Followership

The Servant-Leader has become a buzzword in training circles, and to a certain degree has misrepresented the example of Christ. In fact, success for followers of Christ stands in stark contrast to the definition of this world. Success as defined by the world is how many people can I control and how much money can I make. Success as defined by Christ is how many people can I serve and how much money can I give away. Entirely different.

Today I've been thinking about Leadership and Followership. America's rugged individualism has created a culture that abhors followers and esteems leaders. None of us wants to admit that we are followers, we want to be on our own track. The fact is that in the Church we need both, and even our leaders are followers of Christ. We need to get comfortable leading but only as we follow.

This thought was informed by an article in Fast Company magazine. Nancy Lublin said, "Fundamentally, though, mine is not a touchy-feely, 'Workers of the world unite" argument. The under-appreciation of followers has a major bottom-line consequence: crazy redundancy. You can see it in the not-for-profit sector, which has a gazillion little organizations replicating one another. We all want to run our own thing, so not-for-profits never die. As a result, we have huge inefficiency and ridiculous amounts of overlap in the sector. This is wasteful, and this is fundamentally bad business."

Interesting thought.

--Ben