What Makes A True Leader?
She wasn’t the CEO of a large corporation. She never held elected office. She spent 59 years living in a monastery on a wind-swept ridge overlooking the Missouri River on North Dakota’s prairie.
She was neither bombastic, nor physically imposing, but slender and self-effacing. Yet Sister Thomas Welder cast a monumental presence.
Sister Thomas died last week at the age of 80. To honor this remarkable woman, I spent time reviewing the many Internet videos in which she speaks on her signature subject: educating young people for leadership.
I got to know Sister Thomas last year when she invited me to speak at Bismarck’s University of Mary on “Stirring the Ashes: Igniting a Sense of Hope in Our Work.” Her example of leadership leaves an indelible handprint on the hearts of those of us lucky enough to have known her.
As our country moves toward the Presidential and Congressional elections in November, this Benedictine sister’s vision speaks volumes about what it means to be a servant, a leader, a person of faith, and exemplary human being.
In 1978, Sister Thomas became president of the College of Mary, then a small, liberal arts college on the Dakota prairie. She had a sweeping vision. It was to transform the College of Mary into University of Mary, one of the country’s premier institutions for educating future leaders.
The school’s mission would not be to turn out your typical MBA, get-ahead, get-rich, seek-the-limelight-type of leaders. It would become a training ground for “servant leaders.”
An early influence on her thinking was Robert K. Greenleaf’s seminal 1970 essay, “The Servant as Leader.”
Greenleaf was a former AT&T executive who concluded after his long tenure at the top that the authoritarian, command-and-control, pyramid-style leadership model was no longer serving the needs of our country, our corporations, or its workers.
Sister Thomas advocated for a different pyramid-shaped model. She twinned “Service” with “Vision” on the sides of the triangle, and placed both those values firmly on a base of “Credibility.”
“People won’t listen to the message, if they can’t trust the messenger,” she was fond of saying.
Effective leaders, she observed, don’t seek to influence by “force, coercion, control, or authority,” but by “respecting the needs of those in their service.”
They aren’t big talkers. They are devoted listeners.
Here Sister Thomas didn’t need to turn for guidance to any of the latest books by management experts. As a Benedictine sister, she was intimately familiar with one of history’s most famous guides for living and leading with compassion: the monastic “Rule of St. Benedict.”
A 6th century text written expressly for monks might seem an odd guide to address our rapidly changing 21st century social, political, and business practices. But from its first sentence, “Listen … with the ear of your heart,” The Rule echoes guidance coming from many of today’s top organizational and management voices.
In his chapter on electing a monastery’s abbot or prioress, Benedict explores the character traits essential to good leadership. They prove remarkably similar to those historian Doris Kearns Goodwin cites in her 2018 book, Leadership in Turbulent Times, on the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt.
Those character traits? Humility. That is, a willingness to learn from mistakes. Empathy. Resilience. Self-reflection.
St. Benedict says in his Rule, those who seek to lead must do so not by words, even soaring ones, but by “living example.”
In one of his most memorable passages, he compares a leader to a physician whose objective is “the care of souls.”
Sister Thomas would often end her talks with a series of questions she called the “tests of true leadership.” Do those I serve grow as people because of my leadership? Do they become healthier, wiser, and more likely themselves to want to serve? What effect does my leadership have on the least privileged, most marginalized in society? And, does my leadership serve to build community?
These seem apt questions to ask ourselves as we evaluate candidates this November, as well as our current business leaders.
Sister Thomas’ own path to leadership was a personal profile in courage. At the height of her career, she was struck with kidney disease, endured dialysis, and eventually received two separate transplants.
“She knew she was on borrowed time this side of the clouds,” her longtime friend, Sister Anne Shepard, observed. “No one lived one day at a time more than she did. No one loved life and recognized the value of each day more than she did. What a model she was of what it means to be Christlike.”
Another of her favorite expressions was, “It’s the people who matter.”
Under Sister Thomas’ 31 years of leadership, University of Mary tripled in size from 925 to 3,000 students, added a doctorate program, and established satellite learning programs across North Dakota and the country. She was the nation’s longest serving female university president.
Anyone who spent time with her quickly realized she had an uncanny way of aiming the spotlight away from herself and making those she was with feel as though they were the most important people in her world at that moment.
Despite her pressing duties in recent years as president emerita and ambassador-at-large for the university, she still managed to sing with and conduct her monastery’s choir, and play the organ at daily community prayers. She had a master’s degree in music from Northwestern University.
Sister Nicole Kunze, prioress of Annunciation Monastery, said Sister Thomas spent her final hours before succumbing to kidney cancer meeting individually with each sister in her community.
“It’s the people who matter.”
Her monastic community will lay Sister Thomas to rest on Monday. If you have time this week, I urge you to search her name on Google and treat yourself to watching one of the videos in which she talks passionately about servant leadership in her distinctive, plainspoken, self-deprecating, and humorous style.
She often included in her talks images of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. She would point out that before any management gurus seized on the idea, Jesus was the original “servant leader.”
Sister Thomas was the epitome of servant leadership. May we be inspired every day to follow her example. It’s the people that matter.
