by lack of trust.

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