Servant to Resilient Leadership

Jane Goodall has been a hero of mine for as long as I can remember. I have a children’s book about her called  Me, Jane in the basket by my reading chair. Her passing last week reminded me why she’s been one of my lifelong heroes. 

I first admired her as the groundbreaking scientist who transformed our understanding of chimpanzees, but she became so much more to me — a compassionate activist, educator, and messenger of hope. Goodall taught me how to take my natural leadership style (servant leadership) and make it so much more resilient for ever-changing times. 

This post looks at how to move from servant leadership to resilient leadership using Jane Goodall and Ernest Shackleton as case studies. It is dedicated to Jane Goodall: a woman who led with care and resilience, and who showed the world that hope is not optimism — it’s choosing to act, even when the future is uncertain.

Jane Goodall

Ernest Shackleton

STORY: Moving from servant to resilient leadership

READ MORE: What else can I read Irene?

BOOK STUFF: This month we’re reading Rewire or Retire: AI for Leaders! Join us to choose the November & December book. 

GOING FURTHER: Enrollment for the Disruptive Change Leadership Circle closes next week!

STORY:

Almost all of you Inquiring Minds readers identify as servant leaders (at least in part). You care about people over power and prestige. You embrace the idea of “leaders eat last”. You flip the hierarchy and lift others up. 

Robert Greenleaf introduced the idea of “servant leadership” in the 1970’s and the research on the style has developed greatly over the years with a more recent, great book by Ken Blanchard & Renee Broadwell. The core commitments are:

• Empathy and Listening: Attending deeply to the needs and voices of others.

• Healing and Stewardship: Caring for people and systems with integrity.

• Awareness and Foresight: Understanding the emotional, ethical, and systemic landscape.

• Growth and Community: Enabling others to develop and belong.

• Persuasion and Purpose: Leading through trust, vision, and meaning, not authority.

Servant leaders, you are amazing! 😍

But there’s a problem with servant leadership in today’s every-changing world. Servant leaders thrive when there’s stable ground. Long-term things like professional development, listening tours, community healing and revitalization, collective meaning-making, and visionary projects take time. You need to plant seeds and nurture them over time as they sprout, grow, and flourish.

Unfortunately, In today’s world, there’s often very little stable ground. Things are constantly shifting and changing. Government shutdown. Funding lost. Leadership turnover. New regulations. Crises. AI. Shifting directives. Market forces. As soon as one chaotic situation is managed, a new challenge emerges to throw everything up in the air again.

So what is a servant leader to do without stable ground? 

Resilient Leadership

When predictability ends, resilient leadership begins. Resilient leaders have a deep commitment to their work and to life as a whole. They embrace change, uncertainty, and adversity as a normal part of life. In fact, to them, life’s hardships are the sharpening stone that hones our best selves. Resilient leaders master all four aspects of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-regulation, other-awareness, other-regulation. 

Resilience isn’t the absence of adversity, it’s how you respond to it.

The core commitments of resilient leadership include:

• Anchored Purpose: Holding true to your “why” and core values, even when everything else changes.

• Cognitive Flexibility: Finding novel solutions, seeking new perspectives, and adapting the plan (or throwing it out altogether) in order to sustain momentum towards your purpose.

• Emotional Intelligence: Modeling calm, hope, and confidence, and inspiring those in others.

• Transparency: Building trust through honesty and vulnerability.

• Growth Mindset: Treating failure and adversity as learning opportunities.

• Renewal: Boosting energy and managing stress in oneself and others.

• Moral Integrity: Acting with fairness and consistency under pressure.

• Collective Care: Sustaining morale and nurturing connection.

Servant leaders nurture people and missions when conditions are predictable. Resilient leaders ensure that those things last through inevitable change and disruption. 

Servant leaders embody compassion and community. Resilient leaders fuse those traits with flexibility, endurance, and courage. 

Servant leaders say, “I’m here for you.” Resilient leaders say, “We’ll get through this together."

Taken together the result is Resilient-Servant Leadership — leadership that loves deeply but lasts indefinitely.

In my mind, two leaders exemplify Resilient-Servant Leadership: Ernest Shackleton and Jane Goodall.

Ernest Shackleton

In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set out on what he called “the last great polar adventure.” His goal: to lead the first expedition across Antarctica on foot. His crew included 27 men, a stowaway who became the ship’s steward, 69 dogs, and a cat named Mrs. Chippy.

From the start, Shackleton led with a servant’s heart. He knew every sailor’s birthday and quirks, played the banjo to lift spirits, and personally checked each man’s cabin for warm boots. Where other explorers ruled with military command and discipline, Shackleton led through empathy and care—the essence of servant leadership.

But on January 18, 1915, just a day from their intended starting point, a gale shoved the pack ice against the shore and trapped their ship, Endurance. The men watched helplessly as she froze “like an almond in a chocolate bar.”

Shackleton’s response revealed his early steps toward resilience. The ship’s surgeon noted, “He did not rage or show the slightest sign of disappointment. He told us simply and calmly that we must winter in the pack; explained its dangers and possibilities; never lost his optimism, and prepared for winter.” That was emotional intelligence and transparency in action.

For ten months, Shackleton’s top priority was collective care. He prescribed what he called “mental medicine”: purposeful work and daily rhythm. The men cleaned, hunted seals, exercised, repaired gear. He organized dog races and waltzing contests, showing the spirit of renewal—protecting energy and dissipating stress under impossible conditions. And with unflinching moral integrity, he ensured officers and sailors shared the same rations and chores.

When the ice began crushing the ship, Shackleton showed cognitive flexibility—abandoning the expedition and salvaging only essentials. Even cherished items like bibles, keepsakes, and Mrs. Chippy had to be sacrificed.

On October 27, 1915, Endurance finally sank. That night in his journal, Shackleton wrote simply, “I cannot write about it.” But in the morning he gathered his men and reframed the mission:

“Ship and stores have gone—so now we’ll go home.”

That single sentence epitomized the moment he became a resilient leader. His anchored purpose was clear—get every man home alive—though his methods remained flexible. At first he tried to march across the sea ice toward land, but after managing only seven miles in seven days, he abandoned that plan and decided to let the sea ice carry them north. Months later, when the ice finally broke apart, they rowed for Elephant Island—six brutal days of freezing spray, hunger, and exhaustion before touching solid ground.

The chances of being found were minuscule. So, after nine days of recovery, Shackleton set out again—this time with five men in a 22-foot lifeboat to sail 800 miles across the world’s roughest seas. His decision showed both growth mindset and collective care: he took the few dissenters with him, knowing that by “keeping his friends close, but his enemies closer,” he would ensure that the naysayers could not spread doubt and despair amongst the 22 men left behind.

After sixteen days of storms and then another sixteen hours of climbing across the mountains of South Georgia, Shackleton reached help. Four months and four rescue attempts later, he returned for his crew. Every man was still alive.

Shackleton’s journey is the story of a servant leader transformed by catastrophe into a resilient-servant leader—one who fused compassion with adaptability, community with endurance, and stewardship with courage.

He embodied all eight traits: Anchored purpose. Cognitive flexibility. Emotional intelligence. Transparency. Growth mindset. Renewal. Moral integrity. Collective care.

(Side note: Just a few days ago, an article in the Polar Record announced a detailed study of the remains of the Endurance which was discovered in 2022. Apparently there were numerous structural failings that led to its ultimate demise and the failure of the original mission.)

Ernest Shackleton shows what happens when the shifting ground is a state of life or death crisis. But what about a slow burn of change, uncertainty, and disruption over decades?

Jane Goodall

Like me, Jane Goodall was a curious child who loved animals, books and nature. She would sit in the branches of her favorite beech tree and dream of someday studying wild animals and writing books about them.

She saved enough money working as a waitress to get passage to Kenya and was hired by the esteemed primatologist Dr. Louis Leakey, as his secretary. Though she had no university education, Leakey was impressed by this determined, passionate, patient 26-year-old woman. He sent her to Gombe, Tanzania, to study chimpanzees, armed with nothing but binoculars, a notebook, and boundless curiosity.

Like Shackleton, she was a servant leader in the truest sense — humble, observant, and deeply attuned to others, both human and nonhuman. She listened more than she spoke, waited for the chimpanzees to accept her, and built trust one quiet gesture at a time. Through patience and empathy, she broke barriers of species, gender, and convention.

Where her contemporaries studied animals from a distance, Goodall lived among them. She named her chimps — David Greybeard, Flo, Fifi — and treated them as individuals with personalities and emotions. Many in the scientific establishment ridiculed her because of her unusual methods but also because she was a woman. But Goodall’s anchored purpose — to understand and honor the interconnectedness of all life — held firm. That clarity of her “why” grounded her 

Then came the first shock: the chimps she loved and studied weren’t the docile herbivores everyone thought. They not only hunted other animals for meat, but they were capable of war. Over several years, one group of chimpanzees systematically killed each and every male in a splinter community. She observed infanticide, serial killers, and chimps drinking the blood of their murdered victims. She wept, questioned her work, and nearly lost faith in the very nature she’d devoted her life to studying. But this moment also revealed her growth mindset. Instead of abandoning her work, she got curious. Life is both beautiful and brutal — complexity she would later teach as a central truth of our shared humanity.

When deforestation began to destroy the Gombe ecosystem, Goodall again transformed. She could no longer simply observe; she had to act. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute, and her mission shifted from scientist to activist. She used cognitive flexibility to experiment with multiple solutions to reduce deforestation – working with local villages, growing ecotourism, replanting forests, building schools, employing young people who could then become ambassadors, and many more. She relied upon emotional intelligence and moral integrity in equal measure — staying calm, hopeful, and ethically grounded over decades, even as the environmental crisis deepened and climate change worsened.

But her most powerful evolution came through collective care. In the 1980s and ’90s, rather than leading from the top, Goodall began empowering others through Roots & Shoots, her global youth program. She believed that real change required nurturing thousands of young leaders, not commanding from above. 

Through decades of travel, exhaustion, and heartbreak, she embodied renewal — finding restoration in nature, prayer, and solitude. And through it all, she remained transparent and humble — acknowledging her mistakes, sharing her doubts, and inviting others to learn alongside her. That authenticity built trust across scientists, activists, and schoolchildren alike. Even into her eighties, she traveled widely in order to speak out about climate change, rally people to join her mission, and share a message of hope. 

She too exemplified all eight traits of resilient-servant leadership: Anchored purpose. Cognitive flexibility. emotional intelligence. Transparency. Growth mindset. Renewal. Moral integrity. Collective care.

Where Shackleton’s resilience was forged by a life or death crisis, Goodall’s was seen in the daily work of ever worsening environmental destruction, political headwinds, and climate change. 

Ever since I was a little girl reading her story, I’ve seen Goodall as one of my heroes. I’m writing these words a week after her passing and the most important lesson I’ve learned from her is that resilient leaders don’t just survive disruption — they transform it into hope that outlasts them.

Summary

If you see yourself as a servant leader who is stepping into resilient leadership (perhaps reluctantly) as the result of ever-present change, you aren’t alone. It’s how I see myself and where I see many of my clients struggling. But each of these are skills that can be learned and practices by anyone, not just the Shackletons and Goodalls of the world.

1. Clearly articulate your own anchored purpose because a deep, values-driven “why” can hold you steady through chaos.

2. Regularly practice and embrace cognitive flexibility because the pace of change is only going to accelerate.

3. Learn the skills of emotional intelligence because it’s essential to not only regulate your own emotions to stay graceful under pressure, but leadership requires the ability to read and influence the emotions of those around you.

4. Be transparent in what you say and do because honesty and openness builds trust.

5. Cultivate a growth mindset that views the inevitable challenges of life as your greatest teacher.

6. Establish regular renewal practices for yourself and others because resiliency is only possible when you can give the best of you, not what’s left of you.

7. Always act with moral integrity such that your insides match your outsides.

8. And most important of all, create communities of collective care, because there’s nothing that those kinds of communities can’t figure out together.

READ MORE:

Harvard Business School has a lovely free online mini-course about resilient leadership using Shackleton as a solo case study. It’s great! If you want a book, The Resilient Leader by George S. Everly Jr., Douglas Strouse, and Dennis K. McCormack is great. (I haven’t read the whole thing but I love the parts I read!)

History.com has a good article on Shackleton though I highly recommend the book, Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. And you can learn more about the new research about the ship Endurance in the Smithsonian.

You can read about Jane Goodall’s work and donate to her organizations at The Jane Goodall Institute.  And I can’t say enough good things about the children’s book Me, Jane by Patrick McDonnell and The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times  by Jane Goodall, Douglas Abrams & Gail Hudson

BOOK STUFF:

This month we’re reading Rewire or Retire: AI for Leaders! Join us to close the book and conversation. We will also choose the new read for November & December!  Hope to see you there!  If you are not yet subscribed to Book Club you can do that HERE!

GOING FURTHER:

Enrollment for the Disruptive Change Leadership Circle closes next week- October 15. If you are interested in getting in on this group, let's make it happen!  Book your 30 min consult call to tighten up your goals for this three month cohort!