Christian Leadership is Different

 

Supervisors who are Jerks.

The high cost of poor leadership has provoked quite a lot of attention in our business world and there are many good writers who have written many good articles on the subject. The following one is a good example that does a good job of highlighting the problem and pointing to a solution. Many Church and para-Church boards are tempted to think that this is the answer to all of our Church leadership problems, but I will be bold enough to suggest another solution.

It is evident that Mr. McKinney understands the basic problem, that leaders, supervisors, managers are human, and that their workers are human, but he then disregards this cause and focuses on the results that it produces.  He even quotes this conclusion from Christian writers of the past and from what every Bible scholar should know about the doctrine of humanity, that in the beginning God made man perfect but they have sought out many inventions as the man of wisdom told us in

Ecclesiastes 7:29 Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions. 

Inventions that deny their accountability to God their maker.

Now this represents a real problem for worldly modern educators, for psychiatrists, social workers, and the elite. Every one of their ideas and solutions treats only the results of the problem instead of the problem. None of their ideas or solutions changes the person who has the real problem here. Of course this problem is also theirs and they make it by leaving God out of the picture, He being the One, the only One who can change a fallen man back into His own image of upright perfection.

But Christianity, God, the Bible does have the answer. And so should we. If we take our way of thinking from the world we will have no more answers than they but Paul argued that God even in His foolishness is wiser than all the wisdom of all the wise of the whole world. Worldly wisdom can see the result of the problem but will not admit that the cause is the same as their own self imposed chosen blindness toward God.

For a moment let us digress and assume that a scientist claims that he can prove that the city of Ottawa is not in Canada, and that he can do this using the scientific method. We who know better might think him out of his head but then he proceeds to present his claim. The scientific method he informs us is to propose a hypothesis, a statement to falsify, and then to define the scope of the universe that holds the only data to be considered. In other words the question and where to find the answer.

The statement then to be debated, to be proved is “Ottawa is a city in Canada” after which he delivers us the restricted “universe of data”, a map of Poland in Eastern Europe in which we are to find the correct response to the hypothesis that Ottawa is in Canada. We could never find it neither could we prove that the hypothesis is true, therefore that test confirms that Ottawa is not in Canada.

Not so fast. It proves nothing of the sort, all it does prove, and it does prove this, is that Ottawa is not in Poland which we were told is the whole universe. But you say this is silly, stupid, outrageous. And yet it is scientific and it does disprove the proposed statement. What is wrong is the limitation of the data to that which will prove or disprove only what the designer of the test wanted.  In science this is called a closed system. Closed to other possibilities. And so we see that when we begin by closing out the Eternal we can come up with wrong conclusions.

Yes, this may be all that a non-Christian business owner or manager can do when he looks at his leadership problems, but it is not all that we can or should do as Christians. We do NOT operate in a system that closes out God, unless we want none of His blessings, and God does have a remedy for overcoming the self seeking problems of leaders, even Christian leaders. Obedience to what He has told us. Christian leadership is more than just leadership.

The following is the article that I am referring to:
http://affluentinvestor.com/2017/08/business-like-north-korean-prison-camp-can/

How Your Business Is Like a North Korean Prison Camp and What You Can Do About It

Roger McKinney  On August 30, 2017
Research has shown that high turnover rates at companies are largely due to supervisors who are jerks. Why should that matter to business people? One reason it should be important is because the expenses of attracting, hiring and training good workers are much higher than business people recognize and can mean the difference between success and failure. As a Forbes article said,

    …people don’t leave jobs, they leave managers, and a survey by B2B marketplace Approved Index confirms that this adage is true. In its survey of 1,374 employees in the U.K., nearly half (42%) of them have left a job because of a bad boss and almost a third of them feel their current boss is a bad manager. When asked why they disliked their managers, 41% cited a lack of recognition, while 40% said they felt overworked.

One of the reasons employees feel overlooked, overworked and underappreciated is because supervisors focus on pleasing the manager above them, not on developing a well-functioning team below them. That is human nature.

Another reason businesses should be concerned about poor supervisors is that bad supervisors kill morale. Employees with low morale perform far below their capacity. In other words, the company is getting far less for the wages they pay than they could. One of the best business books, How Full is Your Bucket?, is not about business. It’s about the origins of the field of positive psychology. One of the authors, Donald O. Clifton, studied why US prisoners of war died at a much higher rate in North Korean camps than in POW camps during World War II. In his research he discovered that the North Koreans kept US prisoners isolated, gave them letter from home with only discouraging news, and made them confess their “sins” daily. Healthy prisoners became so depressed that many pulled their blankets over their heads at night and died.

The author realized that for people to perform well at any assignment they must feel good about themselves and their work. He created the field of positive psychology to promote the idea. The great psychiatrist Viktor Frankl also insisted that people must feel confident, relaxed and focused in order to perform well in art, sports or business. Most workplaces are like the North Korean prisoner of war camps. Subordinates hear nothing from their supervisors except criticisms.

The natural response to the problem of bad supervisors by most writers and human resources managers is more training. But it is not a knowledge problem; it is an attitude problem. Knowledge problems are easy to fix with training. Attitude problems take years of counseling or a disaster in one’s life that destroys one’s arrogance.

Most of us have known people who we thought were very nice and easy going people only to find out that the workers under them, or their wives and children, considered them monsters. They live a Jekyll and Hyde existence. That’s because few people can handle even the small amount of power that comes with supervising others. It overwhelms them. Saint Augustine wrote that all people are consumed with the lust for power and when set free it turns nice people into ogres. Lord Acton wrote that power corrupts, and we can see that in action at work in the overbearing attitudes of supervisors toward the employees suffering under them.

If more training isn’t the answer, what is? The solution is to get rid of supervisors and restructure the company in teams. Information on team structured businesses can be found on web sites and in books on organizational behavior. One web site wrote that

    By eliminating layers of management, employees get to make decisions without getting multiple approvals. This streamlines processes and lowers administrative costs. Additionally, employees feel empowered and morale increases. Because people on the team work toward the same goal, they focus on the task at hand rather than petty interdepartmental conflicts requiring management intervention. Using a team-based structure, employees typically solve problems themselves without having to consult superiors, which shortens the amount of time required to complete activities.

A team based structure doesn’t solve all problems. In fact, it can create problems, as many web sites explain. But the problems the structure creates tend to be knowledge based and so can be solved with training. Team based structures solve the attitude problem, the weakness in human nature that power corrupts.
Originally published on ABCT Investing.
Roger McKinney