Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott J. Allen, Ph.D.

Developing Servant Leaders at Scale with Dr. Max Klau

• Scott J. Allen • Season 1 • Episode 290

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Dr. Max Klau is a consultant, author, speaker, and Integral Master Coach based in Boston, Massachusetts.  He received his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2005 with a focus on civic leadership development.  He served as the Chief Program Officer at the New Politics Leadership Academy (NPLA) from 2016-2024.  NPLA is focused on bringing more servant leaders into politics, and Max designed leadership programs that have graduated more than 2,500 servant leaders to date.  

Previously, he was the Vice President of Leadership Development at City Year, the education-focused AmeriCorps program.  He is the founder of the Center for Courageous Wholeness and his second book, Developing Servant Leaders at Scale, will be published in August 2025. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and two children.

A Few Quotes From This Episode

  • “One of the reasons our world is so divided is because we’re divided from ourselves.”
  • “We’ve hit the limits of how much change we can make without getting serious about owning our shadow.”
  • “If we don’t confront the shadow, it controls us from beyond our awareness and shows up in the systems we lead.”
  • “Service turns pain into power when we use the gifts of our struggle to serve others.”

Resources Mentioned in This Episode 

About The International Leadership Association (ILA)

About  Scott J. Allen

My Approach to Hosting

  • The views of my guests do not constitute "truth." Nor do they reflect my personal views in some instances. However, they are views to consider, and I hope they help you clarify your perspective. Nothing can replace


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Scott Allen:

Okay, everybody, welcome to Practical Wisdom for Leaders. Thank you so much for checking in. Wherever you are in the world, today I have Dr Max Klau. He is a consultant, author, speaker and integral master coach based in Boston, massachusetts. He received his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2005, with a focus on civic leadership development. He served as the chief program officer at the New Politics Leadership Academy from 2016 to 2024. Npla is focused on bringing more servant leaders into politics, and Max designed leadership programs that have graduated more than 2,500 servant leaders to date. Previously, he was the vice president of leadership development at City Year, the education-focused AmeriCorps program. His second book, developing Servant Leaders at Scale how to Do it and why it Matters, will be published in August 2025. He lives outside of Boston with his wife and two children. Max, what else do we need to know about you, sir? What isn't in the bio that is critical for listeners to know?

Max Klau:

Well, one is I'm very excited to be here, really looking forward to this conversation. I want to say I'm launching a center for courageous wholeness. I'm that this comes out. That will be very close to being able to really unveil it, but I do want to launch that. I've got a lot of clarity around kind of my next initiative. That is really about how to bring the ideas in this book into the world in a powerful way. Talk a little bit about that.

Max Klau:

I weave together several themes. One is clearly servant leadership my entire career has been working with people who are serving others and how to do leadership development in that context. The other piece is shadow. I do a lot of work around inner development, with a particular focus on owning our shadow and integrating our shadow and then scaling up our impact. And it's taken me a while to get really clear as what is the essence that unites all of that? And it's really about taking a journey towards courageous wholeness, trying to bring that into the world and really believing that one of the reasons why our world is so divided and polarized and at war is because we are divided from ourselves and polarized and at war with ourselves inside and there's some work we need to do around achieving wholeness within if we're going to start shifting these dynamics around us.

Scott Allen:

I love that. And how are you defining wholeness real quick? What do you think about that? I mean, is it like an inner development goals type approach? Is that? Would that be dancing around where we are?

Max Klau:

It's not even dancing Absolutely, and I hope we'll talk a little bit about the inner development goals which have brought this whole focus on, which have brought this whole focus on.

Max Klau:

We need to complement our dedication to creating impact in the world around us with an equivalent focus on the inner work that we need to do as we try and do that, and a big part of it is wholeness, which is about really being able to be with our fullness as human beings, which of course, includes the parts of ourselves that do not fit with our idealized vision of who we would like to be or who we want to be.

Max Klau:

We all have these parts that we're not particularly proud of and that we prefer not to really grapple with, and Carl Jung, who wrote a bunch about this, says if we haven't really done the work to look at this, then it ends up controlling us from beyond our awareness and we end up projecting it out into the world and seeing all the parts that we hate about ourselves and some other, and that dynamic is truly an existential threat for the species right now this projecting outside of ourselves all the stuff we don't like, and I just feel like we've hit the limits of how much change we can make without really getting serious about owning our shadow and doing the work to become whole within ourselves so that we can call for wholeness in the world around us.

Scott Allen:

Oh, wow. And again, I love how you're kind of bringing in this whole conversation around at scale too, because, as you know, that's critically important, that it's not just one or two or three people at a retreat or at a series of retreats or on that journey that we can get some critical mass. And so I love how you're thinking about at scale. Yes, if you put an individual who and again I'm not defining it correctly how you did, but let's just for the sake of kind of the conversation who isn't whole or even interested in doing that work, in a position of authority, well, adventures ensue.

Max Klau:

Absolutely, and, you know, if we understand how interconnected the world is and how fractal everything is, we all have some degree of power over the sections of the network, of the core of relationships in which we are immersed. And so, at whatever scale, we're doing it to the extent that we have not taken this inner journey, we are impacting others with our own kind of disconnection from self and blindness to the parts of ourselves that we don't really like.

Scott Allen:

Yeah Well, let's talk a little bit about the book. I know you kind of start off with the journey to the journey which is love. So tell us a little bit more about you and that journey, because I think you bring a number of different perspectives and lenses to the conversation, whether that's the work of Keegan, whether that's the inner development conversation, whether that's the work of Keegan, whether that's the inner development goals, whether that's some of the integral studies that you've done. You're bringing a number of lenses and kind of the servant leadership lens. You're bringing those to the forefront, and so let's talk a little bit about that.

Max Klau:

Yeah, so to share a little bit of my history. I always say I'm a service person. I'm an alum of four different long-term service experiences and led service trips to India and Honduras and Ghana and Ukraine and service was really kind of home base for me, where I just you know and the other part of my story I like to say is I was a lost idealist in my twenties, just had this burning desire to do good and didn't really know where to direct it. So I kept doing these service programs because I felt kind of at peace while doing that. And then I went to grad school and encountered the adaptive leadership of Ron Heifetz and really went deep in that and then I built my career. So after I got my doctorate and had done this, all this work around adaptive leadership and testing all these ideas in the service programs, I landed a job at City Year, which is, for folks who don't know, it's an AmeriCorps program, so young adults who are 18 to 24 years old and doing a year of service in high need schools to keep students in school and on track to graduate, and it's based in Boston, but when I got there I was 18 years old and was already in like 15 different cities. It's now in 29 cities and has something like 2,000, 2,500 core members every year. So it's a big organization and I felt like the thing I could contribute was a really powerful approach to inner development for each core member Because I, having done service experiences, I just knew how transformational these service experiences were. But I also know it's really easy to get so focused on your to-do list and the urgency of serving the people right in front of you. We can just not focus on our own, the way it's transforming us, and our own inner work around this. So I said I want to do this and the first thing I realized was I had no idea how to do it Like I had certainly done it on small programs, I had personally experienced it in personal growth experiences, but to build a capacity to do that work at the scale of an organization like City Year, which was in dozens of cities with thousands of people, I just didn't know how to do it.

Max Klau:

And the first two chapters of the book talk about the decade of trial and error, of just trying things that didn't work. The first thing was I said we can't develop leaders and you can't do inner development without reflection. And everyone said reflection is great but we're way too busy and we quickly proved that wrong. So we were able to get an hour every other week and then people hated it. It turns out that just giving people time to reflect is not always effective. People just use it to vent and complain and it was not a productive use of time.

Max Klau:

So then it's kind of how do you design an experience that is actually productive, that's scalable? And part of it was we couldn't have PhD level consultants coming in to do this work for thousands of core members. So it was like how do we create an experience in which the organization starts creating these spaces for itself? So you have kind of enthusiastic and skilled non-experts holding spaces for their peers and colleagues and it took a while to design. Like how do you design an experience like that is consistently powerful?

Max Klau:

And then the whole idea of inner development.

Max Klau:

You know there was still a culture of let's take a second to reflect on that. After school program we just ran and make sure we're reflecting, but to say what are my core values or what's my shadow, or like that's deep inner work. And there's a real cultural kind of assumption of if you turn your attention away from the people you're serving to turn to focus on yourself. You're kind of abandoning the work of serving others, these kind of and nobody ever says that out loud, but when you see the resistance that emerges when you say let's try and invite people into this inner work, you just see the resistance and it seems to be grounded in that sense. So you had to get over the cultural resistance to saying this kind of inner work is actually so connected to our ability to serve others that we have to prioritize it and integrate it into the experience you know. So again, the book is about decades of like, figuring out how to solve for those problems. Until you know, I was able to create an organization-wide capacity to do this.

Scott Allen:

Oh, that's awesome. I think I was at an ILA conference and you and I have been longtime members of the ILA and I saw Ron Heifetz and he said how have your experiments been going? Exactly?

Max Klau:

Exactly. I mean, that's the idea of adaptive leadership. You don't know how to do it, so you got to try things and I try in the book to be really transparent about. There was just a lot of failure along the way, but that's what leadership looks like when you're not exactly sure how to succeed at something.

Scott Allen:

And again, if we're going to do this at scale because, yes, I just have so much respect, max, because it's kind of that space where the theory kind of interfaces with reality and it's easy in a classroom to say, well, you know, you got to really focus on reflexivity and critical reflection and it sounds wonderful, but then when we actually put that into action, you know what happens and what do we do now and how do we tweak it. I love the fact that you bring that experience, the theory and the practice to the conversation. I think it's invaluable. I really really do so. Okay, talk a little bit about servant leadership. I've had one conversation about servant leadership. Had Nathan Eva on. We had that dialogue Listeners. If you have not listened to that episode, please feel free to do that as well. But talk a little bit about servant leadership. Why specifically servant leadership?

Max Klau:

So servant leadership is both an ancient idea and a modern field of study. And if you look at pretty much any wisdom tradition, this idea that the highest kind of spiritual level is, when you exist, to be of service to others, whether it's, you know, moses striking out against a slave who's being oppressed, or Jesus caring about the least among us, or Buddha's compassion for the sick and the dying Everywhere you see this idea that we need to use our gifts and our life energies to be of service to others, particularly the marginalized and the vulnerable among us. And the modern take of servant leadership was Robert Greenleaf, who wrote a very influential book in the 70s about servant leadership and really created the modern academic study. And his kind of key idea is the greatest test of a servant leader is whether those served become more capable, more empowered and more likely themselves to serve others. So it's really a very strong contrast to somebody who uses power to try and control others or dominate others or to fulfill their own problematic hungers for power or control or love, or we know when people are using authority positions to feed their shadow. That's really problematic and we see a lot of that in the world today.

Max Klau:

So there's that kind of conceptual framework and then my entire career has been in the very practical application of. You know, I didn't work in the corporate world and not even in a traditional nonprofit. Americorps is a unique experience with people who have chosen to spend a year serving others, which is really still a bit of a countercultural choice. And then, you know, for seven years I was at New Politics trying to bring people who had already served, whether that's military vets or AmeriCorps or Peace Corps alumni to invite them to serve again through politics, that we deeply need more servant leaders with political power in this country.

Scott Allen:

Well, so highlight two or three kind of concepts that you want listeners to know about that, invite them into the conversation a little bit and obviously we're not going to cover the entire book but what are some things you want people to know about this approach? I'm really really interested in kind of hearing how you're going to speak about that.

Max Klau:

So there's some key ideas, and the first is the idea that leadership is always a dual journey, and what that means is, on one hand, we want to improve our communities and our country, our organizations.

Max Klau:

You know, leadership is about trying to make things better for the world around us, but there's always this parallel process of transformation and change in the world within us. So inner and outer change are always happening at the same time, and this is grounded in the belief they're too interconnected to separate, and I always use the image of DNA, of just those twin strands. You literally can't pull these things apart, and actually, you know, as a result of research that I share in my first book, I just deeply arrived at this belief that the world around us is a manifestation of our current inner way of being and at this moment of polycrisis, when there are so many challenges whether it's environmental crisis or the political crisis or health crisis we're doing all this to ourselves. We need to grow beyond the ways of being that are creating this reality. So to really deeply embrace the power of inner development as part of what we need to be doing is really central to this.

Scott Allen:

So talk about inner development, talk about the inner development goals, maybe right now. I love how you're phrasing that. Did you say dual process? Was that how you phrased it A dual journey?

Max Klau:

I like to say a dual journey.

Scott Allen:

Dual journey. I love that, because I 100% agree with your assertion here that, yes, we have the outward, but we also have the inward, and are we on both?

Max Klau:

Yeah, and the further out into the world you go, the deeper into yourself you're pushed to dig, and so we just can't separate these things. And a little bit about the inner development goals. They're relatively new. They're connected to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, which were launched in 2015. And that's a set of 17 really kind of clear, powerful international development goals, like good education for every kid and drinkable water and breathable air.

Max Klau:

Government that works, this really inspiring, amazing set of goals that were designed to really bring clarity and focus to our international development work and, on the one hand, they're very effective at bringing a lot of focus and accountability and, on the other hand, we weren't making progress as fast as we need.

Max Klau:

And so this group of thought leaders, who were all my favorite people, like a Bob Keegan and an Otto Scharmer and a Peter Senge, like all the folks from the leadership field were part of this conversation and they emerged with the sense of we need a complimentary initiative that brings a focus to the inner development that people need to do if we're going to actually be able to achieve these outer world goals, you know.

Max Klau:

So that became the beginning of the inner development goals, and what followed was a really robust research project of just inviting something like 80,000 people to share their thoughts about what they think are the most essential elements.

Max Klau:

They distilled it into this very simple, powerful model of five dimensions and 23 skills, and mostly what they've done is create this narrative that helps people understand the importance of inner development, and I have to say I just discovered it a couple of years ago and threw myself into involvement, because I've been doing this work for two decades, grounded in this belief of we need to be as thoughtful about the inner development we do with people as we are about the goals, about the high school graduation rates that we're so focused on. We need to hold both of those things. And again, graduation rates that we're so focused on, we need to hold both of those things. And again, the book is the story of how do you do this at scale, and so it's really exciting that you know, after spending decades on this, suddenly there's this emerging global movement that is saying this work is so vitally important. I'll stop there.

Scott Allen:

Is that helpful? Oh for sure, and so I think we've got this, the dual journey, servant leadership, as a model that we can kind of ground to. We've got one part of the journey is that that's the inner development, and if we are a healthier human being, the assumption would be that when you put us in a position of authority, we are going to work from a healthier place, hopefully and okay.

Max Klau:

So a couple other things that you want listeners to know about as we explore the book people know of as the hero's journey, and Campbell was a comparative mythologist who studied myths told all around the world, from caveman times up to you know. His work has inspired many Hollywood blockbusters and I encountered his work sort of towards the end of my doctoral career and it just blew my mind how much what he had been talking about kind of helped me understand my own journey, how much it illuminated the landscape of inner development that we all have to undertake if we want to achieve our full potential. And the fact that this is so universal and cross-cultural means this must be some kind of foundational human experience and at its most basic, you leave behind your familiar, comfortable, ordinary life and you encounter the road of trials, where the essence of this is you have to confront your own inner limitations and fears and work with them until you can transcend them.

Scott Allen:

You're making me think of Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back, where he had to go into that cave, the cave.

Max Klau:

Yeah, I mean that's you know, it's classic Joseph Campbell and he's like can I bring my weapons? He's like all you can bring is what you have with you and when you turn and go inwards into this space you don't fully understand, ultimately you encounter yourself and your shadow self. You know he encounters Darth Vader and cuts off Darth Vader's head and a mask pops up and then finds out that it's actually him in the suit. So he discovers the shadow is himself, and I do a ton of training that uses Star Wars to help people understand this stuff. But that's exactly the idea is that the inner development involves confronting the shadow and recognizing that is part of us. And then how do we work skillfully with it to balance the force within the self, you know, and so that's essential.

Max Klau:

And then you get to this question of how the hell do you do that at scale? How do you experience that gets thousands of people through that? And that was you know why I wrote this book? Because figured out how to create an experience that invites people into they're even willing to try on this idea that I'm on kind of a mythic journey of transformation and I need to do this work, and all of it has to be calibrated to be done in a conference room on a Tuesday afternoon, and that's part of this work is this is you know, I've experienced this these really powerful personal growth experiences. That is not something that can happen in a typical workspace. So how do we calibrate all of this so that it's powerful but also something that you can do in a kind of typical work environment and it doesn't trigger this kind of allergic reaction from people who are like what the hell are you asking me to do?

Max Klau:

Here and again, it took years to figure out how do you design an experience and invite them into that, you know. So there's that. And then the question is always, I would say, service turns pain into power. So all of us have difficult things we face. We've all struggled and we've all gotten gifts from our struggles and the real, a full journey always includes finding some way to use our pain to be of service to others. Use the things that we've learned from our challenges to be of service to others and to accept the call that comes from. I'm going to fully step into my ability and responsibility to use the gifts of my journey to be of service to others, and that's challenging and scary stuff, but we can also invite people into it and support them in that process.

Scott Allen:

Well, okay, so a couple of things here. So we've got kind of Joseph Campbell also undergirding some of this work and that we are going there can be this flirtation with therapy. You know, careful, are we going over certain boundaries? So I imagine you have to be super clear also in your work about, okay, how do I invite people in? How do we do it in a way that they're going to be open to it? B, how do we do it in a way that is safe for that individual?

Max Klau:

You know, you know what I'm saying right, I mean absolutely Like we can't open up things that we're not qualified to work with in that space. And it's exactly kind of a key challenge of this work of how do you go there in a way that's calibrated for a professional space that's run by, you know, non-experts. And I have to say this is one of the big challenges I write in the book is, understandably and very appropriately, people are fearful of what could happen, and I honor that fear and shared it myself, but also have done this now with so many people and at such scale that I've realized the fears are unfounded. It is possible to create these experiences and invite people into it and set it up in such a way where it can be responsibly done at scale. And the other piece I'll say to that is you know, I often think of my work as I'm trying to work on the civic sacred, which is, you know, I'm not a therapist, this is not about fundamentally healing people and I'm not doing personal growth seminars of let's go out to a retreat center for five days, and although I love all of that stuff, this is really civic leadership development.

Max Klau:

And what does it mean to take this idea of inner work and integrating shadow as an essential piece of our civic life. That's something, as citizens, we need to do and I just feel like, again, we've hit the limits of our ability to respond to the challenge of this moment without doing this kind of work and to understand that this is about stepping up as citizens and trying to take it out of the therapy office or the retreat center to something that we do civically and think about as part of our kind of responsibility.

Scott Allen:

I like that. I hadn't made that connection, but it makes perfect sense, max. We're going to ground it here in how we engage civically. As you were speaking, this is a little bit of a sidebar, so I apologize, but I had this thought come through my mind. I've talked a little bit about this on the podcast before, but it's just an interesting conundrum for us as a society, as we've seen the numbers of people of faith going to wherever they go diminish and decrease.

Scott Allen:

Yeah, where, as a society? Let's just say, in the 60s and 70s you had a larger percentage of people going somewhere weekly to reflect on who they were. They heard a good message, they reflected on how that applied to them in their lives and there was at least an hour and a half for people to sit in that space and exist. And, of course, there is a percentage of people who still do that every Sunday, but that has decreased. Yes, yeah, you know, it's just really, really interesting from a societal level. I think probably part of what you're introducing, if it could be done at scale, is some of that space of just pause, reflect, think, observe, be in community, be in community with others in some of these dialogue, in these conversations, because I think we're hungry for it. I really do.

Max Klau:

Absolutely no. I so appreciate that you went there because I do think it's one of the reasons why I love Joseph Campbell, who just illuminated all of this. Like this is not necessarily about religious doctrine. No, talks about the wastelands as an experience where the rituals of our daily lives bear no relationship to our authentic inner experiences and where we're kind of going through motions of things that don't really touch the deepest parts of who we are. And I think, you know, consider myself religious. I belong to a synagogue. I know like it's, you know, increasing minority of people. But I also definitely understand people who look at organized religion today and just say these rituals do not speak to me and there are too many examples of authorities in these religions who are not moral exemplars, who in no way embody the values that they say they embody. And I understand people saying like that is not something I can get behind. And I understand people saying like that is not something.

Scott Allen:

I can get behind. You know there's a fundamental need in humans. Yes, I think it met that need Again. Horrible atrocities were done in the name of religion and still are 100%, and just add humans. And I think, yeah, it's more about the process. I'm thinking of like people going somewhere, having a conversation, being in community, hearing a good message, having that time to reflect on who they are as a human. I think that's a fundamental human need. Would you agree with that?

Max Klau:

Yeah, and also part of the story was I spent a lot of time struggling with what does it mean to be a kind of a moral person in the world.

Max Klau:

You know, I studied moral development was one of the things I studied and just constantly like who are the good guys and who are the bad guys and what's the right policy and what's the wrong, and like this whole landscape of is it either this or is it that? Or, and just kind of arrived at, everything is light and shadow within us and the question is have we awoken to confront the shadow within ourselves and begun to work skillfully with it and with that framework? I'm like there are people in every religious tradition who have done that and bring wholeness and compassion into the world, and there are people in every religious tradition who project all the darkest stuff into some other and are creating this just horrible, you know world on fire in which we live, and so what does it mean to invite more and more people into? Let's do this work from a civic perspective? It can also happen in a lot of different perspectives, but this is part of what we need to do as citizens is to get beyond this. I'm all good and they're all bad and I'm on the right team and they're the wrong team to let's all walk this path together of awakening to shadow and trying to work with it skillfully and use it and be of service to others from that place of wholeness.

Scott Allen:

Okay, as we begin to wind down our time, max, anything else that you want to highlight? I mean, I think you've given listeners a lot of just really, really nice foundational things to kind of hang on to. Obviously, in the book it goes much more in depth, but is there anything else you want to say about the work? Well, I think what's?

Max Klau:

so exciting about the inner development goals is again, after doing this for like 20 years of work, to suddenly realize how there's this emerging global consciousness around the need to bring this into our organizations and into our communities. And I still consider myself experimenting with all of this. And I still consider myself experimenting with all of this and I just welcome connecting with anybody who is interested in how do we bring this out into the world and try and bring this kind of dual journey and a thoughtful approach to the inner work along with a thoughtful approach to responding to the challenges around us. I just feel like it's what the world needs and it's kind of an exciting moment of emergence and I want to be connected with folks who are interested in exploring that and experimenting that together. Love it.

Scott Allen:

Well, sir, I always begin to wind down the conversation by, you know, asking one question, which is you know what have you been listening to reading streaming, what's caught your attention in recent times? It could have something to do with what we've discussed. It could have nothing to do with what we've just discussed, but what have you been consuming? What's caught your attention that may be of interest to listeners?

Max Klau:

I can share a few things. I'm really loving the book Abundance by Ezra Klein, which is a really powerful window into how do we need to shift things to kind of build the world that we need to create in the years ahead. And I spent a lot of time with Michael Mead does mythology, does a podcast Living Myth? And just I spent a lot of time thinking about what does mythology have to teach us about how to be with this moment of incredible turmoil and transformation and kind of dying and being born, and so that the podcast with a thousand faces is a podcast from the Joseph Campbell Foundation. So anyway, I find that both create solace and resilience from this challenging time.

Scott Allen:

I love it. Well, listeners, you can find a bunch of links in the show notes, and so please check those out, please go purchase this book and you know what, max, I just have great respect. I appreciate again, as I've said before, not only the multiple lenses you're kind of converging into one conversation, but also just that experience of theory and practice and the interface of those two worlds. It's just absolutely essential to help us better understand this work. So, sir, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you, scott, really a pleasure Appreciate it. Thank you, scott, really a pleasure Appreciate it.

Scott Allen:

Okay, Max, living in that space where theory meets practice, and, as all of you know who've been listening for a long period of time, that's a space I love and it's a space I have great respect for. How do we operationalize something like the hero's journey or servant leadership? Max is doing that work, he's exploring and, max, I have incredible respect for you Listeners. I have a respect for you as well. Thank you so much for checking in. As always, wherever you are in the world, take care, be well, have a great day.