To “follow” is to engage or imitate, or to move toward, or pursue with commitment. To “worship” is to regard with great admiration and devotion, respect, or honor, to revere as being divine. In short, to worship is to “regard”; to follow is to “engage”. Many leaders attain leadership positions to fill their need to be regarded with reverence. This really gets in their way when influencing people to actually engage, or follow. Many leaders are unconsciously striving for others to worship them instead of follow them. Compounding this, countless followers are looking for surrogate parents or gods they deem worthy to worship. The heart of leadership and followership lies in engagement, not worship. All too often leaders are willing to trade engagement in order to receive worship, and followers are all too willing to make that trade in order to have someone to blame when things go wrong. The sick cycle is broken when leaders authentically honor followers as equals, and facilitate followers fully owning their power and freedom.

Submitting to the seductions of worship fills 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. Once they face up to this, they can then engage their followers in the business of following, and guide followers back to the uncomfortable 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. Flawless leaders view others as equals, not subservient minions.

That which is meaningful and lasting begins with and is pervaded by worthy purpose. Leaders fail when they dishonor that timeless truth. Leaders choose failure when they choose not to subjugate themselves to a greater purpose. For leaders to avoid certain failure, they must do that which they strive so strenuously against: surrender. Leaders fail when they fail to surrender to sacred purpose, for surrender is more powerful than conquest. A leader’s surrender to a worthy purpose is embryonic, birthing possibility and significance. Conquest alone cannot bring significance; only contribution offers the possibility of significance. Conquest takes; contribution gives. Conquest diminishes; contribution enlarges. There is always a lavish generosity and a passionate collaboration within a leader’s powerful surrender to meaningful purpose. The deftly disturbing question with which we must wrestle is “what purpose is worthy of my surrender?”  As a leader, what purpose is most worthy of your surrender?