Doing For, or Acting With?

The Humility of Leading Well

My colleague T. Thorne Coyle wrote recently about Leadership, Service, & Gratitude.

Always powerfully eloquent, I love Thorne's writings because she speaks to the warrior in all of us. In Leadership, Service, & Gratitude, she writes about the necessity to act in service if one is to lead well.

Humbling oneself through service is a great, grounding way to retain clarity of mission, to validate that the vision we hold and the reality we are experiencing are actually helped into alignment through the efforts we make and the service we offer.

I was also moved by her description of being in service to a cause, rather than just donating money:

“Rather than looking at this from the view of charity I prefer to look at it in terms of justice. Whereas the root of the word charity – caritas – is that of love, I feel that we have lost track of that and tend to think of charity as something that wealthy people do for poor people. Justice however, brings us clearly back to the reality that we are all yoked together as denizens of this planet. We are not doing for, we are acting with. Justice is the rebalancing force of love.”

"We are not doing for, we are acting with."

That's leadership.