International Journal of Servant-Leadership
Abstract
The following transcript is excerpted from an interview with Parker Palmer conducted for the Gonzaga University online Servant-Leadership Mentor Gallery. Questions have been removed for freedom of content flow. Parker Palmer: What really fascinates me is how visible our brokenness is. A rational person would think nobody needs to be led toward seeing it or understanding it; it's all around us all the time. It's on the nightly news and it's in the morning newspaper and it's in the self-reports that people give of their own lives. So I think we're talking about a network of mythologies or illusions that we maintain in order to try to convince ourselves that things aren't as bad as they seem, maybe in the manner of a dysfunctional family which keeps pretending that everything is fine here even though Dad is drinking way too much and hitting people way too often. The way that leaders can help people see their brokenness, I think, is by acknowledging their own. I don't think we are willing to trust anybody on the issue of how broken we are until that person has acknowledged his or her own brokenness. And I understand that that's a tricky business for leaders. There's a strange dance that goes on between leaders and followers where followers want leaders to pretend that they're totally together and totally in charge, and then they resent them for acting as if they were superhuman, making all the rest of us feel like dorks. So we do this sort of strange dance in which we project on leaders our need for the very thing nobody has, we don't have, so we need somebody to pretend that they have it.
Recommended Citation
Carey, Michael Lieberman; Poutiatine, Mike; and Ferch, Shann
(2007)
"Parker Palmer on Servant-Leadership: An Interview,"
International Journal of Servant-Leadership: Vol. 3, Article 24.
DOI: 10.33972/ijsl.276
Available at:
https://repository.gonzaga.edu/ijsl/vol3/iss1/24
Copyright Information
Copyright 2007 The author(s). All Rights reserved