Serving or Saving?

Tomorrow, the Social Outreach team will be going to Edwards Middle School to present a lesson on Servant Leadership. Indeed, this reflects on the Leadership Institute's view of leadership as an act of "doing something bigger than yourself" (as Reid says in yesterday's blog post). That is something that we hope the children we have been teaching this whole term have come to appreciate, and tomorrow, we hope to consolidate this lesson.

However, I feel that it is very easy for us to profess servant leadership, and practice a form which is counter-productive. Many times people engage in activities where they believe themselves to be serving others. I fear that if not understood correctly, we may end up locking ourselves in a cycle of spoon feeding the people we hope to serve with pre-conceived solutions. In our enthusiasm to engage in servant leadership, we may laboriously figure out ways in which we can intervene in the communities of disadvantaged people with specific solutions to their specific problems. That way, we can find ourselves "saving" these people instead of serving them: we would, in our self-righteousness, provide solutions to the disadvantaged. And that way, we would be no better than the selfish leader because at the end of it all, this saving approach fulfills our egotistic desires.

I do not find "saving" to be a viable form of leadership. My understanding of leadership is that it is used to empower the people who are "led". The intellect and resources of the people are used to give rise to the change that the people who are led seek. To me, leadership is not serving through imposing (which is saving), it is serving through learning. As servant leaders, we need to be careful not to impose our ideals and ideas on others. We need to be willing to listen, learn and work hand-in-hand with the people who we "lead". Most of the times, these people have the answers to their own problems. We can serve these people by learning with them and bringing to the conscious realm these solutions that they have.

And I believe this is what Social Outreach is doing. Yes, we do have a curriculum. But it is a curriculum that forms the basis for learning together with the young people with whom we interact. Still, we, like every other change-driven agency, need to be wary of the human propensity to pursue ego and undermine mission. We need to constantly self-critique and make sure that we are, indeed, serving and not simply saving.

[Posted by Dalumuzi Happy Mhlanga]