The most important aspect of a leader is his (or her) legacy. As we are all human beings, we will all die someday, and there will come a point where we can no longer act and must await the judgment of God and the verdict of history for our deeds and words while we were on this earth. The lasting impact of our lives and actions will be based on the succession we leave behind us. A good legacy means our actions continue to inspire others to godliness and to set a good example for others to follow. A bad legacy means that our name becomes used to support evil and sets a bad example for others to follow.

Succession is the classic problem of monarchies, but it is a serious problem no matter the political system of an organization or nation. Whenever a leader dies or is voted out or overthrown, a new leader takes the reins of authority. For a good leader’s example to live on after his (or her) death to inspire others, there must be others who internalize that good example so thoroughly that they become models of the example able to teach others. And so long as that example is internalized and then spread to others, the legacy remains. Once the good deeds and good example are forgotten, or once the leader’s name and reputation merely become a slogan without any real significance except as rhetoric, then the leader’s legacy is no more, only an empty symbol in a world full of them.

Succession is a serious issue. In a monarchy, the succession is usually limited to a king’s sons, who presumably have been groomed from childhood with an education in how to behave as a monarch. Whether a young prince chooses to learn this example or not is his choice. Many princes become spoiled by their wealth and power and see themselves as the lords over the people rather than their servants. Other princes become powerless tools of the kingmakers behind the throne and are unable to set examples of strong leadership at all. There are so many ways that a legacy can go wrong.

This is why leaders always have an apprentice period. Joseph, for example, knew he was going to be a leader as a cocky and privileged 17 year old young man, and then had to suffer being sold into slavery by his own brothers (which sounds like something my family would do) and then jailed unjustly because he refused to commit adultery with his master’s immoral wife. It was only after 13 years of humbling servitude and imprisonment that he was capable of becoming the godly (and humble) leader that God intended. Moses was raised as a prince of Egypt, and then spent 40 years raising animals in the lonely desert before God called him to fulfill his destiny as leader of Israel. Joshua was Moses’ assistant for 40 years in the Wilderness before getting his opportunity to lead. David spent most of his young adulthood being chased around the Judean wilderness by a jealous King Saul. And so on and so on.

These leaders were hand-picked by God to do great works, and the training included a lot of very unpleasant years of having the pride and arrogance that are easy weaknesses for leaders who have never known great adversity crushed out through hardship and trials. To pass on a legacy of leadership to the next generation is extremely difficult, because most second-generation (to say nothing of third-generation) leaders are not in a position to learn through adversity. Those that are are blessed through their trials, as paradoxical as that may sound, in that their trials help prevent them from having the arrogant naivete of a Rehoboam (to give but one example).

And ultimately, the value of what we do in our lifetime is determined by what remains of it after we are gone. Does it become an idolatrous form of ancestor worship where people revere a name even after they have totally forgotten what the revered man said and never bothered to follow the example of how he lived? Does it become a mere political slogan to attract people who wish to live in the nostalgia of an imagined past rather than to deal with the difficult and urgent problems of the here and now, as well as those problems that loom very close on the near horizon? To the extent that honoring a past leader becomes an exercise in trying to erase unpleasant historical events and to live in a world of denial, and to use someone’s name as a club or as a rhetorical tool to gain the support of misguided people to relive past glories than to seek present and future ones, then such a legacy can only be described as a pitiful failure.

Such a legacy is a problem whether one is in a monarchy, a republic, whether one is dealing with a family or a company. Leadership requires a lot of time and good examples to follow. There is no shortage of good models of leadership (I spent a couple years of my life studying them formally, besides my own informal reading). What we are lacking is reliable ways of training godly leaders through good examples. If we had more examples, we would need fewer theories, and have better results. Our weakness is in transmitting knowledge through example, because intellectual knowledge without practice is worse than useless. We can only be successful leaders when our good example becomes a model for many long after we are gone, so that even if our name is forgotten our example and legacy still lives in the behavior of others.