Given this beautiful mess, our set point is to seek consensus. But there is no consensus. Ask 100 people how they feel about the proposed new spray park, and 20 will hate it, 60 will appreciate it but be quiet about it, and 20 will want to adore it all over Instagram. To address this, our options are: a) to waffle and never make a decision; and b) to have leadership make decisions. Option B is the much better route.

However, Option B can be perilous. Traditionally, the “Pied Pipers” in your community are folks you visibly see around you. We collectively give these folks the keys to our community’s future. We can be tempted to blindly follow the cult of personality because our societal set point is to believe in the power of the individual to quickly solve very complex issues and challenges. When it’s benevolent and strategic its great. But it’s not a given and we all know examples where it has gone wrong…very wrong.

As a management style, title, power and intimidation is easier than kindness. Obvious strength is easier to visibly see and we fall for it. But in only focusing on one shiny bobble, we are ignoring organizational wheels and gears.

If we are going to position organizations and communities for a more ambitious future, we need a more uncommon leadership style.

We need the servant leader. The servant leader has a central compass that can best be described by looking in a mirror. When you look in the mirror, it’s not your face that is looking back. It’s not ego. That’s self. It’s not eggo. That’s just a spelling error and a bad kind of breakfast.

All that looks back at you is all the faces of hopes and dreams and worries. In your heartbeat you feel the urge to be of service to others to help them empower themselves. You have gratitude for what you have. You are humble and kind. You work to build things that you believe our children and grandchildren would be proud of. And you don’t waiver from your greater mission when – every day – you encounter those who don’t or don’t want to understand the deeper mission.

As a result, servants of greater good can still have a steely resolve and determination like power-driven self-interested leaders, but there are guided by the deeper challenges and needs of society, and design an organization to best serve those needs.

To serve the mission, the servant leader is driven by nurturing of a high performance organization. The servant leader focuses on empowering the many. The servant leader is a great communicator who helps people connect strategic dots. The servant leader is always working to take the down the fences of the mind that carve us apart.

Operationally, the servant leader is often quiet, enables the performance of others, builds “team,” accepts mistakes as learning opportunities, celebrates the success of others more than self, and creates both sense of destination while recognizing achievement of the stepping stones. The servant leader pushes from below rather than demand from the top. The servant leader believes that the notion of “Us” has more to say than the concept of “I.

Why? Because a performance organization where people feel valued, understand the mission, and directly contribute to generating “wins,” builds the community trust required to leap the lack of consensus hurdle that paralyzes too many communities.

This is a leap of faith for municipalities because it requires softer re-focus on people not hard-edged check boxes of creating a plan here, there and everywhere. Focus is entirely on a single question: how do we best enable organizational performance? The answer creates suggestion of activities that are rare in municipalities: hire for talent, pay what talent deserves, build strong relationships between Council and Administration, budget more for employee continuing education, take management courses together, invite thought leader speakers to your organization and community, and on it goes. The people prism immediately generates an entirely different brainstorming list of what to do than brainstorming related to a community plan in one form or another.

A people-first focus believes that those empowered in an organization are released from constraint to test the bounds of ambition, and being content stay long enough to realize a sum greater than the parts. We don’t necessarily know the destination. We rely on where the imagination of a high performance team takes us. It’s tough to wrap the mind around. But it’s necessary if we are to position ourselves dynamically in a world of accelerating change.

Reality is that most plans collect dust because we never bothered to invest in the people we need to make anything happen. And so communities never seem to get out of the rut of sideways movement. If we re-focus our politics and actions on organizational performance and building of trust, we open the door to a world of possibilities.

I think we don’t seek a servant leadership style enough in communities. We are too busy being sold by the loud leadership style hollering “follow me” when we should be paying more attention to bringing leaders to the fore that are apt to say: “where do WE need to go and how do WE get there?”

While servant leadership is a timeless concept, the phrase “servant leadership” was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in “The Servant as Leader”, an essay that he first published in 1970.