“Do you give the horse his strength or clothe his neck with a flowing mane? Do you make him leap like a locust, striking terror with his proud snorting? He laughs at fear, afraid of nothing; he does not shy away from the sword. In frenzied excitement he eats up the ground; he cannot stand still when the trumpet sounds.”
These powerful words from Job: 39 open the movie Secretariat, a film about the greatest horse that ever lived. Not only did he win the Triple Crown, he won two of the three races in record time that stand today, almost 40 years later. The storyline of the movie was about owner, Penny Chenery Tweedy, insisting trainer and jockey let Secretariat run his own race--that is, with minimum supervision.
There is a service chip in all of our brains. We grow up knowing the meaning and power of helping, serving and contributing to others. Along the way we get distracted with “all about me” interests and “get ahead” tactics. But, when we see an act of selfless generosity, or are the recipient or witness of a random act of kindness, we get a glimpse of who we are supposed to be. There is often a faint longing to run our race.
What if service leadership was all about removing, not about adding? What if service leaders believed they had a prize service “race horse” that only needed the permission, proficiency, and protection to deliver championship service to customers? What if leaders worked as hard to get out of the way as they did to control and direct?
Had Secretariat trainer Lucien Laurin or jockey Ron Turcotte decided they needed to dictate, direct and domesticate Secretariat we might never have gotten to witness his “frenzied excitement to eat up the ground” as he ran the race he was meant to run. Set your servers free and let them “serve like the wind.”
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