Deacon at 11, bishop with no pay: the ladder nobody applies for

The Church has two priesthoods, and the lower one, the Aaronic, is organised by age. The rules are published, and the dates matter because they changed recently.

Two features of the table are unusual by the standards of any other organisation. Every rung has a fixed unit size, so a 13-year-old deacons quorum president has a span of control of at most twelve and an elders quorum president of at most 96, and every rung is temporary. Bishops serve four to seven years and are then released back into the pews, where their former counselor may now be their bishop. The Newsroom's own page puts the load at 5 to 10 hours a week for an ordinary member with a calling and 15 to 30 for a bishop, a Relief Society president or a stake president, on top of whatever they do for a living.

The mechanism is the calling. A member does not seek a position; a leader one level up extends it, the congregation raises hands in common consent, and the member serves until released. A bishop is recommended by his stake president and approved by the First Presidency in Salt Lake City, then sustained by the ward. Wikipedia's description of the ward is blunt about the staffing model: the leaders are called from the congregation itself, with no formal training in theology or administration, and the bishop, like all local leadership, is not paid. A ward of 250 people, which is the 2024 minimum to form one, will have a bishopric of three and a presidency for each of its organisations, plus clerks, teachers and ministering assignments. Most adults hold something.

Nobody applies, nobody is paid, and everybody is eventually released.

Two changes in 2018 tightened the ladder rather than loosening it. On March 31, 2018, in the priesthood session of general conference, President Russell M. Nelson merged the high priests group and the elders quorum in every ward into a single elders quorum with one presidency, saying the change "will greatly enhance the capacity and ability of men who bear the priesthood to serve others". On December 14, 2018 the First Presidency announced that children would move up in age groups each January rather than on their birthdays, which is how an 11-year-old came to be a deacon. The stated aim was "increased faith in Jesus Christ, deeper understanding of His gospel, and greater unity". The management effect, whatever the intent, was that every boy now enters his first quorum with a cohort, and every ward's adult men sit in one unit under one president.

Businessweek made the argument in June 2011, as the Deseret News reported at the time: members held, or had held, a disproportionate number of top jobs at Marriott International, American Express, Dell, Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers, among others, and the piece credited the mission with its international assignments, languages, companionships and what it called suffering, sacrifice and self-improvement. Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School, who served in Korea in the early 1970s, told the magazine: "I don't think there's any more demanding profession than being a Mormon missionary." The Economist followed in October 2012, noting that the mission teaches young members to persevere despite harsh odds and that afterwards selling airline seats or life insurance must be a doddle. Neither piece quantified anything, and Businessweek's phrase was seemingly disproportionate, which is a journalist's way of saying nobody counted.

The careers that fit the thesis are on the record. J. Willard Marriott served as president of the Washington Stake through the late 1940s and 1950s while turning a 1927 root beer stand into Hot Shoppes and, from the Twin Bridges Motor Hotel in 1957, into a hotel company; at his death on August 13, 1985 it ran 1,400 restaurants and 143 hotels on $4.5 billion of revenue with 154,600 employees. George W. Romney, president of American Motors from 1954 to 1962, was Detroit stake president at the same time. Alan Ashton served as a bishop and a stake president before and after WordPerfect. Robert C. Gay spent sixteen years as a managing director at Bain Capital before three years as mission president in Ghana from 2004 and a call to the Seventy in 2012. The ladder did not make these men; they were on it while they built. The thesis is that running a ward of 400 people with no budget, no pay and no power to fire anyone teaches something that running a division does not. I ran neither, but I worked for several people who had done the first, and I can report that they were good at meetings and at delegation and unusual in their patience with volunteers. Whether that is causation or the selection effect of a culture that promotes the same men in both hierarchies is the open question the magazines skipped.

The strongest criticism of the lay ladder is not that it produces bad executives but that it puts untrained people in rooms where training matters, and the clearest recent case is Sam Young, a former bishop from the Houston area who led a campaign called Protect LDS Children against the practice of bishops interviewing minors alone behind closed doors, in interviews the Salt Lake Tribune described as sometimes sexually explicit; the campaign gathered more than 22,000 petition signatures, and in late March 2018 Young led 800 to 1,000 people to Church headquarters in Salt Lake City to deliver books containing 3,000 accounts of interviews that the writers described as abusive or inappropriate, after which, in the same month, the First Presidency clarified that a young person could ask for another adult to be present during interviews with a bishopric or stake presidency, a change Young called insufficient because it left the choice to the child, and he went on a 23-day hunger strike in July 2018, was tried by a disciplinary council in Sugar Land, Texas on September 9, 2018 and read out the letter of excommunication on September 16, which said the reason was his "persistent, aggressive effort to persuade others to your point of view by repeatedly and deliberately attacking and publicly opposing the church and its leaders" rather than his views on children, a distinction he rejected. The second criticism comes from the research literature, and it cuts against the management thesis directly: Henri Gooren, writing in Dialogue in 2024 on leadership and retention in Latin America and Europe, found that the unpaid rotating model worked poorly where poverty and little formal education were the norm, that retention of converts ran at 10 to 25 percent in Central America and 15 to 20 percent in Brazil between 1968 and 1973, and that local leaders in Central America were, in his words, "overwhelmed, authoritarian, and unable to emulate the US managerial model"; among the causes of disaffiliation in the United States he lists burnout related to callings alongside family and work crises. The third criticism is arithmetic and needs no scholar: a bishop working 15 to 30 unpaid hours a week for five years on top of a job is either being subsidised by an employer who tolerates it, or by a family that does, and the executives who fit the thesis in the previous section all owned the companies that employed them. The ladder trains the people who can afford to climb it. That is not a small caveat, and the Church's own retention numbers abroad suggest it knows.

• Span of control from age 12: a quorum president has up to twelve people and a bishop up to 500, and both learn to run a meeting before they can drive.
• Delegation by necessity: nobody can be paid or fired, so the only way to get the fast offerings collected is to ask and follow up.
• Rotation and release: a bishop serves about five years and then sits under his successor, which is a lesson in ego most companies never manage to teach.
• It does not teach finance, law, product or the subject matter of any industry, and it does not screen for competence, since the selection is by inspiration and availability rather than by results.

The ladder is real and it is cheap, and it is not a management programme, because nobody designed it as one. It was designed to run congregations without a paid clergy, and the executives are a by-product that Utah has learned to notice. The next general conference will release a few thousand bishops and call a few thousand more, and the Church will not measure whether the released ones got promoted at work. Somebody should.