Tami Simon: You’re Listening to Insights at the Edge. Today My Guest Is Jim Hunter. Jim Is the Author of Two Internationally Bestselling books: The Servant: a Simple Story About the True Essence of Leadership, and The

the irony of this, is that the people around the table already know it. If you don’t think your people know, Tami, they’re the ones that gave you the feedback.

TS: Yes.

JH: They already know. We pretend like people don’t know. They know. People spend half their waking hours at work. They spend more waking hours in your building than they do with their families. They’re very aware of what people’s stuff are. This isn’t a mystery. But we’ve got to get people to stand up and start owning it. So everybody goes around the table—this takes an hour to do this, it doesn’t take a long time to do this. It’ll take an hour. Everybody talks about how they felt about their results, what they’re going to do about it, [how] specifically they’re going to measure it. OK?

And we’re not done yet. Now, a week after that, we ask them to go to their department, or wherever it is they lead, and do the same thing. “So here’s what y’all had to say. Thanks for this feedback. I have a couple areas I need to work on. Here’s what I’m going to do, and here’s how I’m going to measure it. Now, I’ll be getting back to you regularly, perhaps on a monthly, maybe bi-monthly basis, and give you a little update on how I’m doing and I’m going to be looking for some feedback from you folks. I’m going to start working on my stuff. That’s my commitment. We can’t ask you folks to be the best that you can be if we’re not willing to be the best we can be. So mom and dad—we’re working on our stuff.”

So what that does, and what I have found in doing this for about 20 years now, is the group will start to build some community together when you do this. It forces us to go to some deeper levels. I mean, we’re talking about some deep stuff now. The group starts to build a little community together. And when you’re sitting in a room with 20 sets of eyeballs on you, and you make a commitment to the group, there’s a lot of power in that. There’s a lot of power.

What it does is it gets you to a point where you’re left with a choice. And life is all about choices. It’s not death and taxes, it’s all about death and choices. You’re left with a choice, and the choice is this: you’re either going to get so uncomfortable you’re going to have to leave, or you’re going to start doing something about growth and continuous improvement. You’re going to have to start getting after your stuff. You’re going to start changing what you’re doing.

So it’s a radical way of helping to get people [to] change, helping people to change. But we have found it to be profoundly successful, especially with a committed CEO.

TS: And have you noticed a difference now, that we’re not talking about 10 percent but we’ve got some other kind of number of people who are actually really growing into servant leaders?

JH: Yes. I can’t give you a hard number, and that’s because it all depends on the commitment of the CEO. All I can tell you is this: the greater the commitment there is at the top, the more success that we have.

If I have a committed CEO—and I’m getting pretty good at it now, and I can pretty much tell now if somebody’s really in it or they’re just trying to do dog-and-pony stuff. An organization that really wants to change for continuous improvement as more than just a punch line, where they really, really do want to grow. When I have a CEO like that, my job’s really easy.

Because here’s the deal: once everybody on the team understands the CEO’s in, I’ve got nowhere to hide. Where am I going to hide? I mean, the CEO’s standing up there opening their kimono, where am I going to hide? I’ve got to start getting serious about growth and continuous improvement. I’ve got to start getting after my behavior. And in the end, leadership is about our behavior. You know, like, be nice, tell the truth, hold people accountable to excellence, appreciate people, build trust. I mean, basic things.

But to get people to do that stuff, they’ll agree that it’s the right thing to do, but to get them to start hitting the ball and practicing that stuff—you know, the farmers are very clear about this. Anything living, you are in one of two states. You are either green and growing, or you are ripe and rotting. [Laughs] I mean, pick one. I hate to be so blunt, but that’s really the truth. You’re either growing, you’re either moving in one direction or the other. C.S. Lewis said, “There’s no neutral ground in the universe.” You’re moving toward the light or you’re moving toward the darkness.

So what this process does is it says, “You know what? We’ve got to start growing. If we’re going to be leaders in this organization and have human beings entrusted to our care for half their waking hours”—I mean, think of the awesome responsibility of being a leader. Having human beings entrusted—if I’ve got a lousy boss, I’ve got a lousy job, and you’re messing up my life. I mean, a lousy boss messes up people’s lives. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a bad boss, Tami, but I have, and it affects what goes on around your dinner table.

So, “If you’re going to be a leader in our organization, we’re not expecting you to be the best leader in the world. But we are expecting you to grow. We are expecting you to be moving the line northward. We want growth.”

My definition of continuous improvement is this: that you’re able to say, “I’m not where I want to be, but I’m better than I used to be. I’m better than I was three months ago. I’m better than I was six months ago. I’m listening better. I’m holding people accountable more. I had a crucial conversation yesterday that I probably never would have had before, but I finally had that conversation.” Are you moving the ball up the field?

So this process ensures that we have got the appropriate tension in the environment. We want people to grow. We know you’re moving one way or the other. Nothing stays the same. Anyone who thinks they’re the same—I mean, nothing stays the same. Nothing living. If you’re think you’re the same as you were six months ago, the world is moving by at such a high rate of speed these days, by definition, you’re going backwards.

Nothing stays the same. Where are you heading? What are you becoming? My wife’s a psychologist; she used to love to tell her clients, “There are no human beings, only human becomings.” We are all becoming something every day. A better leader or a worse leader. More of a saint or more of a swine. Every day we’re becoming something.

So CEOs that really get that, Tami, that really get that, “I’ve got to push my people”—and that’s the essence of servant leadership. It may not be what they want. It may be uncomfortable. It may not be what we want, but it’s absolutely what we need. And that’s what servant leaders do. They’re not interested in what people want, they’re interested in what they need. “What’s going to help this person grow?”

And most of us, 90 percent of us, Tami, we need some friction. We need some push. We’ve got a crazy world coming at us. [Laughs]

TS: Yes.

JH: And we’ve got a ton of stuff on our plate. And I need more than a PowerPoint deck and a book to become a better leader. I know I need to, I know I need to grow, I know I need to be a better dad, a better husband, a better—I know I need to grow, but help me! Help me to do that.

TS: Now, I’m curious, Jim, in this “opening the kimono” move here. I’m curious to know a little bit more about you, if that’s OK, and what your own challenges have been in embodying servant leadership in your life, and how that’s evolved for you over time. Maybe one aspect of servant leadership that has perhaps been the most challenging for you.

JH: Oh boy. I’ve had several. Gosh. My latest or my ones in history, or does it matter?

TS: Whatever occurs to you.

JH: You know, one of the tough ones—and I don’t think it’s sexist to say this, especially with men, I think a lot of us men suffer from this one—is we like to put the mask on, especially at work. Being authentic, being vulnerable, being willing to talk about what we really think and what we really feel, and getting out of that mask mode was a big challenge for me.

Back when I first started studying community building under Scott Peck back in [the] mid-’80s, my wife and I went to his Foundation for Community Encouragement, just a powerful organization about building community. And one of the things I found was the reason I wasn’t having a whole lot of community in my life was because I had my mask on. And it’s really hard to an effective leader if you’ve got a mask on.

This has never been more true than with the young people coming up these days. These young people, these Millennials coming up, born after 1980, they don’t like masks. They’re not impressed by corner offices, they’re not impressed with your 30 years of experience. They are impressed by authenticity. They want to be able to look you in the eye and know that what you’re saying is reality and who you really are. They’re much more impressed with that.

So I really have had to do a lot of work over the years—and I still work on it—to work on that aspect of my life: vulnerability and authenticity. But the rewards are awesome. So I tell men regularly, I say, “Here’s the thing, if you’re not willing to be authentic and you’re not willing to be vulnerable, you’re just not going to experience much community in your life. And you’re going to miss out [on] some of the sweetest parts of living.”

And we can have a lot of community at work. One of the things I do with organizations is help them to build communities on their staffs. We are spending half our waking hours there. Why wouldn’t we want to be a community? A place where we can be honest with each other. We can get our mask off, we don’t have to worry about things like confidentiality and whether I can trust you that you’re [not] going to talk behind my back. We can come in and get real with each other and talk about our joys, our dreams, our frustrations, our sorrows, our ideas. To build community together.

It’s a huge part of leadership. In fact, I’m going to be writing a lot about this in my third book. I find the really great servant leaders are pretty adept at this. They not only are great leaders, [but] they know how to build community with people. They know how to build trust, and trust is the basis of a relationship. They know how to get people to come to a meeting and really be fully present.

Peter Drucker, the great management guru for 50 years in America—he passed a few years ago—used to say, “The first responsibility of a leader is to drive out fear.” Is it a safe place? Is your management team—is that a safe place to be? Can I really be honest? Can I really tell you want I think? And if you’re not getting candid feedback from people, you’re going to be in a heap of trouble.

So authenticity and vulnerability, that’s been an area for me. Another area, early on, was accountability. And I find that many executives struggle with this one. In fact, the number one gap we find between where people need to be as leaders and where they are—after 30 years, the number one gap, [there’s] not even a close second, and we’ve done these results on these leadership skill inventories for many, many years—well, let me ask you, what would you think would be the number one gap?

TS: I’m not sure, but I can tell you that accountability was the challenge that I identified for myself very clearly as the biggest area of difficulty for me—holding people accountable. So I’ve been reflecting on that very deeply in preparing for our conversation today. So I’m eager to hear what you have to say about this.

JH: It’s number one. And there’s not even a close second. Not even a remotely close number two. Far and away, the number one gap is failing to hold people accountable for the standards that have been set and failing to confront people with problems and situations as they arise. Far and away, people who are otherwise just wonderful executives, great people, they shy away from the tough conversations. Because we have this need to be liked, we have this need to avoid this tension. We just avoid that stuff.

So that was an area for me that I really had to work on early on, because I tend to want people to like me. And so to tell people the truth—but then I had somebody confront me with it just point-blank, right between the eyes, and I had a paradigm change. Probably a significant emotional event, one of the couple that I’ve had in my life, is he looked at me and he said, “You know, Jim, here’s the thing. If you don’t hold your people accountable to excellence, you’re a thief and a liar.”

And I said, “Well that’s a little strong.” He said, “Every time you take a paycheck, you’re stealing. Because this organization pays you to hold people accountable to excellence. And number two, you’re deceitful, you’re lying because you’re pretending everything’s OK and it’s not OK. And guess what? Everybody in the building knows it. You think you’re fooling anybody in the building? They all know. Everybody in the building knows who you’re holding accountable and who you’re not. So you’re deceitful. You’re anything but a servant leader. You’re a slave leader. You’re not doing what people need, you’re doing what people want.”

And now, that just went to my core, because I’m all about character and building trust, and I’m thinking, “Man, if I’m not telling people the truth, I’m a dishonest person. I don’t have a really authentic relationship with any of my people. I’m pretending it’s OK and it’s not OK. So I’m a phony!” So that just went to my core.

But as I said earlier, what is painful instructs. Once I got out of the woodshed, it really motivated me to change. Because then I didn’t look at discipline as, “Oh boy, this confrontation—we’ve got to have a tough meeting,” and I’d be awake the night before worrying about it.

No, I’m not here to discipline you. I’m here to disciple you to excellence. I’m here to help you be the best you can be. When I don’t tell you the truth about your performance, you’re going to end up worse than when you got here. I’m not serving you. I’m here to help you grow, and when I see an opportunity, when I see a gap between where you need to be and where you are, we’re going to be talking about that. Why? Because I care about you. I want you to grow.

You see, here’s the thing, mom, dad, boss: Don’t tell me how much you care about me if you’re not willing to have me mad at you for a couple days. Don’t you dare tell me that. If you cared about me, you’d be kicking my butt up and over that performance bar every day. It might not be what I want, [but] it’s absolutely what I need. You’d be kicking my butt up and over my performance bar so that when I leave here, I’ll be a whole lot better than when I got here.

Because just like you, I’m either green and growing or ripe and rotting, so if you let me be me mediocre, if you don’t confront me with my stuff, you don’t hold me accountable to the stuff that I’m doing here, I’m going to be worse when I leave you. You haven’t served me. Don’t tell me how much you care about me. You care about yourself. You’re not serving me, you’re serving yourself. You get to avoid the hassle. Now, when I had somebody explain it to me that way, Tami, that motivated me.

TS: What’s interesting to me is, in this conversation, you’re really pointing out how receiving feedback—pointed and constructive and right-on-the-money feedback—is such an important part of the change process.

JH: It really is. I mean, business people will tell you, we can’t make decisions unless we have good data. We have to have feedback. We have to understand how we’re doing. The difference between fact and opinion is evidence. What’s the evidence?

If we’re in a leadership position, we have to give people pointed feedback about what we’re observing, what we’re seeing, what we’re hearing, what we’re smelling. We owe that to people. If we want them to grow, they need that. They need that tension, they need that friction to help them to grow. Again, this might not be what they want, but it’s absolutely what they need.

TS: Now, I’m curious, are the principles of servant leadership based on Jesus as an example of the ultimate servant leader? Is it fair to say that?

JH: Well, I don’t know. I get asked that a lot, and I don’t think of servant leadership as a religious thing. I think of it as a Golden Rule thing. I don’t think of it as a great commission thing where I’m evangelizing anybody.

Jesus did make a statement about servant leadership. He said [that] anybody that wanted to be the leader must first be the servant. If you want to lead, you’ve got to serve. But 2,000 years before him, Lao Tzu in China said pretty much the same thing. So I don’t view it as a religious thing. I view it as a Golden Rule–type thing. I view it as just treating people the way you’d want to be treated.

I often tell people in my seminars, I say, “I’m not here to instruct you. I’m here to remind you. Everything you need to know about leadership you already know. It all boils down to one simple rule: treat people the way you’d want to be treated. Be the boss you wish your boss would be.” You know that person you want your boss to be? Same person your people want you to be.

Be the father you wish your father had been more fully for you. Be the mother you wish your mother had been more fully for you. I mean, all servant leadership is, Tami, is identifying and meeting people’s legitimate needs [and] seeking their greatest good.

So if you’re going to be a servant leader, yes, you’ve got to make a little list. What do people need? And I tell people, “If you ever get stuck on your list, just ask yourself a simple question: What do I need? That’ll get you going again. Respect, appreciation, relationship, listening, accountability, rules of the house, clarity—basic things that people need. What do you need from your leader? Then go be that person.”

It really is simple. It’s not simplistic, but it really is simple. It’s basic. I teach servant leadership to Boy Scouts, Girls Scouts, Cub Scouts—they get this stuff. It’s not a difficult topic. Some people what to make leadership a difficult topic, [but] it’s not a difficult topic. Serve your people. Get in there and identify and meet their needs. Get them the things that they need, and they have a lot of needs. They also have a lot of wants, so sometimes we have to discern between the two. But get in there and meet needs, and they’ll walk through walls for you.

TS: Now, there’s a word that you talk about, a word that you use liberally, freely, although you define in carefully, which is bringing—here we go—love into business.

JH: What’s love got to do with it!

TS: Yes! And so, tell us, yes, what does love have to do with it?

JH: [Laughs] Oh man. You know, I had to make a choice. Again, it’s not death and taxes, it’s all about choices—death and choices. I had to make a choice about 25 years ago. Was I going to introduce love into my business seminars? This was even before I wrote books on it.

I thought, “OK, now that’s going to be risky.” I mean, you start talking about love around HR people, and their eyes start to glaze over. “Mr. Hunter, we’re trying to get sexual harassment out of the building. What are you talking about love for? You’re killing me!” Tami, you start talking about love in corporate America and sprinkle a little Jesus in there, you’re going to lose some clients. Trust me. It’s going to cost you dearly. So I had to make a choice, and I nearly chickened out.

TS: Well, I’m so glad you didn’t. Just for the record.

JH: [Laughs] Thank you. I almost chickened out. But in the end, the reason I didn’t was that I just could not be intellectually honest and leave it out. It wasn’t because I was so courageous, it was just I couldn’t be intellectually honest.

Why? All the great servant leaders in history all talked about love. Every one of them. Jesus—he was only one. Mother Teresa, one of the great servant leaders of all time. I mean, she wrote four books on the topic of love. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. Herb Kelleher built an airline on that word. In fact, if you want to look up Southwest Airlines on the New York Stock Exchange, the three-letter ticker symbol is LUV. “The airline that love built.” That was their jingle back in the ’80s.

The point—I couldn’t be intellectually honest and leave love out of it. I just couldn’t do it. The problem with it is that most people have a pretty weird idea about what love is. Hollywood has butchered the word. The classic definition of love is not a feeling. It’s not a noun about what we feel. The classic definition of love is a verb. It’s about what we do. Love your neighbor—the verb in the sentence is love. It’s not about what we feel, it’s about what we do.

Vince Lombardi has a great quote that I used in one of my books, where the great coach used to tell his players, every spring training, he used to say this: “Ladies, listen up. I don’t have to like you. You don’t have to like me. But as your leader, I will love you.” And he said, “My love will be relentless.” [Laughs] “I’m going to love you to death.”

Now what did he mean by that? “When you leave my team, you’re going to be in demand in the NFL. You want to know how much I care? Watch what I do. I’m going to make you great.” That’s the classical definition of love. Are you extending yourself for somebody, identifying and meeting their legitimate needs, seeking their greatest good, so they’re going to be better when they leave than when they got there?

That’s what love is. Love is an extension of yourself. It’s a willingness to extend myself for you, meet your needs, help you to grow. That’s what real love is. Regardless of how you feel, you’re the leader. You signed up to do this. I tell people in business seminars, “I don’t care how you feel about your people. I don’t care if you like them or not. I’m not asking you to like them, I’m asking you to love them. Love is an extension, your willingness to extend yourself for them. Hug them when they need a hug. Spank them when they need a spank. Help them to be great.”

There [are] times my wife—my dear wife [who] I’ve known since the first grade, [we’ve] been married for several decades—doesn’t like me very much. Do you believe that, Tami?

TS: I do.

JH: I know it’s unbelievable.

TS: I do. I know you’re being intellectually honest when you say that.

JH: [Laughs] That’s right. Has nothing to with whether or not she loves me, whether or not she’s still patient with me, still kind, still forgiving—thank the Lord—still committed, “Still in the game, honey, even though you’re acting like a jerk this week, I’m still in.” That’s the classical definition of love: a willingness to extend yourself, committed, all-in, regardless of how I happen to feel this week.

So love, the classical definition, is the willingness to extend. Hollywood love is almost the exact opposite. Hollywood love is falling in love. Falling in love is effortless. It’s almost the opposite of true classical love. When I was 18, I could fall in love five times in a Friday night, Tami. The more beer I drank, the more in love I got. I mean, that was easy. Falling in love is effortless. And there’s no commitment involved, it’s just feelings-based.

But true love—I mean, here it is now, several decades of marriage, written a couple of books on the topic, been talking about it for 30 years—I’m just beginning to understand the depths of that word, “love.” But one thing I’m real clear about? It’s a whole lot more than feeling. Feelings come and go based on whether I ate pizza last night or not.

So that’s what I have to do in seminars. I have to get people to understand the definitions. When we talk about love, we’re not talking about how you feel. We’re talking about what you do.

TS: And in terms of an organization—you’re working with an organization—how would you know if there was a lot of love present in that organization versus, “No, this is an unloving organization”?

JH: Well, as many organization as I’ve been in now—last count, a little over 700. So I’ve been in a lot of places. It’s to the point now where I can pretty much tell in about the first six minutes. It’s palpable in an organization. It’s palpable. I call it the community spirit. You can feel it when you walk in the door, just by the way you’re treated, how people engage you, how people look you in the eye.

There is something about an environment where love is present and where community is present that is—again, the best word I can use for it is “palpable.” And it’s a pretty rare thing. I don’t see it a whole lot. But I have seen it in some places, and it’s a marvelous thing to experience.

TS: What would you say to a leader who wants to bring more love into their organization? How would you direct them to immediately be able to make change in that regard?

JH: Well, the first thing is, you’ve got to be the change you want to see in the world. Just like Gandhi said. You have to be the change you want to see in the world. Because the first thing everybody wants to do is blame somebody else, right? “The problem is my boss, the problem is my spouse, the problem is somebody out there.”

You know, what I tell them is some of the great servant leaders I have worked with over the last 30 years work for terrible bosses, work for dopes that don’t get it. Terrible Nazi, command-and-control, Gestapo-type leaders that don’t get it. But they have made a decision in their life. They can’t control what their boss does, but they can control what they do and how they treat their people.

So the first thing I tell people is stop pointing your finger and worrying about everybody else. Start worrying about what you’re going to do. What are you going to change to be a great leader? That’s where it all begins. What are you going to do [differently]?

You know, when we change—and it’s an old cliché and I’m sure you have it in a lot of your tapes around Sounds True—our world changes. And it sounds trite, but it’s so true. When we really get out and start going to work on ourselves, and start working on how we’re loving people—are we patient? Are we kind? Are we humble? Are we respectful? Are we selfless? Are we telling people the truth about their performance? Are we confronting people with stuff? Are we truly honest and authentic people? Are we committed to excellence?

When we start working on our stuff and start working on our lives, the world changes. People respond differently to us, the world comes at us