Grooming Your Replacement

There will come a point in your life when you will have to choose whether or not you are willing to take an initiative in reproducing yourself. Although some leadership trainers highlight this aspect of reproduction or multiplication, we all know some of us would cause more problems if we multiplied our leadership practice. Thus, before we multiply, we must first evaluate ourselves to determine whether or not it would be useful to have more than one of us around! 

"Before we multiply, we must first evaluate ourselves to determine whether or not it would be useful to have more than one of us around!" 

Might I suggest a slight difference between multiplying ourselves and helping to groom another leader? While I might be splitting hairs, I would encourage the “grooming grammar” instead of the reproduction and/or multiplication terminology. When we think of reproduction or multiplication, we tend to think of training someone to be just like us. We might end up teaching them to do exactly what we do, and this could be a scary thought for some followers!

TCL’s Leadership Development Plan

"I began to refrain from using the manager
mindset of "My way or take the highway.
When people got stressed, I began
to help them work through their problems."

One way to stay on the right track is to be strategic about your own development so you can help others. While it is simple to say you should groom your leaders to be more like Christ, diversity in leaders’ methodologies with regard to business and church organizations can make it heard to determine where to start. TCL’s plan has three phases:

1. Explore your leadership philosophy.
2. Study the Bible’s leadership theology
3. Develop a Biblical methodology.

Exploring and Studying
 
Back in 1980’s, as a young manager of about 50 workers, I sat down at my desk one day and pondered why I had such a high turnover rate among my employees. While I had terminated some, many just stopped showing up. At that time, I was a Christian, but I was very spiritually immature; I still remember one defining moment that served to boost my maturity, the moment when I realized that the problem was actually me.

Because of this, I changed my methodology. I began to refrain from using the manager mindset of “My way or take the highway.” When people got stressed, I began to help them work through their problems. If they wanted to bail, I asked them to reconsider, and I even suggested that they take a day off to make a good decision. This one simple change began to transform what people thought about me and in the level of the work they did. I now know it had something to do with patience and grace!

Hopefully, most of you are past the spiritually immature stage. However, some of you may not be. Spiritually unready people, who have a Donald Trump methodology like I use to have, I say that it is time to change. Realize where you are at and commit to grow through your own personal Bible study. Above all, be patient, and learn about leadership from God. You will know when to proceed to the next step and then into the grooming process.

Even if you are spiritually ready, there are reasons why we do not groom others.

1. We are afraid that the person we are grooming may do our jobs better than we can do, and we might loose our jobs. 
2. We have no idea that God wants to give us something bigger than what we are already doing. 

I would suggest that these reasons are not because we are spiritually weak. I would suggest that they are the result of poor leadership theology. These attitudes say something about how you believe God treats his leaders. When you don’t worry about losing your job and are readying yourself for the next assignment God is preparing for you, your theology is solid.

"It should be a relief to know we don’t have to reproduce ourselves. We just need to groom our replacements to lead like Christ!" 

 Developing a Solid Spiritual Methodology

The third phase of TCL’s leadership grooming plan is to groom your replacement with solid Biblical methodology. Now that I have studied the theology of leadership, I can better groom another leader by explaining what I learned in the 80’s about grace in managing people. I could not do that in the 80’s because I did not completely know what I was doing. 

Finally, it should be a relief to know we don’t have to reproduce ourselves. We just need to groom our replacements to lead like Christ! Many of you should set aside your fear and start doing that right now.