PRESERVING YOUR LEGACY

John chapter 15







Today we are walking in: Preserving Your Legacy







Job 34:16




If now thou hast understanding, hear H8085 this: hearken to the voice of my words.

























UNDERSTAND







Today we look to the word-UNDERSTAND- H8085 shama`--to hear with attention or interest, listen to understand (language)






















The Torah testifies...............




Genesis 11:7




Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand H8085 one another's speech.






















The prophets proclaim..................




Nehemiah 8:2




And Ezra the priest brought the law before the congregation both of men and women, and all that could hear H8085 with understanding, upon the first day of the seventh month.

























The writings bear witness...........................




1 Kings 3:9




Give therefore thy servant an understanding H8085 heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great a people?











Chapter 2

Preserving Your Legacy




THE MAJORITY OF the experiences that most of us have had with leadership transfer came after somebody died. What follows usually is not a smooth transfer, but a conflict, a fight, a struggle. Many times brokenness, frustration, and, worst of all, a split will cripple or destroy the organization the leader built. How many of us have seen this in our families, churches, governments, or businesses?




When the “president for life” of the African nation of Gabon died recently after more than forty years in office, government leaders at first denied he was even ill and continued to dispute reports that he was in ill health only hours before announcing his demise. Due to fear of a coup as news of his death spread, national officials immediately shut airports, closed borders, blocked Internet service, and stationed guards in government buildings and at the utilities. Traffic was in gridlock as people sped home from work and rushed out to buy groceries, fearing stores would close.




That may be the extreme, but chaos is very common when a leader dies. Anyone who has lived long enough to experience leadership transition will agree that confusion, fear, uncertainty, and insecurity accompanied the change. All of these can be very debilitating, immobilizing, and dangerous to the organization, country, family, or business. They are a direct result of the leader’s failure to prepare for transition, products of the inability or un- willingness to mentor and prepare others to succeed him.




When the head of the family dies, children fight among themselves for the spoils. Jealousy and hatred destroy the love they might have shared in the past. Look at the infighting over the custody of Michael Jackson’s children and the disposition of his assets. To some, he was just a successful entertainer, to others an oddity, but he was also the head of a family and the leader of a billion-dollar entertainment enterprise generated by his music and rights to the music of the Beatles and others. The legal battles could go on for years and destroy what he left. Even in ordinary families, children, stepchildren, wives, ex-wives, and coinhabitants may fight so bitterly over petty issues and things of little worth that kinfolk do not associate with each other generations later.




“Measure leadership success by the success of the successor.”




I have seen the chaos of transition in corporations, churches, and other organizations as well. When one strong leader passes on, fighting takes hold. Followers resort to deception, deceit, and destruction. These are indicators of the failure to prepare and mentor successors. How does one leader transfer leadership to the next without destroying the organization and losing everything?




Beyond the Horizon




The greatest act of leadership is mentoring. It took me forty years to write this one sentence. I thought a great leader is one who built a big building or organized a massive campaign. I thought leadership was about building a corporation worth millions. This is not the measure of greatness. Greatness must be measured by the transfer of success to future generations. In this series, I want to talk about how to transfer leadership from one generation to another, from one leader to another.




I find it very intriguing that the first-century, young rabbi Yahusha Hamachiach built an organization at thirty years old that is now more than two thousand years old. It is the largest company on earth with upward of two billion clients. I happen to work for the company. He started the company with just eleven investors, to whom he gave shares. They did not have to buy them. The greatest leader of all time gave these shares to the partners by passing on knowledge, by mentoring. He told them they were no longer servants because a servant does not know what his master is doing. He had shared everything with them, so they were “friends.”




John 15:15 “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.”




Yahusha was a secure leader. “I am going to give you everything,” He essentially said. “Why? Because I don’t plan to stay.”




That is not an attitude that we often see in leaders today. Yahusha never built a building, never opened a bank account, and never established a physical institution, yet His company is still expanding after two thousand years. That means greatness and leadership is not in buildings. It is in building people. We are so stuck on wanting our names on buildings, which can decay and fall down, that we forget the greatest investment any leader can make is in people.




Some leaders have their names engraved in their office chairs. They have that chair chained to the floor, and they have a seat belt on the chair. Every Monday they click it on and say, “No one is taking this. This is my position, my company, my ministry...”




True leaders do not hold on to the knowledge, experience, achievements, opportunities, or relationships they accrue in their positions. True leaders transfer knowledge. They cultivate the inquisitiveness of their mentees. Like the lioness, they encourage the mentees to observe them in action. The leader encourages them to ask questions. “Ask me how I did this and why I did this. I want you to know what I know. Because the sooner you learn this, the more quickly I can move on to my next position.” The greatest accomplishment of leadership is succession. Failure to mentor a successor is the cancellation of leadership legacy. Failure to mentor a successor is the cancellation of your own legacy.




Transfer of Ownership




Your influence will not continue in buildings or bank accounts. Your influence will continue in people. This is why the greatest leader of all time invested three and a half years in people—in a training program for people. He had this idea of living forever through them. Buildings are perishable. People live on. You last in those who remember your name. You last in those you mentor. You last in the leaders you left in your place and in the leaders that those leaders train to replace them and so forth.




I do not want my name on a building because a hurricane, a terrorist act, or an earthquake could wipe it out. I want people to remember my name by the continuing leadership of those I mentored and by the successor that I molded.




So we need to consider: what are our priorities?




Four principles summarize my concept of succession in leadership:




1. Visionary leadership is generational.




2. Vision is greater than the visionary.




3. Mentoring is the highest responsibility of leadership.




4. Succession is the greatest measure of leadership success.




Leaders must focus not so much on fulfilling their vision as on preparing new leaders to carry it forward. Many leaders have great vision, but they think they should fulfill it in their lifetime. They do not think much about posterity. When a leader does not prepare the successor, the result is always chaos and destruction. Two major mistakes leaders make are to believe that they are the only ones who could and should fulfill the vision and to think that they should fulfill it in their lifetime.




Visionary leaders always possess a sense of destiny. Destiny forces one to think beyond a lifetime. Destiny is bigger than all of us. It is that massive, uncompromising eternalness of life. Visionary leaders always think of their mortality. They are not afraid of it. They interpret destiny as the privilege to paint in a small piece of history. This is why visionary leaders communicate the vision of the future effectively. They are able to paint pictures and give conceptual vision to the future of others. Visionary leaders transfer ownership of the vision to the next generation. Visionary leaders focus on training others to fulfill the vision even beyond their lifetime. Leaders lead beyond their own leadership. They go beyond what they are supposed to do. They are constantly thinking about what remains after death. These are true leaders.




Measure leadership success by the success of the successor. This means that true leadership does not use achievements or goals, programs and projects as measures of success, but looks to the quality, character, competence, and passion of people around the leader who can fulfill the vision. Leaders are not in the business of focusing on projects. To a true leader, people are more important than projects. People are more important than paper, personal ambitions, or pride. Leaders do not manage people. Leaders develop people.




Mentoring is the greatest and highest responsibility of leadership. It is not just a necessity for the operation. It is obligatory. Yet the responsibility for mentoring is usually not in the forefront of leaders’ minds. Most people we consider leaders focus mainly on themselves, their own achievements, and their successes. They focus on what they want to do, what they want to be known for, and what they want to build as a legacy. Most leaders build their legacy in their work and not in people. I encourage you to shift that paradigm. Your greatest legacy is not a product or an institution that you left behind, but rather a person or people. This approach is different from anything else I have read on succession and leadership.




Leaving your child a building or a house is not succession. That is inheritance. Whatever a person inherits, he can lose, but if you mentor a person, he cannot lose what you gave him. Mentoring is a transfer of things that are durable: vision, passion, intent, and character.




The average leader today has no interest in mentoring. He or she is preoccupied with defending a position and protecting turf. These are insecure, false leaders with titles.




You know people in your company who have been there for forty years, and you still cannot get rid of them. They do not even want promotions. They just want that position. How do you break that spirit? You teach them about mentoring. Teach this to your staff, those you are mentoring, because if they understand this early, they will not hold on to jobs too tightly. They will not develop the spirit of entitlement. That spirit of “this is my space” will be broken if they study and embrace mentorship.




Mentored to Lead




Mentoring involves encouraging another to serve in that person’s area of gifting. Through the opportunities for service that you provide, the mentee can discover, practice, and refine a gift. By serving that gift to others, the mentee discerns and fulfills purpose. At the same time, seeing you serve so willingly and joyfully influences the mentee. The mentee helps you carry out your vision and fulfill your purpose.




I have come to define true leadership as the capacity to influence others through inspiration, generated by a passion, motivated by a vision, brought by a conviction, produced by a purpose.




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 Yah spoke to Abraham, He got an argument (see Genesis 17:17). When Yah spoke to Moses, they argued (see Exodus 3:11– 14). When Yah 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: Yahusha, 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 ministry 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.




New and Improved!




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.