Servant-Leadership is a specific leadership style that was described by Robert Greenleaf in his essay, “Servant as Leader” in 1970. The groundwork for the philosophy states that the best leaders are servants first, focusing on the needs of their followers and helping them grow as individuals. At MSOE, we have the MSOE Mindset.  One of the main ‘pillars’ is the Servant-Leader mindset.

Our MSOE journey with a Servant-Leader mindset includes the self-aware qualities of Foresight, Authenticity, and Vulnerability. We are community builders who demonstrate effective Listening, Caring and Coaching skills. We conduct ourselves with a sense of Usefulness, Presence, Acceptance and Stewardship. 

Many people whom I have met in my career in engineering, business and in education seem to have ‘discovered’ Servant-Leadership. As everyone can be a servant-leader, we would like to see Servant-Leadership to be well understood and developed naturally at a young age by choice, not as a discovered set of traits later in a person’s career.   

The “Greenleaf” qualities, characteristics and principles have been shared in books, articles, presentations, academic research, and roundtable discussions for decades. Today, however, there are several ways that people express some of the concepts of Servant-Leadership. For example, professors and researchers will refer to “Authentic Leadership” and “Transformational Leadership.”

My responsibility as Pieper Family Foundation Endowed Chair for Servant-Leadership is to encourage and promote the preparation of future Servant-Leaders for service in their professional and personal lives. We will do this by working to integrate the servant-leadership mindset into the MSOE student experience through workshops, roundtables, project-based experiential learning and other events on the MSOE campus and in the community. I will also work closely with the Wisconsin Servant Leadership organization to share the best research and case studies to help practitioners understand strengths and effectiveness of the leadership style.

If you would like to learn more about what servant-leadership is all about, please consider attending the MSOE servant-leadership roundtables held monthly throughout the academic year. You can also visit Wisconsin Servant-Leadership’s website to learn more. Finally, please do not hesitate to reach out to me or any member of the CREATE team with any questions you may have regarding the role of servant-leadership at MSOE.  

In service,

Gene

Gene A. Wright
Assistant Professor, Rader School of Business
(414) 277-2268 | wright@msoe.edu