ADULT MINISTRY
Being a Better Follower
by Jeanie Miley
I’m having a leadership crisis.
Well, maybe it’s a following crisis I’m having, and I’m not enjoying it.
Standing on the threshold of my den one morning, I suddenly saw my following problem so clearly that I could almost feel the seismic shift in my brain, and for the rest of this long, hot summer, I’ve had to turn that new insight and subsequent related epiphanies over and over in my mind.
It’s time for me to recognize the difference between leaders who have empathy and concern for their followers and leaders who use their followers to keep their own personal dramas going. I need to be more discerning about those who lead from a core of authentic power and those who are all about image and little about substance. There are those who are, it seems, invested with leadership power and others who merely assume it, demand it, or take it from others. I need to get smarter about all of that.
Before I follow someone else, I need to do a thorough investigation of just where it is this person is planning on going; I’ve had enough of following leaders who aren’t going to the places I want to go. I need to give up hanging my hopes on any one human being. Before I sign up to follow anyone, I need to up my standards a bit.
I need to keep on working to remember the difference between leaders and celebrities. Perhaps in this culture of constant overdose on celebrity sightings, it takes a little more effort to discern the difference between people who care and people who just want to be seen. With a constant diet of the junk food of pop culture, persons of substance, gravitas, and moral courage often get lost in the glitz and glitter, but I’m convinced that my mother was right. Ultimately, the cream rises to the top, even if it takes a long time to get to “ultimately.”
It’s been a long time since I’ve lived under the illusion that leaders have anything other than clay feet, and I don’t expect perfection from anyone. However, I’m really, really tired of being disappointed and disillusioned by the people I’m trying to follow.
Where is the leader who has done his moral inventory well enough to be aware of his own character defects? Where is the leader who has faced his personal shortcomings and knows himself well enough to be attuned to his weaknesses and able to manage and hopefully transcend his worst flaws? Where is the leader who has enough consciousness to govern her own life so she will not inflict her weaknesses on another person? Who has the humility to own his own mistakes without blaming someone else or hiding them behind some kind of pious or plastic covering?
I’m wondering where the leaders are who are more concerned about the people whose trust they have been given than their own selfish interests. Is there a leader whose values include integrity and truth-telling as well as winning? Have the people I’m trying to follow been tested in the hot fires of anything--tested enough to have had the dross burned away so that the gold is evident?
Epiphanies happen in the most common of places, and my epiphany was not so much that there are leaders who do not care about their followers. I already knew that. What knocked my socks off was the awareness that they do not know that they do not care about others. So cocooned in their own world of self-absorption, these leaders have lost touch not only with who other people are but who they are behind the façade.
This new growing edge is hard, but I’m determined to be a better follower.
—Printed previously in the San Angelo Standard Times.
The author of eight books, Jeanie Miley lives in Houston, Texas. Trained at the Spiritual Direction Institute in Houston, she is a spiritual director and teacher, retreat and workshop leader. She is married to Martus Miley, and they are the parents of three adult daughters
To check out Jeanie Miley’s latest book, Joining Forces, and others please click here.
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