The Ancient Future of Servant-Leadership
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Servant-leadership can be understood as bridging the modern necessity to work and lead within complex organizations and environments with the call for tapping into ancient wisdom that is absent from such settings. The servant-leader’s role is like that of the Peruvian chakaruna -- one that bridges the core reality of sacred ecology with that of civil society. Shamans have called upon chakaruna to mediate between what I call the dream of the world (global economic system) and the dream of the earth (embedded ecology). In terms of our world’s vernacular (that is, as educated members of the global system), a chakaruna is a “servant-leader,” one who serves life, but also knows how to leverage the system that he or she works in. The servant-leader has a foot in both worlds in order to bring them into harmony.An aspiring servant-leader is called to become a kind of neo-shaman within whatever profession she is working in; her desire to serve comes from a primal source. I use this model because shamans are typically chosen, not by the individual’s own career choice, but from a calling that is beyond individual consciousness or rationality. Like the shaman, the servant-leader must also “die” in order to release society’s conditioning before serving her community. Death sometime comes literally, other times figuratively. In my Buddhist mentor’s life it was prison and addiction; my situation was the collapse of my immune system. Like the plotline of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, the future servant-leader’s ordinary world is turned upside down, and then she is called upon to venture into the underworld in order to rebalance the world. First the servant-leader becomes a pilgrim before taking on the role of healer, or put differently, she must heal herself first before directing the energy outward to the general community. As MIT management theorist Otto Scharmer points out, “The Indo-European root of the word ‘lead’ and ‘leadership,’ *leith, means ‘to go forth,’ ‘to cross the threshold,’ or ‘to die.’”
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