Servant Leadership

Paul Mutengwa, a Project Samuel Zambia team member wrote this blog and I wanted to share it with you. Paul writes, “I was once encouraged and mentored by this great leader, Timothy Vowell, who said, ‘Lead others and manage yourself’. Interest, experience, knowledge, and passion; these are some of the driving forces that exist in different individuals with different life perspectives.”.

Paul goes on to write, “I personally believe that it’s not enough to have only an interest in doing something. It is what backs up those interests that’s important. Passion should be the glue that holds it all together. One can have experience, knowledge, or interest but without the passion for the experience, passion for the knowledge, or passion for the interest, positive results are rarely witnessed. Whenever I sit down to analyze the source of this rapid growing Project Samuel, what comes to mind is that there was an experience that was accompanied with knowledge that was later backed up by passion. Not everyone of us has to go through something in order to implement action.The experience of someone, if shared unmodified, causes the hearers to develop interest. That interest has to be accompanied with knowledge and passion for it to be complete.

Nevertheless, how passionate people are about anything is proved by how they do it. In Zambian culture, my culture, a boss is an instructor, a delegator, a manager of others and not always of themselves. But here at Project Samuel, I have found that leaders have not much to do with titles or positions, but of service. The first time I saw this “servant leadership”, the Director himself, Brenden Vowell was making fire while I was standing at a distance. This does not exist at all in my culture. The second time, it was the assistant director, Daniel Pieper, working alongside the workers cutting timber for the Training Centre. This is something you would not see in my culture; the boss helping to complete the task. Two great leaders exhibiting somewhat similar characteristics, not only observing and giving directives, but physically involved in the tasks regardless of what kind of work.

In a nut shell, I am truly finding a total difference between leadership and management. Besides making sure that work is moving (managing), leading involves loving, teaching, encouraging and mentoring. I find true leadership here at Project Samuel and I am ever humbled.”.