Our values & servant leadership: Humbition
When it comes to leadership, values matter. In our current political climate, it is vital that elected leaders clarify their values, and live and lead on a daily basis with the courage to stay committed to those values.
At New Politics Leadership Academy, we understand the importance of modeling this truth. We make the work of getting clear about values central to our approach to training and supporting servant leaders. Our team emerged from a long process of deliberation with a list of five core values that we believe are key to servant leadership and to the work that we do. You can learn about our five core values here.
Throughout this year, various members of our team will be writing about our organizational values and how you can apply them to your service. We hope you take the time to read our posts and do some reflection on how you are living out your own core values in 2020.
We’re starting our series with humbition - a blend of humility and ambition that we believe to be an essential element of servant leadership. Here’s why we think humbition is so powerful:
Servant leaders need humility - the awareness that they are working for a cause far greater than themselves, and that they do not have all the answers. You want to transform Congress and its ability to get things done? Great, so did many people who came before you. Servant leaders must have the humility to understand that they stand on the shoulders of many talented, smart, and dedicated people who have also strived to achieve the same change.
But that truth should never stop us from standing up and stating clearly: this is the change I seek. Positive change never happens when leaders throw up their hands because others have tried. It happens when they say, “The odds might be long, but this is a worthy fight.” That’s why while humility is necessary, servant leaders also need a healthy dose of ambition - a deep knowledge that their voices and perspectives matter, and that the lessons they have acquired through serving others are deeply meaningful, vitally important, and central to the solutions they seek.
Humibition speaks powerfully to a spiritual challenge encountered by many servant leaders considering running for office. These individuals have dedicated themselves to serving others, and they know big accomplishments are to the credit of many people — not one person — and that progress is often a slow, winding road. Watching the political sphere, though, it often seems that political leaders who lead with hubris and overconfidence are the ones who get celebrated.
Today, many servant leaders are asking how they can best serve the world, and a large proportion are realizing that the answer is through politics. For a lot of these leaders, the idea of service in a world that celebrates ambition but seems to scorn humility can be deeply uncomfortable.
For servant leaders who push past this discomfort, the challenge is to hold humility in balance with ambition - to summon the audacity to enter the political arena and strive for big things while retaining the humility required to keep perspective and remain focused on the work at hand.
Interested in clarifying your own values and learning how you can apply them to serving in the political sphere? Fill out our intent to apply form for Answering the Call and our team will get in touch!