Fruitless?
In 2017, I got the leading to begin a consulting outfit called Spurstack and in less than 2 years, it has grown to become a vibrant creative agency that helps its clients to find innovative ways to boost their brand’s visibility, influence and profits using both digital and traditional marketing mechanisms.
As I continued to grow as a leader, I began to see the need for efficiency in my leadership style to get my team to accomplish the goals of the organization and boy, I realized that leadership is HARDWORK!
It takes a lot of mental and emotional work to get people aligned to a goal. Leadership is more tasking than a lot of people realize and truth be told, it sounds easier to give up on one’s team members, especially if the results got do not equate with the input you give.
I get really pissed off sometimes my team members do not carry out tasks assigned to them and one word keeps playing in my mind; SACK! (lol), but my hot-headedness is often cooled by the fact that some of my superiors gave me chances and didn’t give up on me, so I should not give up on my team members. One person who reminds me of this principle is Dami O. Mogaji who is literally my brother and Chief of Operations at Spurstack.
While studying the scriptures last week, I discovered a scripture that attests to this idea of paying it forward in giving people chances and a whole new light was brought to my understanding of what we really ascribe to as being unfruitful and I sincerely desire that you grasp the perspective I will be communicating.
Mark 11:12–24 “12–14 As they left Bethany the next day, he was hungry. Off in the distance he saw a fig tree in full leaf. He came up to it expecting to find something for breakfast, but found nothing but fig leaves. (It wasn’t yet the season for figs.) He addressed the tree: “No one is going to eat fruit from you again — ever!” And his disciples overheard him.”
The curse Jesus gave to the fig tree as opposed to popular knowledge is not because the tree is unfruitful, but rather it was a showcase of Jesus’s anger due to his human nature at the time. The tree was not a fruitless tree, rather it wasn’t in season at the time Jesus needed it for food.
And it got me thinking really hard…
Could it be that we curse people/situations when it is not yet their season for fruitfulness?
As a leader, we must understand that two factors consist of a highly productive team:
- Nature - This is the idea that we must allow time to have its due process for our team members to produce fruits.
- Nurture - This is the idea that we must place the right seed in the right environment for growth.
We must understand that both nature and nurture must play its critical roles for us to yield the fruitful nature of our team, and ourselves. We must accept that people are not as fruitless as we think, it might just be the nurturing has not yet allowed nature to have its due course for the fruit to find expression.
A classic example is giving birth to a child…
No matter how much you breastfeed that child (nurture), you need to allow time (nature) play its role if you really desire to see the effect of the growth process you’ve subjected the child to.
Our relationship with God can be likened to this idea of fruitfulness. With God our potential is His reality, that’s why He doesn’t judge us by our acts, but rather, by the content of our heart. God calls us who we are by who we can become, so he calls our future His past, but the frailty of our human flesh interprets our reality by sight, sound and feelings, hence we miss the joy of interpreting our existence, and that of others by our human yardstick.
I oblige you to shift your perspective and see beyond the fig tree that doesn’t have any fruit on it yet; it might just be the tree is not yet in a season for its fruitfulness.
