Part 1
As I listened intently to the Social Weather Stations social-survey presentations on January 18 in my alma mater, the Asian Institute of Management, I recalled what the Servant Leader founder, Robert K. Greenleaf, said that attracted me to its principles: it is all about institutions as servants, not individuals. You see, as I was absorbing the slides that Dr. Mahar Mangahas presented, I thought that we seek out servant leadership in a President of a country—or in a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, or even in an Archbishop of an archdiocese—not as an end in itself, but as means and model to create and sustain organizations as servant institutions.
The 2012 SWS Survey Review reported that the Aquino presidency has so far reached a record high in helping the poor. How did they know? They took the total percent of those dissatisfied with how the Aquino administration was helping the poor in 2011 and deducted that from the total percent of those who were satisfied. The result was +51 percent. That is higher than the years of the Ramos and Estrada presidencies where the net satisfaction for helping the poor was only in the range of +30 percent to +40 percent, and for the Arroyo years, +10 percent to +20 percent. The Aquino presidency has also reached unprecedented high record in foreign relations at +43 percent, and in fighting crime at +34 percent when compared with previous presidencies. That is interesting because the rating given to Mr. Aquino as President (vs presidency or governance) is high but not unusually high like those of Fidel Ramos or Corazon Aquino as Presidents. That really got me to think about the institution as servant, and its leader as servant.
If we can’t have both, what should we encourage and aim at sustaining—the servant leader or the servant institution? Or both? Or more than both? Two points to ponder:
First point: what Greenleaf reminded us about “caring for persons, the more able and the less able serving each other, is the rock upon which a good society is built.” He says that what we tended to see often is “caring was largely person to person” but in recent years we are able to see how care is done through organizations. It immediately cites Caritas Manila as an example. In its founding years, donations were gathered and repacked for person-to-person or family-to-family giving. It was much later that the BEC—Basic Ecclesial Communities—modeled from the early Christian communities that Caritas communities were identified and charity became a systematic, planned social intervention. This means, charity as an effort to help not only in immediate needs but to help break through the cycle of individual or family poverty. How by providing access to Caritas programs the build capacity—education, food preparation, microbusiness, own home.
Greenleaf says: “now most of [the care for persons] is mediated through institutions—often large, complex, powerful, impersonal; not always competent…. If a better society is to be built, one that is more just and more loving, one that provides greater creative opportunity for its people, then the most open course is to raise both the capacity to serve and the very performance as servant of existing major institutions.”
(To be continued)
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