You got a story about that?

A friend is reminiscing about the reading he did years ago to forge his leadership style.

"And I read a lot of Greenleaf," he says.

With a jolt of recognition, it takes me back seven years to my own reading of the late Robert K. Greenleaf, founder of The Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership. For me, it was essential preparation for five years of speechwriting for the CEO of ServiceMaster Inc. I bring it up now because I can't remember a single thing from Mr. Greenleaf's books and lectures. But I can tell you a story about servant-leadership exactly the way it was told to me at the beginning of this decade. Here's how I wrote it in a speech:

Many years ago, one of my colleagues at ServiceMaster was sitting in a room much like this. He was attending one of his first big company meetings. Dinner was almost over. Plates were being cleared and dessert was on the way. 

Near the front of the room an elderly gentleman sat, waiting for his time to walk to the podium and speak. His name was Ken Hansen. He had been a legendary CEO of ServiceMaster. Now, not in the best of health, recently retired from the everyday job of leading the company, he was still a powerful symbol of everything ServiceMaster stood for.

He might have been thinking about what he was going to say when he got to the podium. Instead, he was open to everything that was happening in front of him. And what he saw was a single server coming toward him with a tray of desserts. The tray was heavy and hard to balance, but the woman under it knew what she was doing. She was walking fast toward the front of the room, where she knew she would find a stand to set the tray on.

Ken glances ahead of her and sees that the stand is not empty. There's a tray of dinner dishes on it. In a flash, Ken is up and on his way. He snatches the dinner dishes just in time. The server sets down the new tray and begins to hand out the desserts.

There were several hundred people in that ballroom. And probably only one of them caught the significance of what had just happened. His name was Mike Isakson, and he was impressed. He decided that must be the way leaders did things at ServiceMaster. Today Mike is president of one of our businesses, and the spirit of servant-leadership lives on in him.

When you ask him what servant-leadership means in practice, he tells you that story. And he goes out of his way to point out that as he took in this act of service to the servant, he was convinced that it wasn't done for show. It was almost like a reflex action -- but the reflex action of a conditioned mind. Ken had a great awareness of the service that was being performed in the room. And he had a great empathy for the servant. It was from that background that he saw, and he acted. Not just so the servant could do her job, but so she could do it with the dignity that was her due. 

It's stories like this that stick with us. That's why we put them in our speeches.