Can We Follow?

Posted on May 24, 2013 by Vaughan Granier

Everyone talks about the importance of leadership, and there is no doubt about its importance. But very few people seem to stop and think about the importance of followership.

There is an Afghani proverb which makes me chuckle, but it is so true: “If you think you are a leader, and you look behind you and there is no-one following you, then you are just going for a walk in the park” It is interesting that what makes a leader so impactful, seems to be the inertia created by people who believe in their vision and are willing to align themselves with it and put their effort into bringing it to fruition.

The other trend I see is that when you read stories about great leaders, there was usually (not always, but usually) a season in their lives where they were a follower. And, significantly, the trend is that they were a good follower! (Entrepreneurs not necessarily included in this…) It seems to me that a key skill in being part of a community, whether that is a work community, a social community, a spiritual community or a sports community, is the ability to play on another’s team and to support the achievement of a vision and a goal that we did not create.

Its not about getting out of the way, about simply not being an obstacle. The key is to become an active player, an energiser, a comrade, a lever, a encourager, a co-labourer. Anyone can simply avoid being an obstacle. That is an absolutely meaningless contribution to the work. The key of being a good follower is to add value unselfishly and passionately, to someone else’s work. If you can make it your own and buy into it wholeheartedly that is first prize. But there are many things where we can’t do that. We simply don’t feel that way about it. And yet, we are in that place, on that team, and we have to choose the role we will play.

Personally, I have always thought of myself as a better 2IC than a leader – and this has made me consider ways to enhance and support the leadership of the person who is leading me. In the words of another motivational chirp “If you can’t win the race, help the one ahead of you to break the record”

I never used to be any good at this. I still struggle sometimes, but I remember the moment when this realisation dawned on me and when I began to make a real effort to be a team player.

It was the week our new pastor arrived at the church I was at. I was self-employed and had made a decision every week to participate in the church project to collect food and deliver it to the needy communities that surrounded our church. We used to drive around and hand out packages of goodies to families we knew about. I was just finishing up when he called me on my mobile and said that he wanted to change how we did it, that instead of us going to the community, he wanted to work it so that those in need, made the short walk (500m) to the church premises to collect.

Man, I was upset. I had sort of adopted this programme as my own, and was getting a great deal of fulfilment out of it, meeting families etc. But in no small way, I was very upset at the fact that he was asking me to change how I did MY work. (And of course, it removed my high solo profile and made me part of the bigger team with a smaller profile – probably, if I am completely honest, the real reason for my attitude!)

Luckily, my non-team player instinct was slow off the mark, and my words to him were “Sure Alan, no problem”. I then had to resolve my own internal battle to realign my attitude with the commitment I had made, and managed to get it right after a few minutes. (I don’t think I ever told him this part of the story)

But at that point I realised that what he needed as a new leader was people he could trust and rely on not to question, not to judge, or withhold commitment to see if he measured up. He just needed team players. So I chose to become one.

All our leaders need this decision from us. No leader can afford to spend huge amounts of energy and time managing recalcitrant team players. Recalcitrance is a curse. It is put bluntly, a divisive, manipulation of team dynamics. If you are currently a follower, resolve to be a good one. Don’t try be the leader if it is not the season for it. Don’t get out of the way (that’s just abdicating and avoiding responsibility). Get in the boat, grab an oar, and row for all you are worth.

Not only does this prove that you are a good follower, and give you huge credibility and trust with those whose team you are on; it is, I believe, a core ingredient of being a good leader later on. If you should not ask of your team anything you are not willing to do yourself, then be an effective follower when you must be, so that you can be an effective leader when you should be.

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Getting over our Expectations

Posted on May 23, 2013 by Vaughan Granier

I sincerely recommend Gary Chapman’s book “The Five Love Languages”. While no one such book has all the answers, it is an incredible insight into how people work in relationships…

My wife and I read it, we loved it and we figured out that our primary love languages are “Words of Affirmation” (me) and “Acts of Service” (her). For both of us, our secondary love language – and there is always more than one – is “Quality Time”. At the time, I felt pretty good that we at least had something in common.

OK, so problem solved. I do good stuff, she says nice stuff, we walk hand in hand on the beach every now and then… all good right? Match made in Heaven? If only…

Turns out there is a bit of effort involved as well. The effort, I think, is in overcoming expectations. What are expectations? I will somewhat boldly offer a definition that seems to work for me… They are closely linked to hope, but not in a very good way… I think the simplest definition is that an expectation is “a hope, with a penalty”. A penalty for non delivery.

Expectations come from different places, some of them quite strange. Some part of them are from what we saw in our own home growing up, in the way things got done between our parents. Some are from our own dreams of marriage and partners. Some are a result of our brokenness, the damage we have sustained on our own paths. Abuse, disappointments, loneliness, fears, betrayals, etc… Basically our expectations, however flawed, create our personal view of how the world should be. Our definition of “Normal”, or “Right”, or “Acceptable”. This view of how the world should be becomes our safety zone, our standard by which we evaluate things.

Anyway, with that as a backdrop, back to the topic…

I have discovered that our instinct is to show love to our partner using our own love language and not the others. And the same in reverse. So we both instinctively express our love in a way that is not easily received by the other, as “love”. The very real problem with this, (and I am speaking here from my personal understanding only) is that we expend a great deal of energy doing what we believe is right to make sure our partner feels loved, and then we have EXPECTATIONS. Expectations that there will be joyful happiness and a satisfied glow. Expectations that love will be returned and bliss will prevail. Expectations that there will be peace in the home. (Us guys love the idea of peace in the home) And above all, we have expectations that we are building up this huge reserve of good will, where our failings can easily be forgiven because we have this huge positive emotional bank balance stored up.

But we don’t have this huge positive bank balance… In fact, because we have been using OUR love language and not HERS, the “love deposits” all got lost and our bank balance is in the red. WAAAY in the red. And our expectations, which govern our world, are not being met.

The problem with emotional bank balances being in the red, is that our resilience crumbles. Resilience is that incredible quality that we have as people, to absorb impacts, and return to our normal shape. It is the ability to rise above unmet expectations with benevolence and grace. When resilience is gone, the ability to be gracious and kind is compromised, and then a bitter cycle of being dominated by our unmet expectations starts.

“You don’t react like I believe you should. I lack resilience and I get frustrated. My
frustration shows, and you lack resilience, and respond unhappily from your own unmet expectations.”

All of a sudden we are not thinking about each other, and what the other person needs; we are thinking about ourselves, what we need, and why the world is being unfair to us.

“All this effort, unrewarded? How ungrateful can they actually be?”

But that’s not it, is it?

If we want grace and resilience from our partner, to create for them an abundant place of trust and goodwill, and provide a level of freedom and flexibility when we fail, we need to have made some “love deposits”. Deposits that actually ARRIVE in the other persons bank account. To guarantee that, they have to be in the receiver’s language, and not in our own.

Here is the problem, I think. I think we have a perception of the other love languages – a sense of how they feel to us when we use them. And I think we object or at least struggle to speak the other love language because of how that love language feels to us.

I speak Words of Affirmation, not Acts of Service. When I use the language of acts of service, I feel like a slave, weighed down by all the stuff that I have to do for you to make you happy. It’s all about do, do, do. The list never ends! And I am not anybody’s slave!

I speak Acts of Service, not Words of Affirmation. When I use the language of words of affirmation, I feel like I am being dishonest, words are just words. How can I say nice things and be kind when you are so inconsiderate to me all the time? It’s just hypocrisy! And I am not a hypocrite!

We have to get over the feeling of how speaking the other persons love language makes us feel. How we feel is not important. Well, not as important as laying that down and being more concerned about how THEY feel anyway.

Its hard work. It feels peculiar. It feels “not right” and as if we are being forced and manipulated into things that we don’t naturally do. Well, I think it’s time we got over that “me me me” perspective… Hey, who am I fooling? Its time I got over it.

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Forgiveness…

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Vaughan Granier

So, I’ve been thinking about forgiveness. Seems I am not so good at it…

The other day, my beautiful wife did something that I didn’t like. It hurt me and I let her know. Bless her, she gave it some thought and then came back to me and said sorry. Let’s just say my response to that was not my finest moment. I believe my words were along the lines of “I forgive you. But it’s a bit like a piece of paper – you crumple it up and then sorry is like trying to straighten it out… it might be flat, but it will never be smooth again”

Where does a guy get comments like that from? I still don’t know. So there I was watching her back as she left unhappily. And it hit me that I don’t know much about forgiveness. That’s not to say I haven’t read a stack on it, and even done it, most of the time. But there is a difference between forgiving someone when it suits you and forgiving them when it doesn’t – like when you still feel like enjoying the resentment and the feeling of revenge. If forgiveness was easy, it would mean nothing.

But forgiveness is not easy. It is a willing and disciplined denial of self – of our “right” to be right and – especially – a denial of our right to hold against someone else the fact that they are WRONG. A lack of forgiveness in this case, was nothing more than me giving in to the selfish desire to be “one-up” on someone else, whose actions have created an emotional debt between them and me. And forgiveness is the opposite – setting someone unconditionally free of their debt to me.

So there I was. Loving the feeling of being right. Pushing home my advantage. And for a few seconds, it felt good. But then it just felt horrible. Her apology was all she had to offer, an unconditional acceptance of responsibility for the pain caused, and a request for intimacy again.

I had forced her to take responsibility for the condition of MY heart, to take the blame for the fact that I chose to be hard hearted! But, honestly, since when is the condition of my heart the responsibility of someone else? This gentle, beautiful person has entrusted her heart into my hands. I was painting HER as the violent one, painting HER as the abuser of grace? The fact that my heart felt like a crumpled piece of paper was MY responsibility.

The question I had to ask, and answer for myself was “Do I want to stay like that?”  Unlike a piece of paper, a human heart can be smoothed and straightened. Redeemed, I believe, is the technical term…

So I had some choices to make! Thank goodness I went to her and asked her for forgiveness. And thank goodness she is better at it than me.

With unconditional forgiveness the forgiven person is absolved of a debt, but the forgiver’s heart is freed! Freed of an unnatural violence of spirit that cheapens every vulnerable moment after that. Freed of a cycle of abuse and re-abuse. How can a person truly be vulnerable; truly feel alive when they take pleasure in nurturing hurt, take pleasure in binding up other people in emotional debts and deny themselves the opportunity to grow in grace? Who on earth nurtures hurt and calls it a good thing?

Choosing to forgive is about choosing to live free. It’s about being gracious when you have to dig for it. And the deeper you dig, the more precious the gift of grace.

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To My Fathers

Posted on May 20, 2013 by Vaughan Granier

It has taken a while to get to this point, free from the daily grind and free to be able to step back and discern my own world with enough clarity to write.

In 2005 I married a beautiful lady and immediately emigrated to the Middle East, and after three years there, on to New Zealand, moving again to a second city in two years.

One of the most profound consequences of relocating between countries, as I have done twice over the past 5 years, is the shallowing out of spiritual relationships – most profoundly of all, the loss of intimacy with spiritual fathers.

I have spent the majority of my spiritual walk in the company of great men who it has been my privilege to know intimately, and to have walk alongside me as I have grown. In fact in many cases, it has been their companionship and counsel that has enabled me to choose growth over self-preservation, to mine for a vein of resilience and strength in times of hardship. Submitting to their counsel, bending my will to their advice and choosing a more mature path has been my “salvation” – often from the folly of my own immaturity. Without fail, the testimony of their guidance has been that they have already walked the path I am on, already scraped their knees and blistered their feet discovering what is wise and good, and the fruit is there to be seen in their own lives.

To my shame, I have not always followed their counsel, and have not always stewarded well the wisdom they showed me. There have been lessons learnt and then unlearnt, hardships revisited in times of weakness that have undone me and at times, sadly hurt my family alongside me.

At times though, as well, a spiritual father has betrayed himself, and through that betrayal, others, including myself, have at times been hurt. Although this is sad and deeply regretful, fatherhood is not only a call to invincible men – it is a call to ALL men – all who once were sons, and now must become fathers in order to establish Gods order in their own lives. Perfection is not required, in fact it would be counterproductive, I believe, to proper parenting. Rising above flaws and rising above the hurt and disappointment of the failings of others, is part of what makes us mature and strong. Only God is perfect, and only God is a perfect Father. We are required to be good fathers, not perfect fathers, and part of our mantle as good fathers, is demonstrating grace towards others’ flaws, and indeed towards ourselves when we fail.

The spiritual lesson is sometimes hard to grasp, but the lessons of biological fatherhood are impossible to ignore. Once I was a son, now I am a father, laying foundations in the heart of my own son. And my son, unable to comprehend his own foundations yet, will one day become a father to his own son, on the foundations I am laying down today.

Now I find myself far from these fathers of mine, and far from my own biological father, who although he came to know the Lord many years after I did, possesses a God-given wisdom and insight into my heart. Now it is up to me to “father” myself in a way, and to stand and be counted before God completely as an individual. I cannot take refuge in “the church” and all its collective doings and thinkings – as I write this we have yet to call another community our home. I cannot take refuge in the counsel of others – it is me alone before God, making choices and determining my path and the path of my family.

So, to my fathers in the faith, and to my own father, thank you for roads walked together, for the strength and the safety of relationships where admitting failure is OK, where humility and gentleness are prized over macho denial and posturing. Thank you for value based choices, for coaching and counselling and partnering. Thank you for leaving space to fail – and succeed – on my own, and for being there shouting encouragement and showing the way by example. Thank you for teaching me that we never walk alone. We are not built for it.

 

 

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