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The Journey Begins: Choosing the Narrow Road
Scripture makes it clear that God calls Christian leaders to a higher standard, both in what we say and do. As a result, Christian leaders who consistently live out their faith at work look very different from other leaders.
Work is our primary means of loving our neighbors, serving our communities, and developing others—and being developed ourselves.
Effective conflict resolution yields greater influence. Fear is a leadership barrier that must be overcome. Relationships are the currency of work. Unity must be fought for and protected. Generosity is the best investment in any relationship. Mentorship and discipleship are the goals of biblical leadership.
Being an effective, healthy leader is a lifelong process, not a destination.
Narrow-path options are offered to us every day, but they take more time, more courage, and require longer-term thinking.
Leaders reproduce what they model. The way we speak, serve, handle conflict, overcome fear, build relationships, pursue unity, give generously, pour into the lives of others…how we lead is closely monitored and emulated by those on our teams.
Although the word disciple doesn’t often appear in business books, it’s absolutely an essential business word. A disciple is someone who is a learner, someone who chooses to follow and emulate a teacher.
God wants to grow you in order to use you and your business for His glory and for the good of His kingdom. In eternity and in the here and now. For many of us, work is the primary place where discipleship and transformation intersect—and that’s absolutely good news.
Unfortunately, few business leaders consciously live a life that fully integrates their faith and work, connecting Sunday to the rest of the week.
We are different leaders and husbands and parents and neighbors because on our best days we desperately depend on our daily relationship with Christ—what the Bible calls abiding—to live out these principles.
We cannot be better on our own. We need God. And just as businesses don’t “drift” into success, you don’t drift into spiritual growth. There is no magic bullet. It takes discipline and time.
The Leader: The Journey Begins Within
Your effectiveness as a leader hinges on the quality of your relationships. And as a Christian leader, the quality of your relationships correlates directly to what you believe.
Healthy organizations are characterized by team members who have high levels of trust and confidence in one another.
It is not what you do on your own that determines your effectiveness, but who you remain connected to. That’s what Jesus tells His disciples in John 15.
Leading yourself well is the essential prerequisite to leading a healthy organization. One of the more important steps you can take as a growing leader is to commit to formal, periodic reviews of how you lead. Formal, because casually asking others how you are doing as a leader won’t provide the best data. Periodic, because becoming a better leader is an ongoing journey.
The more honest you are with yourself, and the more willing you are to change, the more you can influence change in your organization.
Jim Collins’ well-known “levels of leadership,” summarized here by the Harvard Business Review, “One final, yet compelling, note on our findings about Level 5: Because Level 5 leaders have ambition not for themselves but for their companies, they routinely select superb successors.”
In God’s economy, whoever wants to be great must become a servant, and whoever wants to be honored must become a servant to all.
We Christian leaders, perhaps more than anyone else, must continually remind ourselves of the truth that it is God, not our culture, who provides the measurement of our greatness and success.
The fruit of the Spirit, Paul tells us in Galatians 5, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. We desire fruitful lives at work, at home, in our communities.
The faithful, consistent, difficult work you’re doing to follow Christ more fully—to become a better person and a better leader—is for a reason
When you, like Caleb, choose to follow God with “a long obedience in the same direction,” your efforts will bear fruit. Caleb chose the hill country because he chose to follow God with his whole heart.
Conflict Resolution: The Journey Toward Each Other
The quality of your relationships will largely determine your effectiveness as a leader. Individual instances of unresolved conflict will accumulate, fester, and ultimately ruin your team and organization.
Enduring, complete peace—called shalom in the Bible—is something we must pursue and work toward. Sometimes we confuse peace with the absence of conflict.
In a recent survey an astounding 43 percent of CEOs rated “conflict management skills” as the number one target for personal growth. Anecdotally, the report revealed that “most things that come to your desk only get there because there is a difficult decision to be made—which often has some level of conflict associated with it.”
Begin any discussion by seeking to understand another’s intent, which can often be misunderstood. Work on conflict by “looking in the mirror” and work on yourself first (that’s the advice I started this blog with, describing your most powerful leadership tool)
Proverbs 18:1 says, “Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire; he breaks out against all sound judgment.” When selecting an external advisor, find someone with a reputation for integrity, an appreciation for grace, and a willingness to tell the truth kindly and for the right reasons—which includes helping everyone involved become healthier, more effective leaders.
Think about how much conflict would end before it began if both parties stopped self-centered thinking and started looking for ways to humbly serve the other person. What do they want? What do they need? What are they hoping for? What do they fear?
The wrong way can be captured in an amusing—and fitting—acronym:
- Withdraw from the conflict.
- Escalate the situation.
- Negatively interpret the situation.
- Invalidate the other person.
In other words, don’t be a weenie about conflict. Dealing with conflict ineffectively (WENI) is based in our human need to be in control.
Five Practical Steps Toward Resolving Conflict
- Believe the best. It is easy for us to believe the best about ourselves, and that is exactly how we ought to treat others, especially when we are in conflict.
- Be direct and gracious. Confronting someone does not mean you must be confrontational. Confront literally means to come “face to face” with someone. If our motive is anything but love, we need to ask why we want to confront the other person. We’ve all heard of the Golden Rule, which comes from Matthew 7:12, part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.” There are times when we allow the so-called silver rule to guide us instead, which says, “Do not do to other people the things which you don’t want done to you.”
- Conflict resolution needs to happen privately and in person. If part of you wants the issue to become public, then that should raise a red flag. Perhaps what you really want isn’t a resolution, but to look better at the expense of the other person. Matthew 18:15 says, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother.”
- Conflict resolution requires planning and preparation. Plan what you are going to say. Practice what you are going to say. Try to consider the responses your words will elicit, and what you might say in return. As you plan and prepare, be guided by your relationship with Jesus and the truth of His Word. “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger” (Prov. 15:1).
- Forgive and rebuild trust. You need to own your part, and that requires asking for forgiveness. There is a distinction between asking for forgiveness and saying you are sorry. Saying you are sorry is insufficient, because all it recognizes is that you regret your behavior. Don’t say “sorry” because you think you are supposed to. Rather, seek reconciliation because you have seen the places where you are at fault, and you want to correct them and work for unity and peace.
Conflict resolution is not about winning or getting what you want. Rather, conflict resolution is about the greater good.
Whether in a church, a nonprofit, or a business, leaders may say that everything they are doing is about God’s plan, God’s purposes, and God’s timing. Sometimes, however, those same leaders will realize they have stopped walking with Jesus and instead have started working for Jesus.
It’s easy to forget that serving people, not accomplishing tasks, needs to drive our work.
When the Pony Express opened for business on April 3, 1860, it instantly transformed the way messages traveled across the continent. More than 150 stations stretched across the continent, roughly one every ten miles, and the riders raced their mounts from point to point at nearly top speed, stopping only to exchange their tired pony for a rested and healthy one.
And yet the riders understood that adequately caring and providing for their ponies was just as important as protecting the mail. Sick, lame, or dead ponies meant no Pony Express—and no mail. No matter how important a given task or goal is, it cannot become more important than people. When you invest in your people, you’ll have healthy relationships—and you’ll also get stuff done. Invest in tasks at the expense of people, however, and all you’ll have is a temporarily completed to-do list.
Conflict can actually unite team members, as long as it forces them to come together to refine their work, develop their character, iterate their ideas, improve their attitudes, and so on.
Fear: Overcoming the Wide Path
All leaders experience fear, but not all leaders are controlled by it.
Fear limits our development, both personally and professionally. When we cease to trust God fully, fear begins to permeate our lives. High achievers are taught “failure is not an option.”
Think of people God used significantly in the Bible, such as Peter, David, Paul, Abraham, Gideon, Mary, Paul, Isaiah, Elijah. All overcame significant fear or failure. Remember, God doesn’t expect us to succeed every time, but rather to be dependent on Him and trust Him.
Whenever we put more value in what others say or think about us than in what God says or knows about us, we allow fear to minimize our influence.
The antidote to fear is to trust God’s promises, even if we cannot see how they will be accomplished.
If fear is the reason we fail to act, love is the reason we choose to act.
Relationships: Journeying Together
Relationships do not happen by accident. You must build touch points with key relationships into your schedule.
Love what you do, love who you do it with, love who you come home to.
Love what you do. This is your craft and calling, not merely your “job.” Healthy workplace friendships make leaders stronger and more effective, team members happier and more fulfilled, and a company culture that is sustainable and generous. Writing for Harvard Business Review, Tamara Erickson points out that employees are often “less motivated by money than by the connection they feel at work.” The same study reveals that one of the primary characteristics of a great workplace is one where employees respond affirmatively to this statement: “I have a best friend at work.”
It is possible and worthwhile to develop a family-like culture in your organization. Your entire team can become better and more effective. The idea of “helping your friends” can influence your interactions with team members and clients, and ultimately lead to a healthier organization.
As Dwight D. Eisenhower noted, “A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.” Humor is often overlooked, but having fun together is essential to cultivating a great company culture.
As Mike Kerr notes in The Humor Advantage: Why Some Businesses Are Laughing All the Way to the Bank, “humor is a key ingredient in creative thinking. It helps people play with ideas, lower their internal critic, and see things in new ways.” A team that laughs together tends to build great relationships. Teams who genuinely like each other accomplish more together.
Consider the following common lies:
- “Hard-charging leaders are better for the company.” Healthy people are far more predictive of a company’s success. No matter how capable and hardworking a single leader is, a single leader can only do so much without unified buy-in from team members.
- “This organization matters more than any individual in it.” At the heart of that statement, however, is the lie that a business can be more important than a person. The truth is that no business is eternal, but every person is.
Your organization exists as a relay race, not an individual race. Your job is to hand the baton to others, via relationships, and then to cheer them on. Pass on the values and the truth that God has trusted you with. Someone will run the last leg at your organization, but it will likely not be you.
Unity: Better Together
Just as William Wilberforce’s successful crusade led to the end the Atlantic slave trade (and eventually slavery in Britain), organizations powered by unified people can accomplish astounding things. Wilberforce’s team was unified behind the why of their cause: that all human beings were God’s children and deserved to be treated well. Each member of the team then concentrated on the what, united toward the same goal.
As the African proverb goes, “To run fast, run alone; to run far, run together.”
Christian churches do not need to agree on literally everything, but they need to be of the same mind, maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
An organization cannot thrive and remain on mission if its leaders are isolated from one another.