Against Servant Leadership

“While I am all in favor of serving others, the expression “servant leadership” is passive-aggressive virtue signaling which coyly suggests there’s something broken in the classic understanding of “leadership” that can be fixed with the help of egalitarian philosophy and LinkedIn business jargon. Imagine asking a fellow in his twenties if he was married and hearing, “I’m a servant husband to my wife.” Are you a father? “I’m a servant father.” What position do you play on the basketball team? “I’m a servant point guard.” Don’t you work at Subway? “I’m a servant sandwich artist.” Well! I’ll just assume you have a gripe against the point guard, the father, and the husband as these concepts have been historically known—though I don’t know that “sandwich artist” is old enough to have a history.

Of course, the term “leadership” isn’t that old either. As Clifford Humphrey noted last year in a brilliant and delightfully bristling piece for The American Mind, “Before the twentieth century, the word leadership almost never appeared in print. Before the 1990s, very few leadership development programs existed. Today… ‘leadership development’ is a $366 billion global industry.” I think it’s a fair rule of thumb that anything which alleges to be a) spiritually important and b) to have gone from 0 to $366b in less than a generation is c) a complete hoax destined to fail soon, but I don’t expect everyone to take a classical perspective on such matters. Humphrey argues that what is now called “leadership” was formerly known as “statesmanship,” but “statesmanship” is inherently rooted in hierarchies and modern people despise hierarchies.

The way Humphrey describes “leadership” in the corporate world and the way Christians describe “servant leadership” are basically interchangeable. Nearly everything else in contemporary Christian culture is modeled after the world, so why not our approach to the workplace? Both “leadership” and “servant leadership” are about community, diversity, equality/our equality in Christ, building others up/the growth of others, and so on. There’s absolutely nothing about “servant leadership” that’s going to intimidate the guy in a Patagonia vest doing a thoroughly secular “leadership development” session for the Whole Foods HQ.”

-from my latest for CiRCE