Stewardship.

One morning in 1993, during my superintendency in Jackson, Miss., I awoke from a dream in which I had revisited the pain of seeing my grandmother--who raised me from birth to adulthood--crying.

The incident happened when I was a teenager. My grandmother asked me to drive her to the cemetery on the Ashley Plantation in Madison Parish, La., to visit my grandfather's grave. As we approached the bend in the road, which was our clue to look for the cemetery, we saw not headstones but chest-high cotton.

Upon closer inspection, we found numerous headstones in the ditch, apparently pushed there by the plantation owner. The now-unmarked graves of my grandfather and countless others were covered in acres of cotton. My grandmother fell to her knees, crying, "Lord, look what they have done to my Bennie's grave." Seeing her cry made me cry, too.

So on that morning in 1993, I found myself particularly drawn to a book I received in the mail--Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest by Peter Block.

Although the dictionary definition of steward is "one who manages another's property, finances or other affairs," from my vantage point as the first African-American superintendent in the Mississippi capital, my personal experiences related to the stewards of segregation who had carried out their duties to protect the self-interest of a racist society. So it was natural for the title to catch my eye.

In the superintendency, however, you quickly learn not to confuse the headline with the article. So it was with the title of Block's book. I was concerned the author would be promoting life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as a realistic fact of life for all Americans regardless of race, creed, color or socioeconomic status.

The foreword, however, quickly allayed my concerns. Block said he would point out the inconsistencies in what we as a nation profess to believe and what we actually do. My interest was piqued.

Block wrote about stewardship as a means for making real change in the workplace by moving away from the traditional management tools of control and consistency that tend to "strangle the human spirit, wilt faith and hope, and ultimately end up creating a sense of helplessness." He described the traditional leadership style as using compliance and control to ensure the future survival and prosperity of an organization. Having grown up in the segregated South, I was familiar with this style of leadership and knew it was one I did not want to replicate.

You create a superior system, Block said, when all members have an active and productive voice in decision making. Through stewardship, he suggests, we can be accountable and give control to those closer to the work, an idea that resonated with me. I had been trying to create such an environment in the Jackson school district but found out how difficult it is to change the learned behavior of subordinates and the attitudes of new leaders who tried to use their stewardship for self-interest.

Stewardship helped me keep a keen sense of fairness and has kept me from being overly judgmental in situations in which race could have become an issue. As a superintendent/CEO, I could not fully implement Block's stewardship model, but I did create an environment that allowed all staff members to participate in decision making.

Ben Canada, a former superintendent and past AASA president, is associate executive director of the Texas Association of School Boards, P.O. Box 400, Austin, TX 78767. E-mail: benjamin.canada @tasb.org