The morning has flown by and as he brings the class to a close, Viterbo University Distinguished Professor of Servant Leadership Tom Thibodeau is going around the room asking his students to offer a word that sums up their experience that day. He turns his piercing blue eyes to each class member as their turn to speak comes, a gaze so intense it feels like he knows what you’re about to say but still can’t wait to hear you say it.

Uplifting. Inspiring. Amazing. Revelatory. Thought-provoking. Memorable. Life-changing.

On this day, these students are not undergrads in one of Viterbo’s required mission seminar classes he teaches with Rick Kyte, and they’re not grad students working on their Master of Arts in Servant Leadership degree. These are working professionals, taking part in a six-week servant leadership certificate course sponsored by the La Crosse Area Chamber of Commerce. The class is one of many executive development educational opportunities offered by Viterbo's Center for Professional Learning.

These students have just begun their servant leadership journey, which Thibodeau will tell you is never truly complete. It starts with understanding, he said, that “servant leadership is the ability to engage and inspire others to work for a greater good every day.”

Some students in this weekly servant leadership session are managers or supervisors, some work in the trenches. Some work for big companies known for having a corporate culture based on servant leadership principles (like Kwik Trip, Altra Federal Credit Union, Mathy Construction, Festival Foods, or La Crosse’s medical centers). Others are from small businesses, nonprofit organizations, the La Crosse Public Library, even a couple Viterbo staff members.

A Viterbo faculty member for almost 40 years, Thibodeau has been teaching the La Crosse Chamber classes since 2015, a couple years after he started a similar program for the Wausau Chamber.

Last year, Viterbo started an online servant leadership certificate program that has seen 94 students go through from 68 organizations, and Viterbo’s D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership launched a book series focused on servant leadership.

A couple weeks ago, Thibodeau hosted his annual Community Conversation on Servant Leadership at Viterbo, and at the end of June he will be the master of ceremonies at the 16^th annual Conference on Servant Leadership at the Weber Center for the Performing Arts, a two-day event that draws people from across the country.

On top of all that, Thibodeau has another 70 to 100 speaking engagements a year, everything from a dairy producers convention to an international servant leadership conference in Ireland. And he has a website where videos of some of his servant leadership talks can be viewed.

May marks 20 years since the first cohort of Viterbo University students earned their Master of Arts in Servant Leadership diplomas. Back then, servant leadership was not a widely known concept. Thibodeau has done much to change that, so much so that at last year’s servant leadership conference he was honored with the Ann McGee-Cooper Spirit of Servant Leadership Award.

Beginnings

In 1975, Tom Thibodeau was a student in Seattle University’s religious education graduate degree program when he first encountered the writings of Robert Greenleaf. A data-driven executive at AT&T, Greenleaf’s research on management led him to advocate for an alternative to the prevalent authoritarian style of institutional leadership.

At first, Greenleaf thought of this alternative as “applied ethics,” but by 1970 when he published his first essay, he had a new name for it. In the essay, The Servant as Leader, Greenleaf coined the term “servant leadership.”

“I read that and I said, ‘This is how I want to live the rest of my life,’” Thibodeau recalled.

At that point, Thibodeau didn’t picture the rest of his life being spent as a professor. Before his time at Seattle University, he had earned bachelor’s degrees in English and psychology from St. John’s University in Minnesota (where he learned leadership lessons as a football team member under coaching legend John Gagliardi). He also was a lay minister in British Columbia, Canada, teaching religious education to children and adults and coaching a First Nation basketball team.

Coaching teenage boys was where Thibodeau started to develop his riveting style of teaching. “If you can keep the attention of 15-year-olds, you can keep the attention of anyone,” he said.

His time in Canada taught him another major lesson, he said: “I learned what’s important in life … people!”

Thibodeau moved to La Crosse in 1976, working as a supervisor and later director of childcare at St. Michael’s Home for Children, an orphanage started by the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. When St. Michael’s closed, he worked as assistant director of the Upward Project at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, recruiting and supervising tutor counselors. He also started his work as religious education coordinator for confirmation programs for a La Crosse Catholic parish.

Thibodeau was teaching weekend classes at George Williams College in Chicago when he got a call from Arita Dopkins, FSPA ’53, asking him to teach a religious studies evening class. He was soon a full-time faculty member, becoming religious studies department chair, and in 1987 was honored as Viterbo’s Teacher of the Year.

A New Idea

In the mid-1990s, Thibodeau was approached by Viterbo President Bill Medland about starting a graduate degree program in pastoral ministry. No, Thibodeau responded, it should be a servant leadership program to expand the scope of application beyond the arena of religion into the workplace and everyday life … “to bring Sunday to Monday.”

“The world needs servant-led institutions of all kinds, including businesses,” Thibodeau said. “Institutions are how we lay hands on the world.”

Viterbo offered its first class in servant leadership in 1996, and in 1999 the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration provided a grant to develop a servant leadership program. It was a good fit for the FSPA mission, Thibodeau noted, because the sisters had been practicing servant leadership since the FSPA came to La Crosse in the late 1800s.

In the end, Thibodeau’s servant leadership degree vision prevailed by a narrow margin, launching in 2001 as part of the D.B. Reinhart Institute for Ethics in Leadership, which began in 2000 under Rick Kyte’s direction.

As big a part as Thibodeau played in launching the MASL program, he was not chosen as the program’s first director because he didn’t have a doctoral degree (he still doesn’t). That stung, but Thibodeau’s attention was soon diverted to helping the Veterans Administration health care operation in Tomah develop training with a culture of servant leadership at its core. His work there was considered so exemplary that the VA expanded it nationwide.

After his work for the VA, Thibodeau took over as director of the MASL program, and his leadership and hard work have made the program what it is today, Kyte said.

“Tom’s become the ideological anchor, making sure we keep this rooted in Greenleaf’s vision,” Kyte said. “I don’t know anybody who works as hard at that as Tom does. He’s always reading new things on leadership that he’s integrating, and his thinking is always getting deeper and broader. He’s gotten better and better about connecting his stories to lessons in leadership.”

Thibodeau returns Kyte’s deep admiration and treasures their 21-year partnership at Viterbo. “Rick Kyte is a national thought leader on ethics and servant leadership,” he said.

Leaders and Leadership

One thing Thibodeau wants everybody to realize about the importance of servant leadership is that the practice of it is not meant only for those in charge and that the true task of leaders is to create more leaders, not followers.

“Most of the time when we talk about leadership, it’s really about ‘boss-ship,’” he said. “You can give people titles, you can give people positions of authority, you can’t make them leaders. We all choose voluntarily who we will follow, and who we choose most times are people of character, people committed to a common good, people who are willing to sacrifice for others.”

The practices that are important in servant leadership, Thibodeau emphasizes, are just as vital in interpersonal relationships with family and friends as they are in workplaces and other institutions. Practices like listening deeply to other people, considering the impact your behavior has on others, and taking time for self-care and contemplation, for example. Servant leadership is definitely not something to be left at the office.

Thibodeau is one who, as anyone practicing servant leadership should, looks for “goodness” in people and in the world at large. If he ever needs a dose of goodness, he can think about some of the people he’s started on servant leadership journeys through his work and how his students have had ripple effects felt far and wide.

While Thibodeau has been practicing servant leadership for decades, he still considers himself a work in progress. “I’m not what I want to be, I’m not what I ought to be, but I’m better than who I previously was,” he said. “That’s why Robert Greenleaf in his book called servant leadership ‘the journey into legitimate greatness.’ It’s always a process of becoming the person we were created to be.”

If you ask Thibodeau to reflect on his time at Viterbo and how the servant leadership program has taken root and blossomed, he’ll talk about how much he learned from colleagues and students alike and how lucky he feels to be at Viterbo.

“This is all gift. I don’t have any PhD, I don’t have any publications. I don’t even have a business card, for cry eye. It’s just like, wow! I consider it some kind of spontaneous combustion,” Thibodeau said. “Anything I’ve achieved is only because other people gave me opportunities. I am just so grateful to be here at Viterbo because I don’t deserve to be here. The people who hired me and nurtured me saw something in me I didn’t see in myself. This place has given me so much. I can’t even begin to think about how to repay that.”