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Book Review

Stewardship - Choosing Service Over Self-Interest
By Peter Block

Who wouldn’t want every single person in their workplace to take the initiative to meet challenges and solve problems?  Unfortunately, because of our experiences in mostly hierarchical environments, we learn to take few risks and wait on the person with the title or leadership role for guidance.

Developing fully engaged team members is possible when you undertake the long-term effort to foster a climate in which employees feel free to think, problem-solve, innovate, and express their opinions.  

“Stewardship is visionary, hopeful, and practical.  Block calls for a whole new way of thinking about the workplace - and then takes the reader through very tangible steps for getting there.”  - Robert H. Waterman, Jr.

  

In Stewardship, Peter Block draws a distinction between traditional leadership and the concept of stewardship.  Traditional leadership is about creating a place for accountability by centralizing power.  This can be done very compassionately, but it still has control as a primary objective.

Stewardship is about trying to create accountability in the world through the dispersion of power.  Distributing power means giving people on the edge as much choice as possible about how to serve a customer and how to serve a business.

Block challenges us to move away from a "parenting" model of leadership, which has more to do with insuring compliance and control in exchange for "taking care" of our employees.  Instead, he suggests that we adopt a "partnership" model where the intent is to redesign our organizations so that service is the centerpiece and ownership and responsibility are strongly felt among those close to doing the work and contacting customers.  Benefits of this approach include:

  • Creating a workplace where every member thinks and acts as an owner

  • Reintegrating the managing of the work with the doing of work

  • Replacing self-interest, dependency, and control with service, responsibility, and partnership

  • Raising the productive capacity of work unites and economic success of organizations

Most of us know and experience daily the limitation of command and control.  Part of the reason we continue to operate this way is that we are unsure of the alternative.  In Stewardship, Peter Block provides us with a useful roadmap for changing the way we work together in teams, businesses and organizations.

Real leadership is the capacity to initiate a future distinct from the past. A distinct future can only be achieved through high engagement. The essence of leadership is about convening, valuing relatedness, and decentralizing its own role.