Yesterday I had lunch at a local cafe and couldn’t help but overhear the conversation at a nearby table. Two men who looked to be in their late twenties or early thirties were talking about their workplace. One forcefully explained how there are really only two kinds of managers in the world. One he described as the individual who knows what to do and then goes ahead and gets it done; the other a ‘suck-up’ to upper management who is only interested in preserving his or her job. The first in his opinion was genuinely concerned about deadlines, was uncompromising, willing to do what’s necessary, willing to take on anybody; the second, unproductive, political and weak.
As the conversation continued the men joined together in denouncing the large number of suck-up managers and concluded, laughing as they got up to leave, that most organizations were ‘sewers full of’ these folks.
I was listening, and I was saddened to think of how often two people gather to draw such conclusions about others, how angry the talk is at bottom, how defensive and disrepectful.
There is a kind of carnage out there in the imagery used by people around effective leadership. The carnage is about the reduction of people, the destruction of the value to be found in human beings. In the reduced world, people are strong. Or weak. Good. Or bad. In any event we are the good ones. They are not. In the books, the ideal of servant leadership and community is pervasive. But in the background, in the real world, in the cafe on any given Thursday, the war continues to rage.
