Leadership Capsule.

..Equipping leaders with tools, skills and weapons to provide effective leadership for nations to ultimately the Great Commission..

Monday, April 03, 2017

TITLE : Leadership Is Empowerment

Preparing the next Generation to Lead

The call to leadership is a call to empowering people. Christian leaders are given the great responsibility to not only lead well, but to invest in the next generation so that they can carry on the gospel task. This is essential for leaders and future leaders to remember. In fact, one of the goals of leadership is to make yourself replaceable. Ideally, a leader should put people and systems in place so that if they have to leave their leadership role for some reason, things will keep running smoothly.  The best measure of a leader is the leaders that he or she leaves behind.
Max DePree put it well when he said that: “Succession is one of the key responsibilities of leadership.” Moses, David, Jesus, and Paul all did this well: they identified followers who would lead God’s people well after they left.

A leader is great, not because of his or her power, gifts or position but because of his or her ability to empower others. Empowerment or Mentoring is a nonnegotiable function of successful leadership. True leaders know that their success is measured, to a large degree, by their successors.  Success without a successor is a failure. I don't know what you want to accomplish in life, but I can tell you this : legacy lives on in people, not in things. Too often leaders put their energy into organizations, buildings, projects, or lifeless objects. But only people live on after we are gone. Everything else is temporary. Make sure you pass the baton. Just anybody can make an organization look good for a moment, but the best leaders lead today with tomorrow in mind. They make sure they invest, empower, mentor, train and build people who will carry their legacy forward. Why? Because a leader's lasting value is measured by succession. Like Paul, a leader should seek to identify future leaders, build them up, empower them and give them resources and opportunities, and turn them loose.

True leaders invest in people and not in cathedrals. Leadership is not building monument. Jesus the greatest leader that ever lived never invested in buildings, programs or projects. He was focused on the assignment to raise leaders that reproduce other leaders. Jesus did not invest in multitude because He understood it's impossible to mass produce leaders. Jesus devoted his life empowering the 12 leaders that will live his legacy. The life and ministry of Jesus taught me an important leadership lesson that a leader's success or influence is not determined by the number of his followers. Jesus never focused on following because he understood that the function of leadership is to create more leaders not followers.