The 76 million baby-boomer Americans born between 1946 and 1964 are poised to flood the retirement market this decade. As they exit stage left, the dramatic drop in birth rates from one generation to the next will create a resounding thud. The 46 million Americans that form generation X not only have big shoes to fill – they have too many shoes to fill. The demographic reality of having about 40% less leaders to fill vacant leadership positions during the next decade is more than just cause for concern. More disconcerting still is the realization that many retiring leaders will unknowingly do everything in their power to cripple their successors.

When the workaholic-boomer leaders who fell in line, toed the line, colored in the lines, and epitomized the long grey line reluctantly hand over the baton to the savvy, pragmatic, nomadic, outside-the-box gen-x-rs who reactively hate everything to do with lines, the resulting clash of the titans could send your business careening.

The boomer generation gave the world some of the best leaders of all time. Most current senior corporate leaders are boomers. While their standards and strengths provided unparalleled growth and success, their generational preferences concerning autocracy and structure will undoubtedly contribute to transition conflict in this coming decade. There are without question many leaders that will navigate the shift in power magnificently, but our observations from working with leaders for over twenty years lead us to conclude that a significant percentage of leaders will unwittingly hamper effective leader transitions. Due to culturally reinforced behaviors, we forecast that a majority of boomer-leaders leaving the job market over the next ten years will reflexively employ at least one of the following Crippling Factors:

1. Scarce Power – viewing power as a scarce resource will cause unnecessary delays in the transfer of that power and subsequently cause organization stutters.
2. Light Switch – assuming the transfer of power must happen all at once – in one moment – will limit successor learning and organization effectiveness.
3. Short Leash –micromanage successors with unnecessary life support and who will manage them when you pull the plug?
4. Sink or Swim – throwing successors in shark tanks without access to your wise counsel is petulant and a breach of trust.
5. Fence Sit – considering gen-x successors on probation until you are emotionally prepared to leave, fosters an indecisive and distrustful relationship that leads to hobbling manipulation.
6. Plastic Perfection – valuing image over honesty will saddle your organization with lackluster leaders that culturally force cosmetic compliance instead of facilitate authentic commitment.
7. Meaningless Motion – the age of putting in your time to make the grade has ended – harnessing your successor with obsolete rules and paradigms may cause them to go elsewhere in a hurry.
8. Tried and True – beleaguering successors in skeptical conversations where you embody the answer and they embody the question contradicts inherent equality.

US corporate leader transitions promise to be one of the biggest economic obstacles in the upcoming decade. Organizational redesign might be a small component of the solution, but the foundational breakthrough resides in managing the relationship and processes between leader and successor. Organizations must act expeditiously to plan and foster productive leader transitions, or find something believable on which to blame their future ineptitude.

Productive transitions for key leaders and officers will only be well facilitated through powerful coaching. Unfortunately, most executive coaching does not empower leaders to self-navigate their own transformation. Structures and processes must be established, but the benefits of well-placed wisdom by a trusted advisor can never be under estimated. The book, Leaving Prisons: Release Your Trapped Value, was designed to serve as a compass for leaders navigating this territory. It details many of the intricate connections between organizational change and personal change while supporting leaders as they assess and shift their thinking and behavior with conscious choice.

W.H. Auden said in The Age of Anxiety, “We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.” The impending leader transitions are organization changes, and all organization change begins with personal change. Regardless of the situation, there is always a correlating personal transformation that enables leaders to propel their organizations toward the desired future. When that personal change is ignored, the organization follows the leader into a prison of oblivious rigidity, crippling its ability to achieve dreams and objectives. The immovable reality is that if our existing leaders do not effectively change themselves, the looming transitions of the next decade will cripple organizational potential and possibility.

Scarce Power. Lord Acton’s 1887 dictum still applies to leaders today, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The viewpoint that power is a scarce resource is a symptom of the dangerous belief that leaders should be judged by a different standard, that they are above the common folk. Leaders who selfishly stockpile power create disempowered organizations and build weak relationships that are disconnected, disrespectful and dysfunctional. Hierarchical position, coercion and adoration give a false sense of pseudo-power, and collude together to support the lie that power is to be hoarded. The reality is that power comes to those who bring others power. Power comes to those who bring hope. Creating power and hope in others are inherently foundational responsibilities of leadership. Power comes not to those to whom others have surrendered. Power comes to those who have surrendered to a greater purpose.

To successfully transition, leaders must incrementally share power over time with successors. Collaborative leadership is required: a leadership that reflexively partners, shares and cooperates. This is a pronounced shift in thinking and behavior for many leaders, but the payoffs will prevent major hiccups in upcoming transitions.

Light Switch. We worked with a corporate President who was planning on retiring in two years. He had selected his replacement and wanted us to work with him to “get him ready.” He also told us up front that he would not let his successor know about the plan until the last minute – he intended to announce his retirement and his successor simultaneously as he walked out the door. We declined on this leader light switch project and later heard the planned successor became disillusioned and took a top job with a competitor.

Transition, at its best is a complex relationship, and relationships take time – most organizations would do well to jettison the light switch theory. It is founded on a belief that leadership is a position. It is not a position; leadership is a social capacity that is only powerful when shared. Leaders become more powerful when they empower others through realizing that leadership is not about them, it is about the purpose and people they serve. When leadership is about you, you are at risk in defining your life by your defects. Leaders saying things like, “that is just the way I am,” “you’ll have to get used to me,” “it’s just like me to be…” and “give me the benefit of the doubt” are probably inept at leader transition and blinded by their excessive narcissism.

Short Leash. Much of our observations have shown that micromanagers, wielders of the short leash, do so out of distrust and fearful self-protection. The scary downside is that leader self-protection hardly ever aligns with leaders’ ethical mandate as fiduciaries: organization protection. One execution-guru CEO we worked with was so controlled by distrust and self-protection that while he was perfecting results at his mammoth company, his wife of twenty-eight years left him for the landscaper that cut the grass of what is now his former home. Through working with us, this CEO realized that his propensity to develop short leash relationships had infused distrust and betrayal in all his relationships. We found excessive internal theft, anemic innovation, and prevailing adversarial attitudes toward management throughout his company. Of the three people he had earmarked as potential successors, the two most desirable were about to negotiate job offers with other firms. His own short leash effectively hamstrung and hung out to dry this CEO.

Short leashes occur when unplanned organizations collide with dysfunctional transitioning leaders. Effective transitions are the simple sequence of key processes. Responsible organizations plan retirements with leaders in advance while successors are groomed and evaluated constantly. As a result of this planning, successors should be selected, promoted and announced as much as eight to twenty-four months prior to a leader’s leaving depending on the size and nature of the organization. After the planning and selection processes, the transition process takes place during the time when both leader and successor share the job, the power, and learn from each other. It is a mentoring time for the leader and a stretching time for the successor. When these processes are effectively in place and appropriate intervention, monitoring, and coaching are applied, transitions propel institutions to new heights of success.

Sink or Swim. The sink or swim strategy is fundamentally flawed in that it presupposes isolation and individuality. Most corporate leaders talk about collaboration and connectedness as mandates for success, yet they encourage disconnected sink-or-swim tactics with successors. Leadership is inherently lonely stuff, but the red flag of sink or swim signals the trapping of value. Tossing successors in the shark tank is a sign of independence driven relationship avoidance. Without relationship there can be no leadership. The best one can hope for in such a circumstance is the thin productivity of cosmetic compliance.

Leadership is ultimately and consummately a relationship, a connection between people. Leadership does not rest in a position; it rests in followers’ convergence. If people follow you, you are leading. Leadership is dependent on people. Leaders do not lead results, profits, outcomes, property, production, or anything else – they will always and only ever lead people. Leadership is also dependent on voluntary relationship, for followers must actually want to follow. So when leaders use sink or swim succession tactics, we know they are aspiring to lead from a distance, and we know they are trapping value and will cripple their successor.

Fence Sit. Leader indecisiveness is a symptom of the illogical feelings of worthlessness. These emotionally stunted feelings and hesitations form cholesterol-like organization bottlenecks and strangle successor effectiveness. To vacillate and consider successors on probation until you are able to tolerate the emotional discomfort associated with transition constitutes an immature betrayal of your replacement and your organization. Successors that spend time with fence sitting leaders, report that they feel distrusted, confused and demeaned. These are relational projections from leaders fighting the deep tumult of worthlessness and infecting newly appointed leaders. Manipulation and dishonesty typically govern the relationships between leader and successor in situations like this.

Fence sitters don’t realize that abdicating choice is a choice in and of itself. When they fully realize that by avoiding decisions they are adversely decisive, they not only face their fears but also potentially feel free to make alternative choices. It is this courageous freedom that releases trapped value in themselves and their organization. Transition takes time and doubt is the enemy of time. Fence sitters need deadlines, but more importantly they need doubt-coaching throughout the transition process; the selection decision they made previously is usually still valid despite their current feelings.

Plastic Perfection. Successful transitions require authenticity. Your successor and your organization need you to be real in order to harvest the data required for leadership continuity. Valuing image over honesty will saddle your organization with lackluster bosses that culturally coerce instead of facilitate authentic commitment and engagement. The biggest root cause to the plastic leader’s problems is that successors never get to know them; inheritors intuitively sense you are covering up something and they know better than to trust that. The plastic leader’s prison cell is their outer shell. People never get close enough to form relationships, so transition is tenuous at best.

For the transitioning leader, being always transcends that which appears to be: appearance. Successors sense the difference. Transition is the time to clear out the closets of skeletons, discuss the undiscussables, and disclose the secrets. Authenticity is scary because it requires that we speak of our own disingenuousness and hypocrisy. While this is uncomfortable and rare for leaders, do it anyway – it works. Leaders are not without defect, and exposing and discussing your obvious errors authentically shows that you are honest and can be trusted. Being authentic is the embodiment of truth, and truth is indiscriminant to and inconvenient for appearances. Truth invites scrutiny, and for successors, truth is a platform for future success.

Meaningless Motion. A retiring Group President we were coaching was in deep conflict with her gen-x successor over the rewarding of empty effort. The heir-apparent leader was annoyed by how much time was spent making sure people were in certain places at certain times as opposed to managing results and outcomes. The soon to retire leader was patiently and condescendingly extolling to her successor the supposedly self-evident mandate to manage meaningless motion. After talking with them for a while, I asked for a break and took the President aside.

We knew each other well and we talked about how her replacement just wasn’t getting it. We also talked about how the world is much different now and that new perspectives were required to create a better future. We landed together on the thought that as a mentor, it was time for her to hand over even more control and to reflect and offer advise on the fresh thinking she hears. She called me later that month and said she was now living by a new standard of wisdom for herself, “Don’t just do something, stand there!”

It’s easy to say the world has changed, but it is an entirely different thing to live through it. The times have shifted. What worked in the past worked well, but indications are that it might not work that well in the future. The age of putting in your time to make the grade has ended, and unknowingly harnessing your successor with obsolete rules and paradigms could potentially derail them and your institution. Whether leaders are forcing antiquated time and space mandates or they are busy pushing outmoded standards of urgency and meaningless motion, transition is a time to look at life reflectively and harvest the choicest fruits to empower your replacement.

Forgoing adequate observation and reflection, leaders sometimes chose inactionable, purposeless direction. To deflect attention from their ignorance further, they employ urgency. Urgency captures attention through anxiety and creates propped-up popularity, but is often light on substance and staying power. Urgency without purpose is a defense against identity and meaning. Too often leaders appear as empty bobbling heads, urgently whining about the next faddish flurry of asinine commotion. Successful successors and accomplished organizations will be aided by your reflection and generative conversation. Resist the temptation to colonially reinforce outdated ideas that will merely detract from your legacy.

Tried and True. Transitioning leaders must challenge their thinking about people. How we view people matters. The tyrant views people as a means to their ends; conversely, the honorable leader views people as ends in and of themselves. If human equality is holy, then elitist exploitation of people is evil. The way in which you view people inexorably infects your leadership. Beleaguering your successor’s brilliance with skepticism in one-way conversations where you embody the answer and they embody the question contradicts your inherent equality.

That which was tried and true worked for you. You are not your successor. Moreover, they are your equal. Humility will always be the bedrock essence of leadership. However strenuously we strive for importance, leaders themselves are not nearly as relevant as those they serve, and during transition you are called to serve your successor. Countermanding requisite humility is the fact that most leaders remain constantly in search of their own significance, and are thus chained to illogical, unarticulated fantasies of being God. Your past accomplishments are an evanescent support of self-pertinence. In transition, your self-importance is irrelevant. The platform you help create for your successor is of utmost importance.

The next decade in US corporate leadership will see unprecedented tempests and turmoil. The king pin position of world economic power will shift from the US to China. Interest rates will rise. US debt as a percentage of GDP will probably shatter the country’s financial standing in the world. Millions of Americans are now without jobs, and many of those jobs will not return. Technology advancements will most probably make all previous investment obsolete. Green standards, industries, and energies will disrupt business operations. Demographic shifts will crowd the retirement market, create a resounding vacuum in leadership jobs, and strain an already struggling health care system. During all these and many more challenges, most corporations will transition virtually all top leadership positions. If leadership transition is not part of your strategy, it might end up being part of your epitaph.

“What exactly is corruption?” was the leader’s uncomfortable question that began the meeting. Although it took a large pry bar to get the conversation moving at first, the presiding leader gently kept the input focused on “purely definition” at first. At the onset, the comments around the room included almost poetic things such as “violation of virtue,” “impairment of integrity,” “corrosion of character,” “perpetration of moral principle,” “ethical decay or decomposition,” “bribery – the tangible payoff for wrong,” and “departure from the good and the right.”

After the group warmed up to the coldness of the topic, they were encouraged to be more personal with the definition, as if it were going to be applied directly to the organization they led and to themselves, the leaders within the organization. The comments then included things such as “the decline of ethical strength,” “the slow spoiling of truth,” “the quiet departure from the originally pure,” “the slow creep away from the initially correct,” “secret festering scandals,” “extortion of blind obedience,” and “self-protective mismanagement.”

I was asked to observe the meeting and periodically offer observations, comments, and advice on the quality of their group processes and interactions. I do this often, and I was generally quite impressed with the honesty and trust I had observed so far, but I noted a large pause and significant discomfort in the room when someone who had been mostly quiet so far said, “corruption is the generally acceptable use of extortion-like power by the elite few seeking to profit at the expense of the unknowing whole.” Since the elite few were the ones in the room, the following stillness was memorably penetrating. After a long silence, and just as a few group members started to get up, I stated my first verbal observation: “I think we have found both the start of a meaningful conversation and the definition of corruption that is most piercingly relevant for this group.”

The group regained composure rather quickly and began a solemn and difficult discussion of the evil in which they had chosen to be entangled, the cancerous corruption both they and society had previously deemed acceptable. Unmasking corruption as an outsider or as a newly positioned leader is heroic and commonplace, although it is often the disguise for disingenuous self-aggrandizement and a host of hidden agendas. However, dealing with our own acceptable corruption is another matter entirely; facing our own evil without flinching is the hallmark of adept personal and organizational transformation.

Leaders can never be perfect regardless of our illogical wishes and expectations, but it is both possible and logical for leaders to know and deal with their dark side appropriately. It is right for leaders to name and heal their own evil; as the ancient proverb states, “Physician heal thyself.” For this self-attentiveness, Flawless leaders gain incremental respect, loyalty, and admiration from followers. Flawless leaders know that being appropriately authentic is the exposure of their own hypocrisy. Consider Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” where the Emperor walks around naked displaying his “new” clothes while everyone around him colludes in agreement with his self-deception. Everyone around the Emperor already knew of his hypocrisy, as it is with leaders. Flawless leaders discuss and deal with their own hypocrisy. Only then can we authentically and honorably deal with the evil in our own organizations.

I was partnering with Paul, a CEO of a large company that was going through significant change. Paul said he wanted help in getting every leader in the organization engaged in the change and becoming a valuable partner in creating the necessary details associated with imbedding this change deep within the massive global organization. We designed a series of work meetings over several years that were vital and dynamic interchanges centered on both a unifying and resonating purpose and on the full engagement of all leaders. The top six hundred leaders in the organization worked together across all hierarchical and organizational boundaries and truly created a rare competitive advantage with high leveragability within their industry. Paul impressed everyone at the series of meetings as an excellent speaker, a master facilitator, a trusted leader, a polished professional, a brilliant strategist, and a management guru. The organization was now positioned well to take advantage of several significant and profitable growth opportunities that no other company in their industry would be able to copy for at least a few years. It would have been wonderful if the story ended here.

Paul then started a new initiative to downsize the leadership staff in his organization and remove many of the “redundant” leaders that had, incidentally, toiled with him to create the advantages he now enjoyed. He did this to meet a special secret bonus incentive that he alone enjoyed as part of his compensation package. Paul was facing a scary fact he had avoided for a long time: he was not at all grounded in who he was. He was not a leader who lived out the values he preached during all those inspirational meetings he had hosted over the last several years. He was actually somewhat deceitful, self-serving, disloyal, and in his own words, corrupt. He immediately lost the trust and loyalty of the remaining leaders, and the best of them took offers from other companies shortly thereafter. Paul’s window to take advantage of his extraordinary positioning within his industry quickly closed around his wily methods and glossy techniques. Paul harmed his organization and those within it by hoarding power and valuing self-protection over principles and purpose.

Let’s face facts. We are all, at least a little, like Paul: deceitful, self-serving, and disloyal to varying degrees and depending on the situation. We are all human. As leaders, we don’t like to admit it or face it all that often, but we are human. Paul was so competent, so perfect, so god-like, that he didn’t face the fact that he was merely human, and that he had a dark side that needed to be navigated in order to lead effectively. Paul had been a “good-boy” for so long that he had over identified with that role, causing him to literally not know himself or even be aware of who he really was. He ignored his dark side; he refused to admit it was there. He was a ship captain who ignored the bad-weather reports and obliviously careened into the perfect storm. Knowing your dark side, facing it, becoming familiar with it, accepting it, and being vulnerable enough to discuss it appropriately takes its power away and enables you to navigate its unavoidable storms.

Our religious leaders, our esteemed paragons of virtue, while attempting to lead us into the intimate worship of the Almighty, too often trip up struggling with illogical wishes to be God. To “follow” is to engage, to move toward, to pursue with commitment. To “worship” is to regard with great admiration and devotion, to honor, to revere. In short, to worship is to “honor;” to follow is to “engage.” These two words have powerful implications for leaders, religious or otherwise, and it’s uncannily easy for leaders to confuse these two words. Leadership is simply the result of following. If people follow you, you are leading, regardless of whether you have a leadership position or appointment. Leadership does not respect titles. On the other hand, if people worship you, you become nothing more than another useless deity with a small “d.” The adoration you receive may feel great, but in its intoxication you are deluded into weakness, poor productivity and demise. Leaders’ choices create paths toward others’ following or worshipping. Inspiring followers is the path to productivity; engendering worshippers is the route to disengaged adoration.

I got a call from Nick while I was about to travel home from some client work. I had some time before my flight, so we met for a quick lunch. Nick was the senior pastor of a mega church in one of the largest cities in the southern United States. His multimillion-dollar organization had thrived for years and people just adored him, but Nick was frustrated by the lack of ownership and engagement of the people in his church. It seemed to him that everyone was content with coming to hear him speak and “tipping” him by throwing some money in the collection plate. However, if he really wanted to get anything meaningful done in his organization, he had to hire staff to accomplish it. He used the words “confined” and “trapped” to describe how he felt when trying to get the thousands of people that attended his church to actually collaborate together to do something good in the world.

As I listened to Nick explain his situation and his feelings, it became clear to me that he had created the world in which he lived. He was no victim; he was the architect. He was also gripping tightly to his viewpoint of reality. He had not often embraced disagreement and divergent points of view, even on minor issues. He liked control; he had strong desires to be liked and feel important. When I asked about the things he feared most, rejection was the first thing to come out of his mouth. When I asked him to describe his ultimate definition of love, he talked about giving honor, respect and admiration to the one being loved. Within a few minutes, it was clear: Nick was a paragon locked in a paradox. He was addicted to receiving the glory, honor and power. While he was intending to direct all those sentiments toward God, he somehow unconsciously grabbed a bunch of it for himself. A deep sadness enveloped Nick as I explained that he had been manipulating his entire congregation to revere him as a god without realizing the disenchanting side effect of disengagement. While Nick thought he was pointing people to God, he was mostly pointing them to himself. Nick is an all too poignant example of religious leader paragons stuck in the paradox of confusing worshipping with following.

The reality is that most of us have deep unmet needs and desires for love and acceptance. As a human living with other humans, it usually just works out that way. Many leaders attain leadership positions to fill their deep needs to be regarded in a loving and accepting way, or at least in an honorable way; and, herein the problem begins. These unmet needs really get in the way when influencing people to actually engage, or follow. Thus, the current milieu is that many leaders are unconsciously striving for others to worship them instead of follow them. Compounding this, countless followers enable these leaders because they are looking for surrogate parents or gods they deem worthy to both worship and blame. All too often leaders are too willing to take all the blame in order to receive the elixir of adulation, and followers are all too willing to trade meaningful contribution in order to have someone to blame when things go wrong.

Submitting to the seductions of worship is a weak attempt to fill our unconscious dark-side voids of acceptance, significance, and competence. To flawlessly lead, leaders must first expose, discuss, and navigate their needs to be worshipped, and then embrace their own irrelevance in service of purpose. Once they address and work through these issues, they can powerfully engage their followers in the business of following, and guide followers back to the uncomfortably productive place of personal and mutual accountability. Flawless leadership requires great confidence and optimism, yet it also requires profound humility; humility that respects and honors all human life as equal. When leaders violate this sacred principle by accepting worship as a defense against maturely resolving vacuums of emotional health, they dehumanize others and themselves in the process.

Productivity in the worshipping organization dwindles for two reasons. First, that personal and mutual accountability has been exchanged for obeisance to the leaders, a trade that just naturally sucks the initiative and intensity out of completing meaningful work in a cooperative fashion. The second reason is the time displacement factor: there are only twenty-four hours in every day, and the total time and effort of collectively and collaboratively serving a worthy purpose is diminished by all that manipulative regarding and honoring of the leader.

Flawless leaders resolve to appropriately reject and redirect the unhealthy admiration of others because they serve a worthy purpose from a place of emotional wholeness. The emotionally weak and principally undisciplined accept, encourage, and sometimes force worship. The flawlessly strong, through connection to and understanding of their vulnerabilities, redirect the energies of undue admiration into cooperation, accountability, engagement and service. A flawless leader’s foundational strength is emotional health and maturity. Flawless leaders are simply self-healed flawed leaders, leaders who learned to heal from the wounds of past rejections, broken relationships, dishonorable betrayals, and voids of self-respect. To respect and honor all human life as equal is healthy; to worship one life as if it is above others is eventually destructive.

When is worship most seductive for you? What voids and vacuums does worship promise to fill for you? What shifts must occur to eliminate others worship of you and enhance their following?

Consumerism, greed and generic gluttony have collided to create the previous age of conspicuous consumption. It is this transaction and accumulation oriented age of the deal that has now birthed the age of the empty suit. The passionate pursuit of new experiences and greater ownership has created societies stuffed full of emptiness, and leaders unknown to and unaware of themselves. Leaders have only become as good as the deal they can strike, the payoff they receive. Every action is made in anticipation of a return. It is as if leaders are investing their lives in a cosmic vending machine in the hopes of receiving good but unarticulated benefits as compensation. The first of many problems in this scenario is that leaders stop doing things from a sense of identity or principle and begin to form a reality that is based on quid pro quo. In a this-for-that culture, I will give you this when I know what that is. Immersed in this culture, when that which leaders will receive in return is unclear, leaders tend not to act. So, short-term mindsets become the standard. These mindsets also contribute to the rampant fear-based paradigm of risk avoidance. This risk aversion culminates in the fear to create raw innovation – so organizations now create new applications and add-on products, and no one is creating new industries, inventions and products that don’t already easily fit into an existing category. And we wonder why the global economy is in ruin?

The reward for becoming the proud owner of all that can be bought is deep despair, diminishing returns, and emptiness. The way out is to become solid in your own identity and principles, to know what purpose is worthy of your complete surrender, to know what you will do in this world with no promise of a return. Flawless leaders live courageously and make decisions based in the solidness of their own identity and principles, from a sense of strength and rightness, an unfortunately rare thing in these parts. Flawless leaders are the proud owners of all that cannot be bought.

What purpose is worthy of your surrender? What will you do in this life with no promise of a return?

Flawless leaders radically honor human freedom. Freedom is uniquely human, and humans are uniquely free. The dehumanizing effects of manipulation are the symptoms and aftershocks of the human race’s most debilitating disease: slavery. It is dehumanizing to be an instrument of a will other than your own. Leaders who insidiously use “human resources” for self-serving means are deceptive tyrants enlisting slaves. Human beings are not means to an end; they are ends in and of themselves. The age of the oppressive domineering leader might never end. The sex appeal of suppression and the pain of equality might be too strong for the healing art of contribution to overcome. But there will always be lighthouses shining in the dark storms: flawless leaders. Flawless leaders honor the free will of others; they do not cover coercion in accountability schemes and regulatory controls. Flawless leaders honor with their lives the adage “You cannot get a flower to grow by pulling on it.”

Who are you using as if they were means to an end? On what flowers are you pulling, expecting them to grow? What tyranny are you disguising as leadership?

Authentic humility is the bedrock essence of a flawless leader. However strenuously we strive for relevance, we are rarely really relevant. It is high time leaders not only accept this but also embrace it. Embracing irrelevance is a holy reverence for the equality of all humans. Most leaders are constantly in search of their own relevance and thus are chained to illogical and unarticulated fantasies of being God. They think they should lead because they are “the best choice for the job,” they have been “appointed.” When we embody the paradigm of constant relevance we repel followers because they sense our need to be dominant, however covert our condescension may be. Our past accomplishments and accolades shallowly support our self-pertinence. Leading and following are intensely “present-time” sensitive. Followers disregard past track records once they are with you in the moment’s current affliction. In our present anxiety, our past triumphs melt feverishly into triviality. Flawless leaders reject continuous relevance because they have chosen a lifelong submission to authentic service and meaningful purpose.

With which of your accomplishments do you over-identify? What is it like for others attempting to relate with you and your ego? What purpose is worthy of your surrender?

To fully engage followers a leader must be fully whole. Unfortunately, we too often and unknowingly choose to fragment our lives, meticulously shattering our wholeness into secret collections of sharp chards. We often speak as though we are comprised of several liquid compounds, which cannot be combined, like salad dressing of oil and water and vinegar. “This is my personal life”, “this is my work life”, “this is my spiritual life”, “this is my family life”, “this is my public life”, “and this is my private life”. This is not organization; this is separation. To separate something out from the whole is to call it “sacred.” Leaders often fail by sacrilegiously creating sacred splinters from their inherent wholeness. We incrementally destruct our lives through sacredness. This habit of segregation and compartmentalization is rampant and pervasive in our societies. Some societies pride themselves on the separation of church and state while others feel honorable in the separation of a specific day or time as sacred and holy. But when we choose separation within one life, we usually cause harm.

When we separate out portions of our lives, we give away our rightful authority and make unconscious assumptions that control us. For instance, we assume that we are in charge of our personal life; our dark-side is in charge of our private life; either the boss, the board, the customer, the profits, or the shareholder is in charge of our work life; the family’s needs take over in our family life; and if we have a spiritual life than maybe God can have a say in that. By portioning out our lives we dilute our power as we defend against unity. It is no wonder so many feel less than whole.

Through our deconstructions we diminish. By dissection and separation, we relinquish wholeness, strength, freedom, and choice. In battle, effective strategists bisect their opponent’s forces, fragmenting their potential capacity. Weakness is the natural side effect of separation and isolation. Some battles are won just by severing the opponent’s ability to communicate between separated battalions. Similarly, through self-fragmentation we self-weaken. Through self-severing we self-diminish. Through our sacred separations we become our own silent saboteur; we embody our own worst enemy. We sacrifice fully living our wholeness. We dishonor others and ourselves by living less-than-whole and less-than-fully-present. We choose the slow suicide of self-shrinking. We choose to slice out a portion of life as sacred and unintentionally commit sacrilege. This pervasive sacrilege creates scattered splinters from what was a full oak of a life.

The immoveable reality is that we all have but one life and every minute occurs on holy ground. Every second is sacred; every moment a miracle. The awe and wonder that a unified, aligned life brings is wholly sacred and defies diminishment. Flawless leaders have no room for diminishing any life. For when one life is diminished, we are all diminished. Flawless leaders speak health into an ill and fractioned world by creating wholeness in their own lives: through living both contentment and submission to unique purpose. In what ways are you less than whole?