Our theme for this Mural issue is leadership. How do we stay humble while exercising power? How do we drive toward goals without running over team members? This is an important theme for us Servant Partners staff. We come to serve our neighborhoods, but we’re often elevated to roles of leadership within them. Is this a temptation to be resisted? A tool to be leveraged? Two of the following pieces respond to these questions.
Personally, I feel a torturous tension about leadership. It always feels triumphalist and self-serving to call myself a leader, sycophantic or manipulative to be called a leader by someone else. Yet, it’s unavoidable.
Image by Daniel Sunkari via Midjourney
I trace my ambivalence to twenty years ago. In my young adult career exploration, I spent two years with an Americorps program called Public Allies. PA is a ten-month nonprofit apprenticeship; each Ally works Monday to Thursday at an organization and all meet together on Fridays for seminars and group service projects with their PA class (mine were about twenty people). I did the program twice. Public Allies was a formative experience for my identity and career.
PA’s slogan is “Everyone leads.” That’s the title of the book by the founder. If you go to the Public Allies website, the first words you’ll see are, “How will you lead? Leadership is not a position to be held, but an action to be taken.” By this philosophy, Public Allies intends to lift up those who haven’t been called leaders before. You’ll see a similar intention in some of our pieces in this issue.
But if everyone leads, does anyone lead? What does leadership mean if everyone does it? The obvious answer is that the slogan needs a qualifier: everyone leads some of the time. The other unspoken, humbling corollary also needs to be said: if everyone leads, then everyone follows too. This is the admission I was missing back in Public Allies. Yes, everyone has times and circumstances when they should be in front, empowered to lead, but everyone also has times and circumstances when they should take and follow directions. Probably most of the time. As a young idealist twenty years ago, that’s what I needed to learn.
Everyone leads some of the time. And everyone follows most of the time. I hope you see that through these reflections.
Andy Singleterry co-leads the Servant Partners site in San Jose, California and is Editor of SP Press. He is the author of The Gifts for the City.