Only the most broken people can be great leaders
The Wisdom of Namor
In general, you should not derive a philosophy of leadership from Marvel movie quotes. But every now and again there's a good one. My favourite remains Wandavision's “what is grief, if not love persevereing?” But let's talk about this one, from Namor in Wakanda Forever, “Only the most broken people can be great leaders”.
Now, on the whole I hate leadership discourse. Most popular and even less popular leadership material in Christian circles is just business principles baptised in Christianese. Which is mostly a bad idea, I believe. Why? Because capitalism is a terrible system which is exploitative of people and rewards immoral behaviour with monetary reward. Getting your idea of leadership from successful capitalists is a bad move. (The one concession I'll make is that there are elements of running a church that overlap with managing a volunteer organisation, and so not all secular wisdom in this area is a bad idea)
I think Namor is on to something, but we need some nuance here. Because there is a brokenness that makes for great leaders, and there is a brokenness that makes for terrible ones.
Let's take Namor himself. Namor's life is shaped overwhelmingly by the fact that conquistadors stole his land, enslaved and killed his people, and he has been the king of an underwater kingdom for 500 years, keeping them safe and building them into warriors, ready for the day the surface world came for them, and he would (and wants to) kill them all. He is broken, and that brokenness has filled him with a relentless hatred and desire for vengeance. This doesn't make him a great leader, it makes him a tragic villain. His suffering is only going to be repaid in the pain of millions of deaths. What Namor is missing is paradoxically bound up in his name (at least the MCU version of this character) - cursed as the child *sin amor*, without love, by a dying priest, he takes this as his moniker, because he is motivated by vengeance, not love.
Not all brokenness is the same though. Not everyone who is hurt is compelled to burn the world down. There is a tenderness and a love and a desire to bind up the wounds of others that emerges out of the humiliation of being broken, when we learn that we can't do it all, that we don't have the power to make or remake the world in our own image, when we are stripped of power and find ourselves utterly exhausted of resources. I can't help but think of the model of Christ, he by whose stripes we are healed, as likewise a model for ministry - in the woundedness of the one who ministers, we find the very means by which we may heal. There are echoes of Nouwen in this, or perhaps more than echoes. This is part of the inversion of the gospel, of the cross: in defeat and death, Christ conquers death. I think the same upside-down-ness applies to leadership. Christ, who came as servant of all, and was abandoned by all his followers in his hour of greatest need, is the leader of our liberation.
It is the brokenness of those who are loved and keep loving, in the depths of profound dependence, that are enabled to not burn the world to the ground, but work for the healing of others.
I think a lot about ways to talk about leadership in the workplace that are more global and more like Jesus ---- and less like a veiled Christianized version of Steve Jobs, the American leader.
This was a great post!