(NDG Wire) Rather than managing others and giving directions, leaders must inspire others to fulfill their own capabilities, said Dallas Urban League President and CEO Beverly Mitchell-Brooks at the University of North Texas at Dallas Oct. 26.
As part of the university’s Student Life Leadership Seminars, Brooks spoke to about 75 students and staff on “The Principles and Practices of Servant Leaders.” Leadership is not so much about leading, she told them; it is about a journey of being ready to serve.
If you choose to lead, you will be forced out of your comfort zone because you cannot lead or serve only those you like, and you cannot expect to connect to those you lead and serve if you remain disconnected from the real environment and its challenges, Brooks explained.
“If you accept this challenge of being a servant leader, you are going to feel like the willing led by the unknowing to do the impossible for the ungrateful. And yet if the spirit of the servant leader is right, then against all of the odds, you will rise again and again to do positive things in your community,” she said.
Brooks described the “unusual route” she took that led to her becoming the CEO of the Urban League beginning as a child. The daughter of a blind man, she watched him cook, organize and even put up Christmas lights every year. One Christmas he fell off their roof but was uninjured and joked about falling. The lesson she learned was not to make excuses.
According to Brooks, watching her father as a child set her path in life. Initially she went into medical research in the field of glaucoma because he was blinded by glaucoma.
Brooks said that she could have been very bitter because as a child she had to walk her father to the “colored” Light House for the Blind, “because during that time there was racial discrimination, and because he was black he was denied a guide dog.
“I could have been very bitter behind that, but I chose not to because of how he and my mother handled it.”
Brooks accepted the invitation to speak on leadership at the nation’s newest university, she said, “because it is your responsibility—as we pass the torch to young leaders—that you are challenged to pick up where we are leaving off. And that’s a hard challenge to overcome many of the obstacles that you will face.”
Servant leaders must become change agents and must accept others as they are and not as they want them to be because everyone makes mistakes Brooks believes. She said the real test of servant leaders is the ability to continue when tempted to revert to a blame-game mentality when things go wrong.
“When everything is right, everybody gets the credit, everybody gets the glory. But when it’s wrong, as the leader, you take the hit, especially when you’re trying to change the course of events in your community.”
Servant leaders are in positions of power, but unlike those who lead by managing others, they accept the challenge of empowering people around them by giving them responsibilities and the authority to complete the task. Leaders are tempted to think that that takes away from their authority, but it adds to the “common good of what you’re doing.”
“You must share your knowledge, your talents. In other words, you must learn the art of giving it away. And that is the true mark of a servant leader,” Brooks said.
She offered a word of caution that servant leaders should not be naïve on this journey. Even if they do everything right, somebody will come out of the woodwork to put obstacles in their way. And during tough times when nothing is going right, servant leaders must believe in what they are doing. As the Apostle Paul wrote in the Bible, “sometimes ‘you must walk by faith and not by sight.’”
Brooks challenged students to embrace self-mastery to realize their true purpose in life. She called getting a college education an extremely important factor but said education alone is not enough. Servant leaders must combine book learning with knowledge from experiences and the ability to reason and analyze the facts.
“That intelligence is going to require a little common sense, and that’s not common anymore either. So, all rolled into one you have a servant leader with a new intelligent factor who’s willing to be a change agent,” she summarized.
