Page 155 - Harnessing the Strengths

138 ■ Servant-Leadership in the Intercultural Practice

themselves at their work? Indeed—you guessed it—the two
sides need each other in order to get beyond just having
ideas, to having really good ideas. The servant-leader will
always take care that the hare brain and the tortoise mind
continue to work together. The road to effectiveness and
creativity passes through hard work. First, it is important to
think with the hare brain; then let the ideas rest and think
them over quietly (tortoise mind) in order to, in the end,
evaluate logically and systematically (again the hare brain).
In this way, an upwardly circling spiral is created.
People seem to be happier about their decisions if they
don’t think about them so much in the beginning. If we go
back to the title of Claxton’s book, in this sense it is true that
people that think less are more intelligent.

Command and Control Versus Delegated Autonomy

It goes without saying that leaders delegate authority,
but for how long should they give their employees free-
dom before they reassert their control? Parents treat their
two- or three-year-old children differently from how they
treat their fi fteen-year-old. Is this sensible? Of course it is!
Servant-leaders have the same approach.
The Canadian psychiatrist Elliot Jaques was the fi rst
one to look at time orientations as an important element of
leadership. Good leaders can be recognized by their long
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“time span of discretion,” which means that they have a
sense of responsibility for their decisions far into the future,
even if they might not offi cially be a part of that future.
Jaques discovered that generals from the Pentagon still
felt some level of responsibility for the next ten to twenty
years, even if they were obliged to retire early. That is an