Fewer measuring devices have more destructive power than those with which we measure ourselves in comparison to others. Those devices are anchored in the power of envy. Envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that cannot be enjoyed by the sinner. Lust at least leaves its sinner titillated. Pride leaves the sinner with a sense of self importance. Anger is presumably cathartic. And when acted upon, these other sins often lead to some sense of gratification. Not so with envy. Envy leaves its host emptier, more troubled and even more isolated and self-loathing than before.
In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas called envy “sorrow at another’s good.”1 The Oxford English Dictionary says that envy involves feelings of ill-will or “mortification” toward that other.2 Envy adds malice and contempt to that sorrow; it is an active desire to see the other hurt. The implications for leaders are hardly trivial. Envy can be a cancer that erodes the fabric of a community or organization, and it may be encouraged by the complicity of a leader unwilling to acknowledge their own envy or the envy of others.
The Bible gives us plenty of brutal illustrations of envy. In Genesis alone there is Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, and Joseph and his brothers. In Judges we have the story of Abimelech and the seventy brothers, and Amnon and Absalom. The book of Samuel tells us that Saul was angry with David because his people favored him. “‘They have credited David with tens of thousands,’ [Saul] thought, ‘But me with only thousands. What more can he get but the kingdom?’ And from that time on Saul kept a jealous eye on David.” Eventually Saul tries to pin David to the wall with a spear. The rivalries in the Bible lead to fratricide, rape, serial murder and enslavement. It would be easy and foolish to simply write these examples off as extreme and irrelevant to modern communal contexts. Cain is the student who, unable to garner the respect of his peers, and resentful of the social status they enjoy at his expense, winds up walking into a classroom at Columbine or Virginia Tech. Jacob all too frequently ends up in the corner offices of our organizations and in the pulpits of our churches, pursuing the higher status of others. Joseph’s brothers are yours and mine. And who among us hasn’t secretly wished to pin someone to the wall in the service of our own glory?
As parents, we may bemoan our child’s excessive desire to keep up with the Joneses but we will get all of the name-brand clothing, electronic toys, cars, and whatever else will guarantee their social status. We may think of this adolescent materialism as the result of harmless peer pressure and draw the line at $150 shoes, “Just as long as he stays away from that boy, Cain.” But these are the seemingly obvious but often unrecognized patterns of envy in their early stages. Psychologists concur that all the signs of our murderous youth are visible long before their crimes. Envy’s destructive power begins early in life, and often has a long, slow-burning fuse.
I spend many of my days working alongside leaders who preside over large and complex organizations. I’ve seen newly promoted leaders immediately begin counting the square footage of their offices to make sure theirs is commensurate with those of similar rank. And if it is not, they will complain bitterly until they get their due. In one organization in which I worked, one senior leader, after a promotion, said to his boss, “I assume I’ll be getting a bigger office now. Since I’m now Janet’s peer, we wouldn’t want to confuse the organization about the value of my role.” This leader became so fixated on competing for the trappings of rank and the appearance of greater status, that within six months of being appointed, his obsessive pursuit of the spotlight had led to his failure to produce any tangible results, and he was removed from the job. One Jewish proverb says, “the one who envies gains nothing for himself and deprives the one he envies of nothing.”
The odd currencies that symbolize one’s importance in our culture breed envy, entitlement, and distrust faster than most care to believe. Justifying their envy by claiming to be in pursuit of fairness, people will fight for what they believe is their due by making apparent disparities an issue of basic justice, and thus distracting the attention of the community from more important matters. Jesus speaks to this very issue in his parable of the workers in the vineyard. Some workers were hired early in the morning and agreed to be paid “one dollar” for their labor. Additional workers were hired later in the day:
When the day’s work was over, the owner of the vineyard instructed his foreman, ‘Call the workers in and pay them their wages. Start with the last hired and go on to the first.’ Those hired at five o’clock came up and were each given a dollar. When those who were hired first saw that, they assumed they would get far more. But they got the same, each of them one dollar. Taking the dollar, they groused angrily to the manager, ‘These last workers put in only one easy hour, and you just made them equal to us, who slaved all day under a scorching sun.’ He replied to the one speaking for the rest, ‘Friend, I haven’t been unfair. We agreed on the wage of a dollar, didn’t we? So take it and go. I decided to give to the one who came last the same as you. Can’t I do what I want with my own money? Are you going to get stingy because I am generous?’3
One of the most sinister aspects of envy is its ability to appear in other forms. Masquerading as a noble cause, an opportunity to send important messages, or righting injustice, leaders can justify their envy with manipulative tactics that can seem almost reasonable. Underneath, however, envy remains committed to the destruction of the community, and this destruction is especially painful when it affects the leadership of an organization.
Envy among leaders quickly leads others wh have been watching to conclude that significance in the community requires that one become self-serving and that comparison to others is the prime currency by which one’s value will be established. Contribution, relationship, and faithfulness are cast aside as the currency for determining merit, as everyone quickly learns to fiercely compete for the social scraps available in a zero-sum Darwinian battle.
Envy is far uglier and lethal than we care to admit or even imagine. Indeed, if there are ways to restrain its menacing effects, we should pursue them, especially when the leadership of others is at stake. There are three contexts in which envy primarily makes an appearance in the leadership arena: the desired envy of others; the undesired envy of others; the envying of others.
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Inviting the envy of others
“Experience the joy of being resented” boasted a large billboard over a Seattle interstate. More than just a clever advertisement, its message not only urged its readers to flock to the nearest convenience store to purchase a mega-millions lottery ticket but, while sitting in rush hour traffic, to inventory where exactly in their life they had a leg up on someone else.
Let’s be honest. Who of us would say we do not enjoy having the delight of others? Adulation from others, and even on occasion, feeling idolized by them, feels good. And when you are a leader, you have the power to invite—even to engineer—this praise. The casual dropping-of-names-of-highly-influential-people-with-whom-one-has-been- socializing, the emphatic “downplaying” of the new luxury car, the unassuming insertion of a daughter’s recent acceptance to an ivy league school into a conversation, the saccharin sweet demeaning of the work of another in comparison to an acclaimed piece of one’s own work—all of these are examples of the ways leaders can sway the self perceptions of others toward feelings of inadequacy, resentment, and competition. In exchange for the cheap, quick rush of self importance, the envy-inviting leader is unwittingly destroying the community over which they have been invited to preside. And if that community has been charged with a specific mission—be it the spiritual well-being of its members, the production of a specified set of results, the creation of goods or services for a market, or the well-being of a family, those important outcomes will be dangerously compromised over time. The envy-inviting leader parasitically feeds off the community and saps its ability to grow, transform, contribute, and thrive.
There are three contributing factors to a leader’s impulse to invite the envy of others. Each of these factors could be the topic of its own paper, but here I’ll touch upon them just briefly.
An inflated sense of power and influence: The leader who trusts her sense of power and influence has little need for excessive admiration. However, the leader who perpetually feels inept to influence must compensate by contriving conditions that force the veneration of others. This leader has a misguided sense of their role. At a fundamental level, she views her role as one of controlling rather than serving others. The saddest consequence is that as this strategy succeeds, those around this leader forfeit their voice and heart and simply become “yes” people, aquienscing to the whims of a leader who cannot relationally engage on any meaningful level.
The temptation of false humility: We’ve grown up in an era where the acquisition of capability is faster than ever. Our world has acquired more knowledge in the last ten years than in the previous two thousand.4 Such staggering accumulation means that we are more capable than ever before. But somehow we have gotten the notion that enjoying this capability is wrong, and so we have learned to diminish our creative efficacy because we are nervous about being too ego-centric. We dismiss compliments directed our way. We deflect acknowledgements away in order to look humble while we secretly long to believe their truth and to hope the sender believes it too. To compensate for the gulf in our souls created by the repelling of others’ praise, we are forced to construct elaborate fishing expeditions that bait and lure into our nets the very same admiration and delight that we have turned away.
An appetite for winning at any cost: Most leaders will gladly acknowledge that they have deficiencies, but most will not acknowledge how much they fear them. Often a leader’s greatest strength, over extended, becomes her Achille’s heel. A gifted achiever of great results cannot bear to face the carnage behind her of those burned in the wake of her impressive pursuits. The highly creative leader whose uncanny instincts generate brilliant ideas cannot stand being reminded that his impulses also include excessive impulsivity, and that his colleagues are driven mad by the perpetually abrupt changes in direction that he forces on them. Such leaders are often threatened when having to face the notion that others have talents that are complimentary to theirs, or which may expose the limitations of their own brilliant gifts. Therefore, exposure to their weaknesses propells them to eliminate the competition. Reminders of the need to temper one’s talents, to be more aware of one’s impact, and to be more sensitive to others, are met with umbrage, and often also with the marginalization of any voice that threatens to exposes the flat sides of the otherwise gifted leader.
The leader who can develop enough self-reflective muscle and self-restraint can contain the terrible effects that an unrestrained appetite for the esteem of others can bring. This takes years of work and intentional self-honesty, which many leaders sadly never acquire. The good news is that the emerging generation of leaders appears to have far more natural acumen toward that end than have their predecessors.
The assault of envy from others on a leader
Leaders in organizations bear unique, often private burdens from which most members are shielded. What is most visible to the organization or community is the special status and the privileges accorded to leaders. And of course, the higher one’s rank, the greater the perceived privilege the leader is accorded. Whether true or not, most leaders are seen as fortunate for being in their positions—they command higher salaries, they are seen as having a greater degree of freedom over their time, they receive perks that come with the job, they get a greater say about decisions and directions, and they get automatic respect because they command positional authority.
That’s one side of the story.
What most people who do not play a leadership role fail to understand is how hurtful those envious perceptions can be to a leader. While it is difficult for anyone to acknowledge dependence on others for anything, when members of a community or organization are faced with feeling that they must rely—or depend on—leaders, their resentment of that dependence can result in showing enormous contempt for leaders. This can put the leader in an unending state of feeling off-balance and fatigued.
In his research on envy and leadership, Mark Stein suggests that when members of a community or an organization begin to compare what they have or who they are to what a leader has or who he is, this may occassionally evoke both a sense of inferiority and also a desire to attack the leader and to destroy their good fortune. Such an attack is more likely when individuals within the group are dependent on the leader’s skills or qualities for their own survival and development. However, it is often too difficult for the individual or group to acknowledge—even to themselves—how envious they feel of those in leadership positions. Acknowledging such feelings would imply recognizing the limits of their own achievements. Worse, it would involve being aware of a side of themselves that is hateful towards others’ good fortunes and their desire to destroy it. By consigning these emotions to the unconscious, the individual is left free from the painful awareness of their destructive feelings toward the leader.5
Sadly, leaders are often relegated to suffering in silence under the burdens and complexities of their jobs, trapped by the popular misperception that they are living in luxury.
Leaders must be sympathetic to the conflicting emotions of individuals in their community who feel the tension between their dependence (being protected), and independence (finding their own voice). Without such awareness, leaders will fail their community members and unsuspectingly perpetuate their community’s feelings of envy. Leaders must accept the tension between a desire for community, intimacy, and relationship on the one hand and, on the other, a desire to protect our individualism, voice, and independence. This tension may never be resolved; it is a paradox that must be embrace. Leaders are afforded the special privilege of having to navigate their own internal battle with this while at the same time helping those in their communities contend with the same tensions. Frequently, it is the leader herself who is the very object of transference that triggers the conflict within members of the community; she then must help them to navigate the conflict so the community member can remain productive contributors to the community.
Leadership, in any context, is ultimately a privilege even though the realities of the role often belie this. Part of that privilege is the requirement to work simultaneously on one’s own transformation while assisting with the transformation of others—often transformation they do not yet know they need or should want. And that type of leadership will often incite the resentment and envy of the very community that the leader is attempting to love and to shepherd. The good news is that if the leader can withstand the assaults and persist by offering love in return, the defenses and resistance of the community—especially in the form of envy—will eventually soften, giving way to mutually beneficial and trusting relationships that ultimately are the catalyst for sustainable transformation.
When leaders hate the good of the other
By now I hope it is clear that envy is an act of hatred—a malicious desire for another’s harm. William F. May, author of A Catalogue of Sin: A Contemporary Examination of Christian Conscience writes, “The covetous man wants to possess the good of his neighbor, whereas the envious man, first and foremost, regrets it.”6 A leader who envies doesn’t necessarily seek his own gain for self-serving ends, but has such intolerance for the gains of others (often those he leads) that he seeks to destroy the blessings of others. He cannot find pleasure in the good fortunes and growth of others, but instead wants to obliterate them. May continues, “The envier is a child of the evil one: if he cannot have heaven, he can at least raise hell in the lives of others.”7
Excessively envious leaders can often be referred to as narcissistic leaders. Rosenfeld connects envy and narcissism in a leader who has an image of one’s self as uniquely special.8 This is the leader who simply cannot bear the success or uniqueness of others, especially those he believes may be out to displace or outshine him. While this leader is often drawn to leadership because of their ability to envision greater things and to invite the devotion of others, they are often ill suited for leadership because they are unable to see or to develop the gifts of others. This then is one of the primary consequences of the envious leader—he creates a learning-impaired organization. The ability to grow, learn, and adapt is limited because the leader’s example is one that prevents growth and change, and as such, the notion of pushing one’s capabilities to new heights becomes too dangerous for others to consider.
In addition to the threat that envious leaders perceive from those with substantial talent and distinction, leaders often can be provoked to envy by those with less burdensome roles. Many leaders commonly hear from members of the community, especially during times of great stress, expressions such as, “Gosh, I would hate to be you right now. Glad you have to deal with this mess and not me.” This moves the leader to resent the degree of freedom and lack of responsibility that others in the community enjoy at the leader’s expense.
What is distinctively sad about this particular genre of envy is the far-reaching implication that it can have within communities and organizations. Once a leader’s envious contempt toward the community is known, boundaries are drawn and unwritten rules are adopted. Rules such as “don’t ask hard questions”, or “don’t outshine the boss,” or “keep the really good ideas to yourself or you get shot down,” or “tell her what she wants to hear if you want to keep your job,” or “if you want your idea adopted, make it look like it was his” are all dangerous conclusions for a community to draw about a leader, and too frequently signal the birth of a slow death.
Leaders who are drawn to hateful behaviors are a frighteningly common commodity in the ranks of organizations. This helps to explain why so many communities and organizations woefully under-perform against their missional objectives. The pathologies that provoke a leader’s hatred can be numerous, and discussion of them falls too far outside the boundaries of this discussion. Suffice it to say that any of us are susceptible to these pathologies, and a ruthless self-reflection and continual invitation to others’ perceptions of us can go a long way toward preventing the noxious effects that such behavior can have.
Self-perpetuating envy: a cycle that destroys beauty and possibility
Here is the really damaging reality: just as cancerous cells create more cancerous cells, so envy begets envy. The leader who invites the envy of others creates an insatiable appetite for admiration that requires constant replenishment by drawing ever greater attention to themselves. This in turn invites the resentful envy from the community of the leader’s exploits, and further isolates the leader from the community. The leader then resents the ostracizing separation from the community and begins to envy the privileges of relationship, which others enjoy at his expense. And so the cycle repeats, leaving in its path a burned down forest of wreckage in the form of muted beauty and squandered possibility. Beauty—the mark of God’s glory manifested in the lives of creation—hides and fades when others are out to destroy it. Possibility—the chance to dream and hope for something more—is exchanged for cynicism and resignation about whether anything more is even possible. Breaking the cycle will require something far more powerful than the artificial social rewards that envy promises. To do this will require levels of delight and gratitude that can eclipse the toxins of envy and, ultimately, disarm their addictive allure.
From rivalry to revelry: learning to delight in God’s glory and beauty in others
So how do we turn the tide? How can we help the allure of envy lose its charm and be drawn toward something more appealing? A deep and raw examination of the father’s response to the elder son in Jesus’ story of the prodigal has something important to offer. Fewer have unpacked the profound implications of this story more richly than Henri Nouwen in The Return of the Prodigal Son. Nouwen writes:
“In the house of my father there are many places to live,” Jesus says. Each child of a God has there his or her unique place, all of them places of God. I have to let go of all comparison, all rivalry and competition and surrender to the Father’s love. As long as I stay outside in the darkness, I can only remain in the resentful complaint that results from my comparisons. Outside of the light, my younger brother seems to be more loved by the Father than I; in fact, outside of the light, I cannot even see him as my own brother. . . . In the light of God, I can finally see my neighbor as my brother, as the one who belongs as much to God as I do. But outside of God’s house, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, lovers and friends become rivals and even enemies; each perpetually plagued by jealousies, suspicions and resentments.9
Despite common interpretations of this parable, Jesus’ point was never to see the elder brother as the bad guy and to celebrate only the redemption of the prodigal son. The more profound point is that the father saw both sons as equals—he saw them for their differing needs, their differing contributions, and even their differing levels of maturity. The elder brother felt taken for granted and hated being seen as an equal, or worse, as less important than his younger brother. Not surprisingly, he complained about never having so much as a baby goat for his friends while being so good, yet his scrappy recalcitrant little brother got the fatted calf.
What measuring stick are you using to determine your own value? If it is one of comparative assessment, you may be doing more harm than you realize. Comparisons that lead to the war in your heart to prove you are better (or worse) than others, can ultimately take down entire communities, or—as we have seen in recent years—entire nations.
But what if you make a different interpretive choice of the measurement? What if you choose to see in others the very same God that invites you into the light instead of the rival whose schemes you must out-maneuver? This is a far more difficult choice than that of cheap and simplistic envious contempt, but it has far more transformative power than any other aspect of leadership. As a leader you must determine early in your run whether you desire more to be right, or more to be good. True the two do not always have to work at odds, but when they do, who will you be? There are two compass headings I will offer as a way for leaders to begin reconstructing a navigational dashboard with different measuring devices than the ones to which they may be accustomed.
From indictment to invitation—using standards that unleash others’ possibilities: As leaders, our proclivity to affect change and to realize results is an important, and healthy component of our work. But what we measure tells much about what we value. But what if one of the most important metrics we used was the progress our communities were making toward who God designed them to be? What if we actually made the formation of others a priority, and believed that our own formation was interconnected to our ability to contribute to the formation—and indeed the trans-formation of our fellow community members? And what if, whenever they made clear strides in the direction of trans-formation, we cheered and celebrated with genuine delight? Instead of collecting data that displays our relative position to them, why not collect data that displays our shared relative proximity to our Creator?
From antipathy to appreciation—learning gratitude for the presence and beauty of others: Having made the choice to change what and how we measure, we are now free to see beauty where once we saw inadequacy, to see God where once we saw threat. It is our gratitude more than anything else that will unleash the greatest potential of our organizations and communities. Nouwen says it so beautifully:
“Gratitude goes beyond the “mine” and “thine” and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. . . . Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment. It is amazing how many occasions present themselves in which I can choose gratitude instead of complaint. I can choose to be grateful when I am criticized, even when my heart still responds in bitterness. I can choose to speak about goodness and beauty, even when my inner eye still looks for someone to accuse or something to call ugly. I can choose to listen to the voices that forgive and to look at the faces that smile, even while I still hear words of revenge and see grimaces of hatred. . . . There is always the choice between resentment and gratitude because God has appeared in my darkness, urged me to come home, and declared in a voice filled with affection: “you are with me always, and all I have is yours. . . . Each time I make [the choice of gratitude], the next choice is a little easier, a little freer, a little less self conscious. . . . At many points I have to make a leap of faith to let gratitude have a chance. . . . The leap of faith always means loving without expecting to be loved in return, giving without wanting to receive, inviting without hoping to be invited, holding without asking to be held. And every time I make a little leap, I catch a glimpse of the One who runs out to me and invites me into his joy, the joy in which I can find not only myself, but also find my brothers and sisters. . . . gratitude reveals the God who searches for me, burning with desire to take away all my resentments and complaints and to let me sit at his side at the heavenly banquet.”10
Clearly, to abandon envy requires more than just abandoning some flawed paradigms of how leadership works. It requires abandoning fundamental views of ourselves and of others in the context of community. It requires abandoning our priority to be right all the time and choosing instead to be good. And it requires an encounter with a God of limitless grace who offers us far more than anything we could ever compete for in petty, envious rivalries. But first, we need to put down our spears, celebrate the good of the other, and choose gratitude. Will you?
Notes
1. Mark A. Yarhouse, “The Vice of Envy: Insights from the History of Pastoral Care” Journal of Psychology and Christianity; Vol 19, No 1, (2000): 25-37.
2. Mark Stein, “Envy & Leadership,” European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 6.4 (1997): 453-465.
3. Eugene Peterson, The Message, verses 8-15
4. Thomas Kelley and John Littman, The Ten Faces of Innovation (Doubleday-Currency, 2005)
5. Mark Stein, “Envy & Leadership,” European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 6.4 (1997): 453-465.
6. William F. May, A Catalogue of Sins: A Contemporary Examination of Christian Conscience (New York; Holt Rinehart, 1967)
7. Ibid.
8. H. Rosenfeld, Impasse and interpretation (London: Tavistock, 1987)
9. Henri Nourwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son; A Story of Homecoming (New York: Doubleday, 1992)
10. Ibid.