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Servant Leadership Learning Community History, Vision and Purpose

To understand how and why the Servant Leadership Learning Community (SLLC) was created, we must look back long before the year of its inception in 2000.

In 1976, the journey began when Jack Lowe, Sr., then Chairman and CEO of TDIndustries (TD), an Employee-Owned, mechanical contracting business serving North Texas, invited Ann to read a copy of Robert K. Greenleaf's essay, The Servant as Leader. Jack also invited Ann to help design a curriculum that could bring these transforming concepts of leadership to life within TD. She was so inspired by what she learned and experienced about servant leadership and what she experienced within TD that Ann and her business partner, Duane Trammell, made a commitment to live and work as servant-leaders. When Ann McGee-Cooper & Associates, (AMCA) began in 1982, we promised to hold ourselves to the same high standards we were encouraging our Clients to adopt.

In early 1990, just as Dessert Storm was looming, Ann was invited by Colleen Barrett, then Executive V-P of Customer Service at Southwest Airlines (SWA), to join the Culture Committee and share the tools and skills of Servant Leadership with this rotating roster of culture leaders. Ann is clear that she didn't introduce servant leadership to Southwest Airlines. It was already there in the Spirit of Southwest, which is to serve each other with the same enthusiastic courtesy that they are famous for in their Customer Service.

It came as no surprise that in January of 1999, when Fortune Magazine came out with the first list of 100 Best Companies to Work For in America, these two Clients were honored as #2 and #4. Almost immediately we were inundated with calls from organizations large and small, eager to learn more about servant leadership. Many were small businesses or community organizations whose budgets couldn't support the kinds of comprehensive development curriculums we had co-designed with TD and SWA. Yet we longed to be able to share what we were learning. From this need was born the concept of a Servant Leadership Learning Community (SLLC).

Parallel to our long-term investment in servant leadership, we had been actively learning and practicing the five disciplines of a Learning Organization as taught by Peter Senge and his colleagues at M.I.T. We had been applying these concepts with clients for over a decade and joined the Society of Organizational Learning (SoL) as a way to stay current in our skill building and share from our Client work. Then it hit us. Maybe the SLLC could become an experimental "fractal" (organic learning community within SoL) to focus on exploring the practice of servant leadership. (We are currently exploring this option as we honor the consensus of members.)

TD generously opened our servant leadership classes as a lab school (on a space available basis) to the community and members of SLLC. Southwest Airlines also served as a resource. In 2000, Gary Looper (who joined AMCA primarily because of his passion for growing Learning Organizations) became Managing Director as seven member organizations formed the SLLC. Member organizations agreed to meet once a quarter on a Friday morning and rotate sites among the members. Our collective intent is to deepen our ability to serve as a Learning Community, sharing our discoveries through the global network of SoL and the international Greenleaf Centers for Servant Leadership.

Vision

We aspire to practice and improve our collective skills as a learning community centered on servant leadership. We desire to collectively increase our ability to co-create a future based on relationships of trust and respect as well as a bottom line that includes both tangible and intangible benefits for our Employees, Customers, Community and World.

Purpose

• connecting with organizational leaders in the Dallas community who share a long-term commitment to developing leaderful cultures (by meeting as a whole group quarterly),
• deepening our collective servant leadership and learning (by sharing resources: videos, books, articles, websites etc., introducing advanced skills, and dialoguing current challenges and successes),
• collecting stories of servant leadership in the workplace,
• identifying the developmental stages of s-l to guide our leadership strategies,
• encouraging the hearts of leaders to continue the journey,
• actively practicing the five disciplines of a learning community,
• sharing what we learn through SoL with a broader international community,
• exploring what it would mean to become accountable to a triple bottom line of People, Profit and Planet (sustainability)?

The following are some strategic questions we continue to explore in dialogue:

1. Can we leverage stages of development in the long-term growth of a leaderful culture so that those organizations new to this transformation can move more effectively on this journey? (Can a 30-year transformation happen more quickly the second time around?)
2. Are there practices, tools and lessons learned we can share for mutual gain?
3. Can we improve the impact of personal and team awareness and transformation by reflecting together to discern patterns and insights we might not pick up separately?
4. Can we share resources and influences to deepen and strengthen the impact across organizations?

We are finding good evidence that these all hold promise.