Servant Leadership Philosophy

The idea of leadership, and particularly the idea of servant leadership is one that I’ve had vested interest in. Servant leadership is discussed frequently in Christian theology, being held in high regard. It often described in the form of certain morals while in a leadership position. A good definition could be: to take on a servant mindset while a leader. However, my main experience with leadership, and thus this idea, is not with the church but with the boy scouts. The Boy Scouts have high standards for children that age, if perhaps only in ideal and less in practice (though this is true for any organization), and the expectations on the leadership of the boys was clear. Often times, the adults present are to be more chaperones than actual leaders, leaving the direction of the troop, and sometimes even the planning of events, to the boys elected to be the scouts’ leader. The leaders (and older scouts) would be expected not just to guide the others in doing something productive, but also to instruct them in the skills they needed to learn, and be on hand to aid them if something went terribly awry. While this isn’t

Being oldest, however, I was at one outing the one with the most authority, and so, for a week, I was the ‘acting’ leader of the scouts. By this point in my life I was long since disillusioned with authority figures, having seen that leaders preferred to only see the privilege of a position, rather than the responsibilities that created the position in the first place. So, I preferred to act as a leader only when the leader was actually required, and otherwise care not for it. My own moral standards would not change, nor did I think they should, and I did not need to be acting as a leader to give any