Holger’s weblog

Servant Leadership… some thoughts

A new blog has made it into my “sites to visit more often” list and this article on servant leadership really got me thinking about my own personal experiences with that topic. While the article itself is written with a focus on business, the author is a Christian and that’s something that shines through in his writing. Anyway, I want to focus some more on the christian aspects of servant leadership today.

My experience with servant leadership as a concept is a bit of a mess. On the one hand, I have seen some great examples of servant leaders, but on the other hand I’ve had servant leadership preached to me a few times too often by people who did not serve as good examples at all. But let’s start with the positive examples.

To me, it’s always fun to watch the faces of participants during some of the conferences I go to, when they suddenly realize that the guy who helped them with their luggage earlier in the day is actually the evening’s main speaker and one of the highest-ranking leaders (if there is such a thing as rank among Christians) of the organisation they are about to join. Watching those leaders during the day, as they help people get settled into the new surroundings by taking a bit of their load upon themselves is always a great inspiration and example. They don’t do it because they want to be more popular or because somebody told them to or because it’s some kind of conceptual thing that they feel they have to do to be viewed as the right kind of person – you can actually tell that they enjoy being a blessing to those they serve. Yes, it’s an attitude and personality thing. You can’t fake that – you can try, but chances are that the person you’re serving will notice.

That brings me to the more negative examples – I just can’t stand it when servant leadership as a principle is preached to me by people who seem to be unable to practise what they are preaching. It’s often in the little things… if it happens once that the person teaching about it goes home while the others are cleaning the place, that’s ok – if it happens all the time, it makes me wonder. And if then confronted after the tenth time, the person actually asks whether it can really be expected of him to do cleaning, that kind of invalidates all his previous teaching. That’s just one example of many, I’m afraid.

I guess servant leadership is a lot about not asking others to do things you wouldn’t gladly be willing to do yourself. Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean you should be doing things that others can do much better and that it’s wrong to ask those who have the skill – but asking the question “how would I react if someone asked *me* to do this” is probably a good first step. And of course there are things that just have to be done – would you be willing to do them, even if it means you do something that you feel overqualified to do? And would you be willing to do it with a smile on your face and a joyful heart, knowing that what you do is helping someone else, the team you’re in, the ministry you’re involved with?

Technorati : christian, ethics, leadership, servant

1 comment February 2nd, 2006

Release Day

After 16 months of development, numerous test versions and countless fixed bugs, yesterday was a big day for the Linux development team at OM’s IT department – we finally built the release version 1.6 of our Linux distribution that we refer to as OMSLS (OM Standard Linux Server). Now our offices around the world can update their office servers with new features, fixes and other improvements (enhanced support of group policies, SSL based VPN, webmail, etc.) and hopefully won’t run into any obvious bugs, even though it took us until the last day of our “release window” to get the last minor issues ironed out.

If you wonder why you’ve never heard about OMSLS or where you can find a copy of it, don’t. It’s currently not available to the public, but only for internal use within our organisation. If you wonder how that’s possible, read the terms of the GPL and you will see that as long as we only use it internally and don’t distribute it, that’s ok. But… we do want to give back to the Linux community and have already taken steps to make sure this will happen in the not too distant future. First, we need to do a major cleanup of the code, though. We’ll toss out the old, bash/perl/sed/awk/whatever-based administration program that still uses dialog for its “UI” and replace it with a new, shiny one written from scratch in Python. Once the API of that new framework has been stabilized, we can think about stripping out some of the internal modules that the rest of the world doesn’t need and turning the rest loose on the world. My guess is that it will be another year before we really find the time to do that… the next internal release (OMSLS 2.0) is clearly a priority.

Some facts about OMSLS: based on CentOS 4.2 (a recompiled version of the source RPMs to an enterprise Linux distribution by a major North American Linux vendor), optimized for use on text-based consoles (thus allowing dialup emergency maintenance even in countries with bad phone lines), pre-configured for Samba, printing support (including a PDF printer), secure email supporting SMTP, UUCP over ssh, POP3(s), IMAP(s) and webmail, protection against viruses and spam, OpenVPN, quota support on a per-user and per-department basis, dialup internet support for small offices and much more that I can’t think of right now. When I first saw it about 4.5 years ago (I was still working for an ISP at the time), I thought that it was the kind of system I had always dreamt of as a small intranet server for our customers. Since then it has grown to be even better. You may want to come back here occasionally to find out when and where the first public version will be available.

Technorati : CentOS, Linux, OM, distribution

Add comment February 1st, 2006