Busy, busy, busy! If you recall in my previous post about Homemade Laundry Detergent, that I mentioned life had been super crazy, crazy busy. Well, this post is a partial result of all that busyness. As it turns out, I was able to squeeze in a podcast interview about servant leadership.
My career path has led me down the road of IT Consulting. I was a computer programmer for about 16 years and now I have been transitioning out of that role into one focused more on leadership for the past few years. Recently, I have been in the project management and agile coaching space, focusing on Servant Leadership. Wait what? How can you be a servant and a leader at the same time? Well, actually, it’s pretty simple.
While the concept has been around for hundreds of years, the term was first coined by Robert K. Greenleaf back in 1970. In an essay, he wrote:
A servant-leader focuses primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong. While traditional leadership generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power by one at the “top of the pyramid,” servant leadership is different. The servant-leader shares power, puts the needs of others first and helps people develop and perform as highly as possible.1
With that in mind, I had the chance to write a blog post for my job’s website about servant leadership. Through this blog post, someone by the name of Lyle reached out to me and he had several questions. I responded and we went back and forth in email a few times, finding that we had something in common – helping people makes us happy (and we have wonderful wives – Deidra added that).
Through our conversation I found out Lyle runs a podcast called Service Is Power and he focuses on bringing the stories of servant leaders to the “up and coming” college audience. Through our conversations, I was blessed with the opportunity to be a guest on his podcast and I have to say that I had a blast. While serving as a leader is my focus on my job, it translates to the ultimate goal with our homestead. Our mission is to “Feed our Family, Feed our Neighbors, and Feed our Community”. Through our journey, we hope to eventually be able to focus our energies on serving and helping others.
Without further delay, below is the podcast. Let me know what you think and be sure to check out the other podcasts on the Service Is Power website as well!