This is an adaptation of a post I made on servant leadership on my InPower Women Substack last week, revised for a general audience. That post includes a subscriber-only exercise to help identify ways we can each personally offer authentic leadership, and support good leaders, during this time of leadership crisis. On the same theme, in my InPower Women LinkedIn newsletter this month I offer advice for leaders who are committed to continue supporting diversity and inclusion efforts.

Key Takeaways

1. The Illusion of Meritocracy: Below, I unpack why the concept of “meritocracy,” often touted as the ideal, can actually perpetuate inequality, and how focusing on “culture fit” can mask underlying biases.
2. Servant Leadership Under Scrutiny: I explore my personal journey as my understanding of servant leadership is challenged by current political and social dynamics, and how privilege shapes our perception of who is being served.
3. The Vulnerability of “Othered” Groups: I drill down on how the dismantling of DEI initiatives and the rise of “strongman” values create a sense of expendability for underrepresented groups, and why this should concern everyone.
4. True Leadership Serves the Whole: I recenter myself–and you!–on why effective leadership requires serving the entire organization and all its stakeholders, not just a select few, and what happens when leaders fail to do so, leading to systemic failure and distrust.

I didn’t intend to brush up against politics in this month’s writings, but it seems to have bumped up against me. Reading my feeds and talking to many clients and readers over the last few weeks, it seems that the leadership “industry” is in a bit of a crisis right now, thanks to what passes for leadership we see from our current leaders in America. Many leaders and leadership thinkers are struggling with a quandary. What happens when leaders turn their back those they lead? Who has an appetite for character-based or servant leadership when all we see in the news is an obsession with “winning,” efficiency to the detriment of serving those who struggle to serve themselves, and the reshaping of alliances around “strongman” values instead of long-term success, safety and security? 

This hit home for me in the form of a big part of my professional identity, which is to be a servant leader. Servant leadership invert the traditional power structure of leader-first, defaulting to servant-first thinking. They believe that when people are cared for–especially employees–both the people and the organization will thrive. What we see running our country right now is not servant leadership. Too many people do not feel cared for.

That said, exploration of this brought me up short and gave me a lot to think about when it comes to “who” it is a leader must care for to be a servant. 

My biases

I’m particularly sensitive to the populations of underrepresented leaders and vulnerable youth being targeted very overtly by the leaders in the US government right now. 

Biased behavior we’ve been talking about as unconscious bias for years is now very conscious today, as every reference to “DEI” (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is erased, questioned, and shut down. 

All the progress towards giving a fair shot to competent women, people of every color, people of every gender, and the differently-abled is being intentionally dismantled. It’s happening in the government and in corporations alike, making prejudicial hiring and promotions perfectly acceptable in large swaths of society. Additionally, needed forms of support are being cut off for entire categories of people merely because of their race, gender, and other characteristics, which are both out of their control and largely irrelevant to their ability.

Why do I think it’s bias showing itself in our leaders? Because if they merely felt the system needed corrections and balancing, they wouldn’t shut it down so completely. Or they would replace it with a system designed to achieve the goals of balance and correction. At least competent leaders would. They would understand that a total shut down gives permission to people to live their prejudices out loud, even if it hurts others.

It appears to me that the well-being of the people DEI supported is being very overtly overlooked in favor of optimizing organizations to the leaders’ ideals, regardless of the cost to the people in need of support and protection. And people–even people not supported by DEI–are being hurt as government and contractor job losses mount and benefit streams dry up around the world. 

It’s making me sit with the questions: What happens when the people in power do not act as though they care for us? Does this mean that what I was taught about good leadership—what I teach about good leadership—is it all just a myth? That Machiavelli was right and the ends do justify the means–“winning?” 

In puzzling over these questions, I’ve refined my thinking about servant leadership and leadership in general. I’ve come to a deeper understanding of privilege. 

Before I could get to my learnings, however, I had to let go of some idealistic thinking. I had to grieve a lot of misunderstanding and truth in favor of the realities of the day. Here are some of my ah-ha’s in this process.

Grieving meritocracy

The irony of the anti-DEI actions mentioned above is that the White House says it’s shutting things down to ensure the government is a meritocracy, a term coined from a satire written in 1958. Did you catch that? A satire. The idea of a meritocracy we all seek, where our effort and work quality open doors that would otherwise remain closed, originated in a satiric work. 

As researcher Emilio J. Castilla at the MIT Sloan School of Management found in conducting recent research on “merit-based” workplaces, a leadership focus on “meritocracy” often suppresses a meritocratic environment: “Certain gender, racial, and other demographic disparities might persist in today’s organizations not only despite management’s attempts to reduce them but also because of such efforts.” 

In reality, Castilla and others have found that a focus on merit is too often used as an excuse to lean into reinforcement of the dominant culture. Such “merit-based” cultures tend to see “merit” in those who reinforce the culture regardless of their ability, experience, or results. This is why you want to be wary of hiring practices that emphasize “culture fit” as a primary criterion. Your good work is less likely to shine there if you don’t personally fit the cultural stereotypes they’re hiring for.

Most under-represented leaders would not find this surprising. Many women, racial minorities, LGBTQIA, neurodivergent, and differently-abled people have experienced such anti-meritocratic workplace standards in ways a majority of white males have not. Sadly, working twice as hard or twice as well–strong measures of a true meritocracy– is simply not the way to succeed by itself.

As with unconscious bias, even the veneer of truly merit-based practices is now on the outs in our government (along with many highly qualified leaders).

This makes me sad. I want to believe that powerful leaders can see past cultural stereotypes to achieve results while rewarding good work and elevating people based on true merit and potential. I want to believe that how we win is at least as important as what and why we win. I still want to believe that the vision of character-based and servant leadership I grew up to admire is the right way to lead.

As the Trump Administration tries to undo decades of progress towards a more equal and equitable society, many non-white-male people are feeling seen for who they’re demonized to be, rather than seen for who they actually are. 

Leaders who care about people would never do this.

But a majority of voters chose this. Does that mean they–we–don’t need or want to be cared for? 

Service As Privilege

Looking at our daily headlines through a servant leader’s lens has been hard. It feels like a rejection of all the values I care about. We chose leaders more interested in acting like strongmen than stewarding public resources for public good, and who appear to serve no one but themselves. Sitting with this realization last week, however, it hit me.

All leaders serve somebody.

Even our current leaders, in serving themselves, are also serving others who agree with them. Our past leaders certainly served themselves at the same time they served those under-represented groups of people who are now losing their protections. Today’s leaders claim that the people they serve have been underserved by those who have been in power in the past. Could they, also, be servant leaders–but of different people? In a different way?

When I was coming of age in the business world, those espousing servant leader values made me feel cared for. 

I realize now my trust in character-based servant leadership was a sign of my privilege as a white woman of more-than-modest means in the years after the second wave of feminism began to secure women’s rights in the workplace and society. In those innocent-for-me times, many in our communities were still “othered” (often by feminists!) and endured a lack of protection before they secured civil, sexual, and gender identity rights. Back then, they did not feel served by the servant leaders who I felt served me. I felt protected, but they didn’t. Today, in the moment, as protection for my class of people (i.e., women) is washed aside with the expulsion of all things DEI, I feel unprotected. And I am just as vulnerable as those who’d been othered before me. 

This quote is finally catching up to me:

First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

—Martin Niemöller

To be fair to myself, I do speak out and stand for my values, but on the topics of leadership, I have stayed out of political discourse. Being othered now, like so many before me, I now feel expendable to whatever gets in the way of our new leaders’ efforts to serve those they deem worthy of protection, and I’m feeling more like these insights belong in my leadership writing and thinking as well.

Here’s my leadership insight from these last months of headline onslaught: I believe I have found the chink in the armor of servant-based leadership, which is that when only some people are served, everyone does not feel protected. Instead, they feel vulnerable. 

I see that my faith in servant leadership once upon a time was possible because I was privileged enough to count myself as part of the group served, but now that I’m on the outs, I find myself sharing in the growing distrust in our institutions as our political parties swap the subgroups of people they serve back and forth, playing with people’s lives in the process.

If any leader is only serving themselves or a small subset of people, they risk failing at their primary purpose, to make effective change possible by improving the lives of everyone they touch. Clearly, our previous leaders in government failed to do this, making too many voters feel underserved and unprotected. And our new leaders are well on their way to doing the same. 

It’s not enough for a leader to serve a subset* of the system, to achieve outcomes that only benefit some of its stakeholders. They must serve the entire system, giving all its stakeholders enough value to meet their needs, if not all their wants. 

If it doesn’t, the system will fail, as will our new leaders.

*To be fair, in a practical and business context, it is fair for leaders to carve out market segments (i.e., subsets of the system) to focus on. However, my insight here on the limitations of servant leadership is that even around those subsegments, they should define their audiences broadly to include all stakeholders who are affected by their actions.

Photo by cotton-bro studio