Servant Leadership: How Dr. Kathleen Bands Builds Leaders Who Transform Communities

Abstract

Dr. Kathleen Bands has impacted scholar-practitioners in transformative ways throughout her tenure as the director of Hood College’s Doctoral Program in Organizational Leadership. She has served leaders to facilitate their work as being mindful leaders who transform communities. Currens (DOL 2020) writes, “Servant leaders are attentive to the concerns of the followers, empathizing with them and nurturing them. These leaders put followers first, empower them, and help them develop their full capacities. Servant leaders serve for the greater good of the organization, community, and society.” Kathleen Bands embodies this essence of being a servant leader.

To explore what Dr. Bands has done to influence leaders and embody servant leadership, this dissertation examines the multifaceted responses to the research question, “How has Dr. Kathleen Bands built leaders and transformed communities?” An overview of Dr. Bands’ career and professional contributions is presented in Chapter 1, followed by a review of literature from the Hood College archives documenting her achievements. Next, several of the methods she developed and implemented to build leadership capacity in scholar-practitioners are outlined in Chapter 3. The findings in Chapter 4 demonstrate how Dr. Bands has influenced cohort after cohort in developing their capacity to be mindful leaders who critically examine and improve themselves, their organizations, and their communities. As each doctoral student, candidate, and graduate indicates, her work as a servant leader has left an indelible impression. As each faculty member writes, she challenged them to stretch the competencies within their wheelhouse and to bring the practical implications of theory into the classroom. Finally, in Chapter 5, the academic conclusions of the program are represented by the dissertations completed and doctorates earned to date.

Greenleaf (2002) writes, “All that is needed to rebuild community as a viable life form for large numbers of people is for enough servant-leaders to show the way, not by mass movements, but by each servant-leader demonstrating his or her unlimited liability for a quite specific community-related group” (p. 53). This dissertation celebrates the profound impact Dr. Kathleen Bands has had as a servant leader on all the people involved in the Hood College Doctoral Program in Organizational Leadership. We have been transformed by embarking on the journey she envisioned, launched, chartered, and championed.