The Institution as Servant

 

The Institution as Servant 

  

As I listened intently to the Social Weather Station social survey presentations last January 18 in my alma mater, Asian Institute of Management, I recalled what Servant Leader founder, Robert K. Greenleaf, said attracted me to its principles: it is all about institutions as servants not individuals. You see, as I was absorbing the slides that Dr. Mahar Mangahas presented, I thought that we seek out servant leadership in a president of a country – or in a chief justice of the Supreme Court, or even in an Archbishop of an Archdiocese - not as an end in itself, but as means and model to create and sustain organizations as servant institutions. 

  

The 2012 SWS Survey Review reported that the PNoy presidency has so far reached a record high in helping the poor. How did they know? They took the total percent of those dissatisfied with how the Aquino administration was helping the poor in 2011 and deducted that from the total percent of those who were satisfied. The result was +51%. That is higher than the years of the Ramos and Estrada presidency where the net satisfaction for helping the poor was only in the range of +30% to +40%, and for the Arroyo years, +10% to +20%. The PNoy presidency has also reached unprecedented high record in foreign relations at +43%, and in fighting crime at +34% when compared with previous presidencies. That is interesting because the rating given to PNoy as President (vs. presidency or governance) is high but not unusually high like those of Fidel  Ramos or Corazon Aquino as Presidents. That really got me to think about the institution as servant, and its leader as servant.

  

If we can’t have both, what should we encourage and aim at sustaining – the servant leader or the servant institution? Or both? Or more than both? Two points to ponder:

  

First point: what Greenleaf reminded us about "caring for persons, the more able and the less able serving each other, is the rock upon which a good society is built.” He says that what we tended to see often is  “ caring was largely person to person” but in recent years we are able to see how care is done through organizations. I’s immediately cite Caritas Manila as an example. In its founding years, donations were gathered and repacked for person-to-person or family-to-family giving. It was much later that the BEC – Basic Ecclesial Communities – modeled from the ealy Christian communities that Caritas communities were identified and charity became a systematic, planned social intervention. This means, charity as a effort to help not only in immediate needs but to help break through the cycle of individual or faimly poverty. How by providing access to Caritas programs the build capacity – education, food preparation, microbusiness, own home.

  
Greenleaf says: “ now most of [the care for persons] is mediated through institutions - often large, complex, powerful, impersonal; not always competent…. If a better society is to be built, one that is more just and more loving, one that provides greater creative opportunity for its people, then the most open course is to raise both the capacity to serve and the very performance as servant of existing major institutions.”
  

 

Second point: what Pope Benedict XVI urged us to consider in his 45th World Day of Peace message, which is reaching out and enlarging the role of the new generations – the children and youth – in affirming a just and peaceful social order. Compared to previous messages, this one is addressed especially to parents, families and all those involved in the area of education and formation, as well as to leaders in the various spheres of religious, political and economic life and YOUTH leaders. The Holy Father, as if hearing Greenleaf’s claim that both instution and person must be servant leaders,  he underscores authenticity: “It is the task of education to form people in authentic freedom. This is not the absence of constraint or the supremacy of free will, it is not the absolutism of the self. When man believes himself to be absolute, to depend on nothing and no one, to be able to do anything he wants, he ends up contradicting the truth of his own being and forfeiting his freedom. On the contrary, man is a relational being, who lives in relationship with others and especially with God.”
  
Consider this: if you were doing social surveys, how do you raise the question about who our leaders and our institutions and us the Filipino people relate to as God. Could we, should we, raise questions about our self-described God, along the same path of survey questions about self-rated poverty and self-rated hunger? I see as a third approach to servant leadership: the youth as an institution that can indeed be called to lead and serve even now.
 
The Holy Father advises: “The ‘earthly city’ is promoted not merely by relationships of rights and duties, but to an even greater and more fundamental extent by relationships of gratuitousness, mercy and communion. Charity always manifests God’s love in human relationships .. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” (Mt 5:6). They shall be satisfied because they hunger and thirst for right relations with God, with themselves, with their brothers and sisters, and with the whole of creation… To all, and to young people in particular, I wish to say emphatically: “It is not ideologies that save the world, but only a return to the living God, our Creator, the guarantor of our freedom, the guarantor of what is really good and true … an unconditional return to God who is the measure of what is right and who at the same time is everlasting love. And what could ever save us apart from love?” Love takes delight in truth, it is the force that enables us to make a commitment to truth, to justice, to peace, because it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things (cf. 1 Cor 13:1-13). Dear young people, you are a precious gift for society. Do not yield to discouragement in the face of difficulties and do not abandon yourselves to false solutions which often seem the easiest way to overcome problems. Do not be afraid to make a commitment, to face hard work and sacrifice, to choose the paths that demand fidelity and constancy, humility and dedication. Be confident in your youth and its profound desires for happiness, truth, beauty and genuine love! Live fully this time in your life so rich and so full of enthusiasm.”