Tag Archives: Leadership. Culture

Something is Out of Whack

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Why don’t we really take care of our people?

Yesterday, I posted a Ken Blanchard video about the leadership approach at Southwest Airlines.  They are tremendously successful in an industry that is notorious for poor performance  – one key aspect is their deep care for their employees.  Jim Collins in his his book Good to Great talks about the importance of your people and how the great companies truly care for their staff.  Monday night, I talked with my class about a book by a CEO of a $2.5 billion company with 55,000 employees worldwide whose motto is “employees first, customers second” and has seen remarkable growth with that approach.  Story after story of the truly great organizations center around the care of the people that make up that organization.

Yet, it is sad to say, that in many of our churches and ministries, there is significantly less care and love for the staff than there is in these “secular” for-profit companies.  Why is it sometimes safer to be an employee of a large corporation where they do a better job of caring for their people than it is to serve at your local church or ministry? It seems a college football coach has greater job security than the senior pastor of a local church.

Sometimes it appears that the forward thinking organizations have adopted Biblical models of leadership and thriving while so many churches and ministries are mired in the some of the old discredited “business thinking” models of past decades.  Does that seem a little out of whack to you?

Somehow, we need to recapture the biblical model of leadership and care for our staffs within churches and ministries and once again begin setting the standard for how the rest of the world needs to lead and care for their employees.

Just a thought.

BG

Success by Failure

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“Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”
– Winston Churchill

Succeed by failing?  Does that sound a little odd to you?  It did to me, even though I have even taught the concept – just not in those words.

Jeffrey Stibel who is Chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. and author of Wired for Thought has an article in the Harvard Business Review blog where he talks about how important it is within their company to advance through failure.  Advance through failure – again a little hard to swallow?  Doesn’t the TQM mentality demand we get it right every time?

Actually, Mr. Stibel talks about how you learn and grow through failure.  Also, because we fear failure, fear embarrassment ( a pride issue), we don’t want to upset the boss and etc. we don’t stretch, we don’t fully innovate, we hold back and play it safe.  When we hold back due to failure, we are not giving it our all, we are not fully engaging our creativity in our endeavors.  We are missing out on the wonderful things we could be doing and contributing due to fear.

Mr. Stibel actually requires failure in his company.  Interesting concept.  Why don’t you go out and fully engage in whatever God has called you to do wholeheartedly and without fear of failure.  Fall on you face, then pick yourself up and dust yourself off and then learn from what happened and get better and truly make a difference!

BG