Faith in the Workplace

Does faith go to work with you? And if it does, what does it look like? Toro Company's former CEO, Ken Melrose, answers with a book on servant leadership. Ken's faith at work showed up in his spirit of service that fostered companywide "pride in excellence," a corporate management style that freed employees to do what Christ does for us: to be our fullest selves.

In this interview, The High Calling of our Daily Work talks to Ken Melrose about how faith informs work and vice versa.

Ken, in 1995, you published Making the Grass Greener on Your Side: A CEO's Journey to Leading by Serving. By that time, a long shelf of books already existed on business leadership. What did you want to add to the discussion?

Most business leadership books then were written by consultants and/or academics presenting case studies from research. Stephen Covey, author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, encouraged me to write about the real-life corporate transformation of The Toro Company based on principles of servant leadership. My book took the reader from Toro's financial near-demise to a bottom-up culture and how it drove business performance.

Which came first, your belief in God or your understanding of servant leadership?

My belief in God came first, stemming from my upbringing and the Christian values taught to me by my parents and brother. My understanding, or perhaps more accurately, my revelation of servant leadership came from my first leadership experience during the '70s at Game Time, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Toro.

What did your work at Game Time teach you about servant leadership?

Several concepts about behavior of the leader and those he/she leads: first, every employee has the potential to contribute and do good work. Second, this potential can be realized when the employee is inspired, valued, engaged, empowered, and recognized. And third, the leader's role is to create this environment. As he/she does, the company goals will best be achieved.

How would you answer the question of where to fit spirituality into a hardscrabble business environment?

A person's spirituality contributes to his or her wholeness, and I believe the whole of the person must, at some level, come into the work environment. This does not mean going to work as an evangelist. But it does mean being able to exercise one's own ethics, integrity, character, humility, caring, and valuing of others. These should mesh into our activities and behaviors toward accomplishing the business goals and our performance expectations. If they're at odds, the lack of alignment will eventually result in a separation from the company.

After you overhauled the management style in a playground manufacturing company, a book on servant leadership sort of codified what you'd experienced. Ongoing, several other books influenced your belief in servant leadership. What kind of reading do you recommend to people who want to excel as leaders?

The landmark book that Covey wrote became formational for me, as well as Robert Greenleaf's Servant Leadership. I particularly liked and have used Peter Block's Stewardship, Meg Wheatley's Finding Our Way, and Ken Blanchard's series beginning with The One-Minute Manager. More recently, Jim Collins' bestsellers talk about servant leadership in a different but very relevant and meaningful way. Another building-block book for me was a forerunner to Collins' Good to Great called Real Power by Janet Hagberg.

Is there any way in which business school failed to prepare you? Or a course you'd like to see on the curriculum?

I hear how business schools today tend to create unrealistic expectations for many students, but for me, both MIT's Sloan School of Management and the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago seemed too theoretical back in the '60s. My bet is that they are different now, but when I began my business career almost 40 years ago, I did not have a good sense of how things really worked in an organization or how the power of teams can be unleashed and focused.

For anyone new to the workforce, can you expand on "how things really work in an organization"?

How things really work in an organization has just as much to do with relationships, feelings, attitudes, and perceptions as with training, tools, and skills. And part of the management difficulty is due to the fact that these, unlike the latter attributes, are often obscured or hard to assess. Management's challenge is to create an environment of trust, openness, and vulnerability so that the leader can understand and utilize the talents of the whole person.

We know that servant leadership is not a formula; still, can you give concrete examples of how a leader serves?

There are so many, but ones I often use in my discussions with others are by walking the talk, driving to win-win solutions, genuine humility and caring, priority focus on the success of those around you instead of yourself, listening over talking in the same ratio as the instruments God gave us, and demonstrating that we are our brother's (and sister's) keepers.