Passing It On: Growing Your Future Leaders (4 page)

To lead people anywhere, you have to influence them. Your influence inspires the mentee to carry out your vision. No one will
buy into your vision if you do not have passion for it. Your passion grows out of conviction that your vision is worth pursuing.
That conviction grows out of finding your purpose. The mentee finds purpose in your passion for your vision. He or she catches
the vision.

The secret to leadership is not the pursuit of power. Leadership is a pursuit of self. While you may delegate some authority
and confer a position on your mentee, you demonstrate that leadership is not a pursuit of those things. You show your mentee
that when you discover what you were born to do, your leadership is born. Thus, leadership has very little to do with people.
It is about self-discovery. It is finding your passion and pursuing it, and then people will find you. This is why leadership
really cannot be taught. It can only be mentored. You can teach people the principles for discovering themselves, and when
they find their purpose, the leader is born.

Purpose is the beginning. Purpose is having a sense of destiny. Your purpose then fuels your conviction. Your conviction is
a sense of significance. In other words, a leader is someone who discovered that he or she is important to the world. Your
mentoring must endow your mentee with a sense of purpose.

That happened to me. I had an argument with my Creator.

I said, “I cannot be that important.”

He said, “Yes, you are.”

I said, “No, I can’t be that important. Don’t you know where I was born? Who my relatives are?”

He said, “Look, you are that important.”

Do you know that the attitude I had is common to all the leaders that I have studied? When God spoke to Abraham, He got an
argument (see Genesis 17:17). When God spoke to Moses, they argued (see Exodus 3:11–14). When God first spoke to Gideon, He
had to argue with Gideon just to make him believe (see Judges 6:13–24). In other words, we never believe the truth about ourselves.

You must help your mentees see they are that important, and the sooner they accept that, the sooner the third step develops,
and that is vision. They begin to see how to fulfill their purpose. Vision is a concept of the future, and when the vision
comes, passion comes. Passion is a deep desire and commitment to achieve the vision. That passion inspires other people. In
other words, passion becomes what I call “contagious energy,” and that breathes air into people.

When your mentees become so passionate about something that they are willing to strive for it, it breathes life into them.
You have become contagious. Think about great leaders. Most of them went to prison or in other ways demonstrated they were
willing to die for their passion: Jesus, the Apostle Paul, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mohandas Gandhi. They inspired people.
Once you inspire people, you can influence them and attract support. You do not demand it. You attract it. People are attracted
to passion.

Therefore, if you want people to follow you, find your passion, and if your passion takes over your life, people will run
after you. A leader does not look for followers. Followers are attracted to the leader’s passion. If you say you are a leader,
but no one is following you, you are simply taking a walk.

Your mentee must see from your example that following is a privilege that people do not have to give you. They can leave your
church or resign from your company at any time. To keep people submitted to your passion, never let them see your passion
waning. Keep your passion. Share it with your mentee. You can become tired, but you must maintain and renew your passion.

If you are going to be successful in producing a successor, you must make mentoring your priority. Mentoring is hard work.
You serve as a model, an
advisor, a counselor, a guide, a tutor, an example for another. Your goal is to produce one greater than yourself. That may
come as a shock. When you are mentoring someone, you are not trying to produce a person who is
like you
. You are mentoring to develop someone
better than you
. Mentoring is about replacement with a better product. Always leave in place someone who is better than you were. A true
leader is always training a replacement, and the goal is to make that person better than the mentor is.

The greatest leadership challenge is establishing the priority of selfreplacement. Leaders do not clone others in their own
image. They help others discover themselves, deploy their own abilities, reach the height of their own capacities and refine
their unique personalities. Mentoring is not about making a person you—making someone talk like you, act like you, or dress
in a suit like you. That is not leadership. That is personality worship.

The greatest leader of all time taught me so much by His attitude. He would say something like this: “If I do not leave you,
you will not be able to do greater works. But if I leave you, knowing how well I trained you, then you will do greater works
than I have done.” In other words, a successor should achieve more.

John 14:12
“I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing.
He will do even greater things than these
, because I am going to the Father.”

Succession is the greatest measure of true leadership. Most leaders define success in leadership as what they achieve, but
if everything dies with them, they are failures. If everything you achieve stops when you stop, you are a failure. We have
many examples in the world where we can visit relics of old organizations, the building projects that died with the leader.
Thus, the challenge of true leadership success is to ask, “What will die with you?” The goal of leadership should be to answer
confidently the question, “What will live after I die?”

Succession protects the value of history. Succession uses the foundation of history to make history. Succession guarantees
the value of effort. For example, you work for twenty years building something. If you have a good successor, they will protect
all the work that you put in. In the absence of proper planning for succession, someone else can tear down something that
you built for twenty years in twenty minutes. Your successor can just wipe it out.

Effective succession is the only way to secure desires from the grave. What did that dead person desire? Only succession can
secure that. Succession is the only way for a leader to live beyond the cemetery. The bottom line is that it does not matter
how great your leadership was in your lifetime. Will it survive beyond your lifetime is the greater question. The answer lies
in how well you have prepared the heirs to your domain.

T
HIRTY YEARS AGO
I began the global organization through which I now enjoy the pleasure of helping millions of people around the world to
improve their lives. I knew from its inception, however, that becoming tied to any position, title, or privilege would hinder
my ability to move beyond the boundaries of the original organization and ministry. I had to be willing to wear the titles,
power, benefits, and privileges of my position loosely. I had to remind myself daily that this position could either become
a trap, tying me to the past, or a springboard, leading to a greater future. I am aware that my pilgrimage on this planet
is a series of roles, assignments, and responsibilities that are transitional and must never be possessed but passed on.

This sense of transitional responsibility motivated me to appoint my leadership team at the start of this global vision in
1980 and to begin to identify the person I could mentor to become my successor. From the beginning, I emphasized that everyone
had leadership potential and that we were building for the next generation. I constantly kept the future before our staff
and the organization’s members. I knew that to realize my vision for global reach through the organization that I had the
privilege to birth and develop, I would need to establish an intentional succession process. This would release me to continue
building our international structure. Fifteen years after starting the organization and after securing the foundation, mission,
and vision,
I knew the time would come for me to relinquish the power, privilege, and authority I enjoyed and to share them with my mentee.
In 1995, I made an official decision to appoint from among the team the leader who understood my heart and vision, the one
who would be willing to sacrifice. Today, that leader has principle responsibility for the core organization and is doing
an outstanding job. This critical move of putting a successor in place has allowed me the ability to expand the organization
worldwide. I could not have done that if I had remained strapped to the first seat of power. My conclusion is that mentoring
and succession is the only way to extend yourself beyond your limited position.

True leaders must:

•  Find the courage to mentor.

•  Secure a legacy for the next generation.

•  Transfer their deposit to the next generation.

•  Measure success by the success of their successors.

The historic leader Jesus Christ began organizing and building His organization at age thirty and appointed His first few
leadership team members from among common village folks who were also business owners involved in the fishing industry. As
soon as He gathered His first leadership students, He began to speak of His inevitable destiny—to be arrested, tried, tortured,
crucified, and resurrected from the dead. He constantly reminded them of His need to leave them and urged them to prepare
for this inevitability. Early in His ministry one day after the mentees had failed to exorcise a demon from a little boy,
He asked them a revealing question.

Matthew 17:17
“O unbelieving and perverse generation,” Jesus replied, “how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put up with you?”

The implications of these questions are profound. His words reveal the
frustration of a teacher or mentor who expected His students to learn enough to allow Him to turn His work over to them with
confidence. It also indicates His deep desire for them to learn what He knew and to perform at His level.

Here are the most important considerations for succession planning, using the mentoring style of Jesus Christ, the greatest
leader who ever lived, as our model and standard:

“The secret to succession begins with the leader’s acceptance of his mortality.”

Plan your departure the day you begin
. You are dispensable, mortal, and temporary. Start with the attitude, “I am temporary, and my greatest job is to leave someone
greater than myself in this position.” You start planning immediately to leave this position. The secret to succession begins
with the leader’s acceptance of his mortality. It begins with a consciousness—“I am temporary”—that allows confident leaders
to begin planning their departure. “I am aware that I must quickly find a replacement, train and develop someone quickly in
case my departure is soon.” You must “begin with the end in mind,” as the best-selling author and business trainer Stephen
R. Covey put it in his classic guide
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
. That was Habit 2. He meant it for normal, daily tasks or projects. In this case, the logical “end” is the end of your tenure,
your working life, or the end of life itself. Recall how Jesus reminded His team that His departure was inevitable and should
be an incentive for them to apply themselves to the lessons at hand:

Matthew 17:22–24
When they came together in Galilee, he said to them, “The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into the hands of men. They
will kill him, and on the third day he will be raised to life.” And the disciples were filled with grief.

True leaders should always lead with their departure in view, being ever mindful that their priority is to work themselves
out of a job.

As a leader, you cannot buckle yourself in and strap yourself to the seat of power with the hope that no one can or will try
to move you. To do so works to your disadvantage because it restricts you from progressing beyond your current position.

Finishing well is more important than starting well
. It is how a leader completes tenure. Finishing well depends on what and whom you left in your place. Many leaders start
with great momentum, passion, and lofty goals. Then they let it all die with them. One of the greatest secrets of finishing
is not with a project but with a person, finishing not with success but with a successor.

The organizational ministry of Jesus Chris after two thousand years of continued growth, expansion, and progressive movements
is a stellar example and prototype of a leader who finished well. When the time came for transition, He spent the final months
of His life focusing on refining and developing His successors, as revealed in many of His instructions, prayers, and mentoring
sessions with His students. He was constantly aware that all the work He had done was not as important as finishing His tenure
well. In His aspiration to complete and transfer His work and vision to His successor, He made the following statements:

Luke 14:28–30
“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money
to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying,
‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ ”

In our lifetime an example of one who finished well was John Osteen, the charismatic pastor who founded Lakewood Church. He
started his ministry in an abandoned feed store in Houston, Texas, in 1959 and built up a multiracial, interdenominational
congregation of six thousand or more. He had a worldwide teleministry and a thriving missionary outreach when he died with
little warning forty years later. Osteen’s son Joel had worked with his father for seventeen years producing his television
program but had never preached until the week before John Osteen’s death. The young man did so at his ailing father’s insistence
and, he believes, at the urging of God to accept the assignment. To boost his courage, Joel said, he wore his father’s shoes
in the pulpit. At that point, his father was expected to survive his illness, but he died within days. Reluctant and feeling
unprepared, the younger Osteen stepped in and not only kept his father’s legacy alive but grew it into a ministry that meets
in a former arena and fills stadiums all over the world.