Page 200 - Harnessing the Strengths

Appendix: Meet the Authors ■ 183

Ed: Attitude and behavior must be the same whether at
work or at home. Therefore, at home I serve my wife
and children. Leading is not a question of playing the
boss; instead, it is knowing which moments to set the
direction, and which moments to take the direction
of my partner. In a family, serving and leading are
constantly changing places. You can see it as a kind
of two-headed leadership.
Fons: That is therefore the same as with the tango: the man
leads where the lady wants to go. Isn’t that the essence
of leadership?
Ed: Yes, but then you need to know where they want
to go! The most important task of a servant-leader
is to identify and fulfi ll the needs of others. That
starts with listening. You have to know what moves
the others, what their question is—even when they
don’t ask the question explicitly. If you don’t lis-
ten to what is needed, then you come up with the
wrong solutions. I have seen this in Colombia when
I was living and working there. Western volunteers
noticed that the villagers’ huts were always full of
smoke because they cooked inside over open fi res.
As a result, there were specialists fl own over from
Holland to come and build chimneys in every hut;
and afterwards, this initiative was celebrated with
much fanfare. When I returned to the village a year
later, every chimney had disappeared. The residents
had torn them down because they had a lot of trou-
ble with infestations ever since the chimneys were
built. The smoke inside the huts had worked as a
deterrent to insects and other infestations, but none
of the volunteers had taken the time to ask them
“why” they used the current methods. They just