Against Servant Leadership

At the crucial moment in Shakespeare’s Henry V, the titular king does something that very few “servant leaders” are capable of doing: he delivers a rousing speech.

On the morning when the English are to fight the French at Agincourt, Henry overhears his cousin Westmoreland complaining about how few men they have. The English are outnumbered five-to-one, they’ve barely survived a grueling winter, and their morale is understandably low—so low, in fact, that Henry fears they will lose the battle. So he delivers the famous St. Crispin’s Day speech.

Unlike most famous Shakespearean speeches, there’s not much to chew on in the St. Crispin’s Day speech. It’s not particularly philosophical, nor is it packed with proverbs like the great speeches in Hamlet, but it doesn’t need to be. Henry understands that the English spirit is faltering and so he uses the art of rhetoric to lift his men and inspire them with courage and an ardent zeal for glory. And it works. The English win the day.

In all the talk I’ve heard about servant leadership over the last several years, I’ve never heard an advocate speak about the importance of giving a rousing speech. Nonetheless, the ability to give a rousing speech is one of the oldest requirements there is for proper leadership. It is so fundamental, in fact, that when Yahweh appoints Moses to deliver His people from bondage, Moses protests that he can’t do the job because he can’t speak well. God doesn’t assuage his concern by telling him that he’s been chosen because he’s “a good decision maker” and “helps people feel welcome,” though. He says, “I will help you speak and will teach you what to say,” thus affirming Moses’ belief that leaders need to be capable rhetoricians.

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. Rest assured that guy “totally resonates” with the thing Jesus said about “not lording it over others.” Still, there are some Christians who reason that because Jesus was a servant, and because Jesus was a leader, Jesus must have been a “servant leader” the way the term is defined in several very popular books about servant leadership that were published in the last four years. And how was Jesus a servant? Not only did He die for us, He washed the disciples’ feet, one of the most menial jobs imaginable in His day.

As something of a side note, I think that Jesus washing the disciples’ feet holds the same place for the servant leader as “Jesus hung out with prostitutes” holds in the heart of the young Christian desperate to hang out with public school kids.

What’s somewhat ironic, though, is that the self-professed servant leaders of our day aren’t washing anyone’s feet. As far as I know, they’re not even arguing that anyone should do that. In gesturing at those washed feet, the servant leaders are simply pointing out that Jesus was willing to take a very lowly job, a job that only the humblest of first century servants would have taken. And yet! The servant leadership apologists (Would they be “servant-leader-leaders”? “Servant-leader-servant-leaders”?) aren’t arguing that the servant leaders reading their books (Would those people be “servant-leader-followers” or just “consumers”?) ought to do the lowliest jobs around the office, like remove clogs from the toilets, scrub graffiti off the bathroom stalls, restock the tampon dispenser, or take out the trash. As far as I can tell, the fact that Jesus washed the disciples’ feet merely means that servant leaders should make feel people safe, loved, and important—by listening to them. No inglorious foot washing is necessary. It’s all about listening.

“Leadership” (when presented as a virtue) and “servant leadership” are attempts at incorporating democratic ideals into the practical need for someone to be in charge. The problem, however, is that democratic ideals don’t make everyone happy, which means that servant leaders have to perform the work of “serving” in obvious, obsequious ways. They make a show of “listening,” talk constantly about how much they care, and regularly draw attention to their own humility. This is supposed to make the people beneath them feel good, loved, and respected, but it doesn’t work because the “listening” is feigned and everyone knows it. No one is more likely to disregard the good advice you’ve given them than someone desperate to be thought a good listener. The good listener is less concerned with an institution running smoothly, effectively, justly, or sanely—the good listener believes that people feel respected “when they are heard,” and thinks that will be enough to hold an institution together.

However, “hearing” someone (in the modern corporate sense of the word) really just means nodding your head while someone talks and occasionally paraphrasing what they’ve said so they know you haven’t zoned out. “Hearing someone” doesn’t actually mean doing anything they ask you to do, tell you do, or beg you to do (or not to do)—which is why a servant leader is more likely to do whatever he wants than someone who never talks about leadership. And this is why the servant leader doesn’t ever feel the need to give a rousing speech. A rousing speech doesn’t Make People Feel Respected®, Build Community®, or Prioritize the Growth of Others®.

As we see in Henry V, a great speech takes people from the bad state they’re in and places them in the good state where they ought to be. In order to make such a speech, a man needs knowledge, wisdom, skill, magnanimity, and humility. Humility? Yes, because it is quite embarrassing to admit that your troops are down. You can’t rouse the troops unless you’re willing to admit they need rousing, and it makes the king feel like a bit of a failure to speak in such a way that acknowledges his men’s spirits are low. “What are you upset about? Is it something I’ve done?” Well, yes, actually. It is far easier to ignore low morale, to admit morale is low but pretend it’s all the fault of a few cynics, or to acknowledge morale is low but refuse to admit why.

The St. Crispin’s Day speech, however, opens with a frank admission that morale is low because the English are so outnumbered that they will either die gloriously or win gloriously. Either way, it’s an appeal to glory. There’s nothing egalitarian about it. It’s not a speech a servant could give. Henry is very much a king.

Of course, Jesus was also a king—not just a king, but the king’s King—and, strange as it may sound, Jesus also gave many rousing speeches. Did He not give unparalleled theological discourse? He did, and there’s nothing that Jesus said which is quite so basic as the St. Crispin’s Day speech, but what Christian has not been a little choked up (with boasting pride in the love and goodness of Christ!) at hearing a minister of the Gospel repeat with verve, “In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world,” or, “If the world hates you, remember that it hated me first”? Did Christ not find men downcast on the road to Emmaus and use rhetoric to make “their hearts burn” within them? Does He not enflame the cold faith of the disciples in St. Matthew’s Gospel with the desperately beautiful, “And surely I am with you always, even to the end of the age”?

And yet none of this comports with what is commonly called “servant leadership.” Neither does St. Peter’s daring Pentecost sermon, which “amazes” and “perplexes” hearers and “cuts [them] to the heart.” Neither does St. Stephen’s martyrdom sermon—or his claim that Moses was “mighty in word and deed.” Neither does Solomon’s endless string of rhetorical questions or his continual, almost belligerent insistence that his student be quiet and “Listen to me.” Neither does Joshua’s blistering, “But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” I could go on and on.

The authors of Scripture certainly exonerate silence (time and again), and St. James says everyone should “be quick to listen, and slow to speak,” but this is hardly the whole story. The Scriptures are also brimming with great speeches delivered by great leaders. In the Word of God, one does not find a condemnation of rhetoric. Time and again, Scripture assumes what everyone in the ancient world knew, and which Clifford Humphrey expresses so well: “The unique quality of true leadership, in the form of statesmanship, is…nothing short of human excellence. On one hand, it is simply the art of rhetoric paired with the virtue of prudence—deliberation and decision. But on the other hand, as Aristotle notes, one cannot be prudent if one lacks courage, ambition, liberality, or justice.”