Leadership as a call to service: The Lives and Works of Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena and Therese of Lisieux.
Christine Cameron. Ballan, Vic: Connor Court Press, 2012.
Reviewed by Dr Richard Rymarz
SERVICE leadership is a concept that is well used in discourse on leadership in Catholic schools.
Christine Cameron in this book presents a new perspective by looking at service leadership through the prism of the lives and works of three prominent and influential female Catholic saints.
Her thesis is that each model, in different ways, dimensions of service leadership and, moreover, that there are lessons to be learned here for those working in leadership in schools today.
Cameron’s definition of servant leadership is based on that of Spears.
It is comprised of ten components – listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualisation, foresight, stewardship, commitment to the growth of people and building community.
In elaborating of these core elements she makes good use of Greenleaf’s notion of servant leadership as a journey.
The central claim of the book is that the three saints are all exemplars of the kind of leadership model that is laid out here.
One of the strongest features of the book is that Cameron does not fall into the trap of plucking pearls of wisdom from the corpus of each saint’s life and work and then applying these without contextualisation to educational practice.
Rather, she engages with each and draws from this reflective elements that model servant leadership.
St Teresa gives, perhaps, the most obvious example of servant leadership as she led not only a convent but also a significant reform of the Carmelites.
For St Teresa components like conceptualisation were especially important.
In her role in the order she had to be attentive, that is listen, to the various currents within the Church, society and also, specifically, to those related to religious life in Spain.
On the basis of this she was able to craft a plan that provided both a vision for the Carmelites and also tackled the manifest practical problems that beset the order.
This fits in well with Spears’ notion of conceptualisation as applying to those leaders who are able to dream great dreams.
For St Catherine, foresight was a particularly important servant leadership component.
She was able to look ahead and see the contrasting futures that lay ahead for the Church if decisive decisions were not made.
In this she was aided by her status as a woman with no recognised role in the Church.
This outsider status made the leadership she was able to provide invaluable, as she was both fearless and insistent.
In her correspondence with Pope Gregory XI, St Catherine demonstrated both her persistence and the capacity of servant leaders to look for solutions and to anticipate problem before they grow too large.
St Therese is the most recent of the saints examined in the book.
Her life as a cloistered nun in France around the turn of the twentieth century gives many illustration of servant leadership.
Prominent amongst these is that of the importance of building community.
One of her responsibilities at Carmel,
despite her age, was to guide the novices into community life.
For St Therese the heart of community life, be it religious or lay, was to be attentive to the needs of others and to present to them the face of Christ.
This translated into taking account of actions in the community and treating all tasks and interactions with others as events of enduring importance.
The book is recommended for those who wish to further their understanding of servant leadership and how this can be applied to schools.
Dr Richard Rymarz is a lecturer at St Joseph’s College, University of Alberta.
