How a mop, cheese, champagne, and takeout containers taught me Servant Leadership

Early in my career, I watched a managing director close out an opening night still wearing his tuxedo. Guests had gone home, the reviews were being written, and he was in the rehearsal studio with a mop, cleaning up spilled champagne so the actors wouldn't slip during the next morning's rehearsal. Nobody asked him to do it. He just noticed the floor was wet and the mop was closer to him than to anyone else.

I've carried that image for over twenty years, because it taught me something no leadership seminar ever did: the job is whatever needs doing next, and title has nothing to do with it.

I've seen versions of it again and again in nonprofit arts administration, which is its own kind of proving ground for this. There's the VP of Marketing who spent a board meeting prep session cubing cheese in the office kitchen because the volunteer who usually did it had called out sick, and the meeting was in ninety minutes. There's the finance director who sat on the side if the stage assembling takeout containers for a set piece, not because it was anywhere near their job description, but because the show teched tomorrow and someone had to. There's the board chair — the volunteer with the least obligation of anyone in the building — who spent pre-show behind the concessions table pouring wine because someone had to do it - only stepping away to make the curtain speech.

None of these people led by announcing that they were "hands-on" or "servant leaders." They led by picking up the mop, the cheese knife, the roll of tape, the wine bottle. The title came later, if it came at all. What I actually absorbed, watching them, was simpler: you don't get to opt out of the unglamorous work just because you're the one running the place — or, in the board chair's case, because you technically don't have to be there at all. If anything, you go first.

That lesson showed up for me most clearly on a day when nothing was going according to plan. Rain had cancelled the outdoor events we'd spent weeks planning. We did a pivot and continued on indoors with everything we could. I wasn't scheduled for the indoor event but I did what I'd watched those leaders do for years: I showed up, looked at what actually needed doing in that moment, and did it. Moving tables. Hauling boxes that weren't technically mine to haul. Not because I had a plan, but because I'd learned that showing up and doing the next necessary thing is the plan, when there isn't time for anything more elegant.

Servant leadership gets talked about like it's a philosophy you adopt, a framework you install. In my experience it's much less abstract than that. It's a mop in a tuxedo. It's cubed cheese instead of a delegated task nobody picked up. It's a board chair pouring wine. It's the ability to look at a mess and ask "what needs to happen right now" instead of "whose job is this."

I don't think you can fake this one. Staff and volunteers know within a season whether their leader will actually get in the truck when it needs unloading, or whether the hands-on talk is for the interview. The leaders who shaped me never talked about being hands-on. They just kept their hands available.

If you're building or running a nonprofit arts organization, I'd rather you remember that than any framework I could hand you: on the day it rains, the people around you won't remember what you said in the strategic plan. They'll remember that you were the one who showed up and started moving boxes.

Mary F. French is the founder of MFCF Management, a project management consultancy serving arts and culture nonprofits, and Executive Director of the Doraville Art Center (DART).