The purpose of authority is to serve.
I ran across this quote in a commentary on St. James, whose feast day is celebrated July 25 in the Catholic Church. It ties together all of the various leadership fads of the last 30 years, starting back in the 1990s with W. Edwards Deming and his leadership principles for “TQM,” or “Total Quality Management.” Deming’s 14 principles were used with great success by Japanese automakers in the 1970s and 1980s, helping propel them ahead of the U.S. “Big Three.”
I was first introduced to Deming and TQM in the early 1990s, when health care was taking up the TQM philosophy and applying it to improve quality and outcomes in hospitals. Bixby and Herrick hospitals were working on a variety of initiatives based on Deming’s principles. By the mid-1990s, Saline and Tecumseh school districts also were partnering and eying ways to apply TQM principles to teaching and learning.
There were all manner of leadership assessment tools in the 1990s to help us better understand how we think of leadership and how we make decisions. I recall in particular the “Real Colors” assessment that I participated in with members of the Saline Area Chamber of Commerce, the Saline Community Hospital, and Saline Area Schools where we learned team building, communication skills, and other organizational leadership tools that were cutting edge. In 2019, while I was still teaching at Adrian College, the school implemented the Clifton Strengths-Based Leadership program, which meant the entire campus was doing assessments to find out their top “strengths” as a way of improvement.
The observation about authority, purpose, and service seems to take the concept of “leadership tools” a step further. To be a successful leader, you must be a humble servant, no matter what your “strengths” or “colors” say about you. Leaders hold authority over others and with that authority service must follow.
As I approach my 64th birthday, I’m reminded of one of the great non-leader leaders that influenced my own path in life. Her name was Bernice Tenniswood Merchant, a.k.a. “Woodie.” Bob and Woodie Merchant met while students at Michigan State University in 1940. Woodie was studying music, while Bob was studying agriculture. After their June wedding in 1943, the couple bought a 190-acre farm in Saline and got busy raising five children. Woodie went right from the classroom to being a farmer’s wife, while Bob went right from the classroom to the cultivator. Woodie had a lot of other jobs in the community, too. She gave piano lessons. She worked in a daycare and for the local newspaper, which is how we met. The daycare was owned by Jackie Tull and the newspaper by her husband, Paul. When I met Woodie, she was covering Saline City Council and writing a weekly “Welcome to the Neighborhood” feature for the paper. Everyone knew her. She served on the Saline Board of Education, the Saline Community Hospital Foundation Board, the Foundation for Saline Area Schools, and a host of other nonprofit organizations. When we met in 1986, she had just turned 64, and when she was approaching 80 in 2002, I wrote a story about her. We talked about her perspective on life, the changes she’d seen, both in the world and in the town she had called home for 60 years. I pestered her for advice, for tips, for the secrets to a happy marriage and to living a long life and enjoying it.
“This isn’t my world anymore,” she told me that February day in 2002. “You reach an age where you realize you’re passing this world on. There are things that you don’t understand, but there are good things, too–things like family and friends, the things that are really important in life.”
That was 20 years ago. I still see Woodie sitting there next to my desk, laughing and talking about life. I didn’t fully understand those words then, but I surely do now. It’s not my world anymore and it’s time for my generation to pass it on.
So, next generation, this is now your world. Step up and serve it well.
SQUIBS 