Those who make themselves complicit with toxic leadership will often do so due to fear of loss of prominence or privilage. These are the middle-managers in Christian organizations, businesses, and churches.
One of the most captivating stories in Scripture is the book of Esther. In ten chapters of moving narrative, Esther provides the plot of an epic drama. The twists and turns of God’s sovereign reign in care of His people even while having exiled them for their idolatry, always keeps me fixated to the end.
The story also captures a common problem with toxic leadership.
So often those who lead under the oversight of toxic leaders are complicit with their leader. For a number of reasons they do evil right alongside the head of their organization, business, or church.
An Object for Display
In Esther’s story, Memucan, a manager in King Ahasuerus’s government, saw Queen Vasthti refuse to come like a slave to the king when he commanded her presence. The king wanted her to come “in order to show the peoples and the princes her beauty, for she was lovely to look at (Esther 1:11).”
Memucan realized his own power and position may be in jeopardy with the Queen’s refusal to obey King Ahasuerus’s making of her an object and display to his subordinates.
King Ahasuerus asked his subordinates who were present,
“According to the law, what is to be done to Queen Vashti, because she has not performed the command of King Ahasuerus delivered by the eunuchs?”
Esther 1:15
Memucan told the king:
“Not only against the king has Queen Vashti done wrong, but also against all the officials and all the peoples who are in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus. For the queen’s behavior will be made known to all women, causing them to look at their husbands with contempt, since they will say, ‘King Ahasuerus commanded Queen Vashti to be brought before him, and she did not come.’ This very day the noble women of Persia and Media who have heard of the queen’s behavior will say the same to all the king’s officials, and there will be contempt and wrath in plenty.”
Esther 1:16b-18
Can you imagine that? Other women will see her unwillingness to be treated as property and think it is okay to refuse authoritarianism. In the end, others who have authority, like Memucan, will lose that authority to boss and abuse their own wives.
Analogous with Toxic Complicity
This is an analogy of complicity with toxic leadership, not just poor marital behavior.
There are a variety of reasons why those who act as “middle-managers” in the workplace will refuse to seek accountability for their boss and become complicit in their abuse.
- Loss of Prestige for Boards: Members of boards fear the loss of prestige if their leader is the focus of a public scandal. So, they cover it up.
- Access to the Leader and Power: Managers fear a loss of access to a leader, from whom they have been empowered, if they report / whistleblow abusive leadership.
- Donor Support: Fundraisers may fear being caught supporting a badly run organization and so would rather just keep it quiet . . . continually praising the health of the organization.
- Bad Witness: Assistant Pastors may continue to support a wicked Senior Pastor because suggesting he is broken and unworthy of leadership will be a bad witness to the world.
- Common Goal: One particular church leader “was picked with the goal of growing the congregation,” and so the “main goal was to keep him as pastor.”1
- “Image management” may create difficulty for subordinates to see the leader for who he or she really is. “Weick (1988) and Maitlis and Sonehnshein (2010) found that strong, optimistic statements and justifications produce blind spots that keep organizations from seeing contradictory cues and pieces of evidence. Followers also feel as if they must be bound to those positive outlooks.”2 In other words, subordinates struggle to keep clear sight when their leader has brainwashed them with positive think.
- No Access: A close cousin to this positive think is subordinates being continually fed the leader’s narrative and never considering the victims’. Boards are notorious for this kind of mismanagement, as the board of our own mission was. They willingly allowed themselves to be kept from access to the stories of the missionaries and nationals who were being mistreated by the leaders of the mission.
And there are other reasons.
Most, if not all of them are bad.
It is not worth it to be complicit in these ways with abusive leadership. The organizational damage will be much worse because more lives will be broken and damaged by the leader the longer he or she remains at the helm.
Speak up Memucans of the world.
REFERENCES:
- “Former Members of Hope Presbyterian Church in Bloomington Allege Abuse, Cover-Up,” Indiana Daily Student, accessed May 7, 2021, specials.idsnews.com/hope-church-pastor-sexual-harassment-allegations. ↩︎
- Wade T. Mullen, “IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES USED BY EVANGELICAL ORGANIZATIONS IN THE WAKE OF AN IMAGE-THREATENING EVENT,” March 2018. ↩︎
I feared that pointing out serious sin in a pastor would damage the faith of the new believers and those who had never been an active part of a church before. I was foolishly trying to protect God’s reputation! Ultimately, God simply removed the lampstand. That church is no more.