Monday Morning Meditation #30: Lead As Jesus Would

As I read about the successors to Solomon in the middle chapters of the book of I Kings, a clear pattern emerged: not only did these kings sin, but they also caused Israel to sin, much in the manner of Solomon sinning and causing Israel to sin at the end of his life, an act that caused God to be angry with him. With Solomon, it began (in earlier chapters of I Kings) with Solomon's taking of foreign wives against the commandment of God, a command with which God had sought to prevent Solomon being converted to foreign gods through the love of foreign wives and concubines.

Reading: I Kings 15: 33-34
Meditation: It may seem like a bit of a stretch to apply this history to modern leadership, but since modern leadership is the stuff of my every day life, I do see parallels and lessons nearly everywhere, including in I Kings. As was written about Baasa, he "did that which was evil in the sight of the LORD, and walked in the way of Jeroboam, and in his sin wherewith he made Israel to sin," so can it be that leaders of all sorts do evil in the sight of the Lord and in their sin make their followers to sin.

As a senior leader, it is easy to forget the influence that one has over the thinking and beliefs of one's subordinates. More than one display of anger, and some junior leaders will consider that heavy-handed approaches are permissible ways to manage. After all, it is easier to demand and to be angry when one's demands are not met than to share governance, listen patiently to someone you just know is wrong, and to compromise when you just know you are right. A lax interpretation of rules and regulations for self benefit tells both junior leaders and employees that cheating is okay if it is only "a little thing." Remembering that deeds speak louder than words can keep one from self-exemption in acting in accordance with moral and ethical standards especially when one thinks one is not being seen. It is much like with our children. If our words and deeds do not match, our children are more likely to emulate what we do than to follow the principles we hope to inculcate in them through education.

It is far easier than we think to lead those who follow us astray, whether that be astray from moral standards, scrupulous adherence to regulations, or willing obedience of God's commands and taskings. For that reason, I ask God to help me at the beginning of every day (often several times during the day as events unfold) to keep me not only from hurting anyone but also from leading anyone astray. I also ask that His love flow through me and splash onto those around me, that both my words and deeds honor Him, and that I set the kind of example for junior leaders and employees that He would have me set. (Of course, even with God's help, I do not always succeed for human emotions intervene from time to time, causing me to forget to refer the given situation back to God.)

In trying to lead as God would have me lead, I find two sources of leadership development helpful. One is the Bible. Just as the passage from I Kings can provide excellent guidance, so can much throughout the Bible -- those situations where leaders excelled and those where they failed. There is another book that I have found to be quite helpful and that I recommend to any leader: Jesus on Leadership (C. Gene Wilkes). For leaders who are not Christians, a very similar book is put out by the Greenleaf Center, The Case for Servant Leadership (Kent Keith, the author of the Paradoxical Commandments that Mother Theresa loved, otherwise known as "Do It Anyway"); while foot-washing is not mentioned in it, it does reflect principles that God taught to leaders and hoped and expected from them throughout the Bible.

These books help me a lot. God (and prayer) help me even more. And the rest I mess up all by myself -- and go running to God to help me fix it!

And that is far as I can go with you this Monday morning. I must retire to prayer to continue to ask for guidance every minute of every day as I interact with junior leaders and rank-and-file employees, to repent for those times that I have set a bad example, to thank God for so often setting straight with my employees what I do wrong, and to give praise for the way in which He leads me and my subordinate leaders to assist and support those who work for us, the ways in which he ensures that we do not harm any of them exceedingly much, and the way in which He has brought much spirituality into our workplace. After that, I will spend time in contemplation, my favorite part of the day, letting God take over the direction in which my relationship with Him moves.

I will now leave you to your prayer and contemplation, but first, I would like to bring to your attention a Monday morning prayer post that you might enjoy:

Fr. Austin Fleming, priest of the Archdiocese of Boston and pastor in Concord, Massachusetts, posts a prayer each Monday morning that he calls "Monday Morning Offering." I enjoy his prayers very much. I hope you also will find them inspirational. He has graciously given me permission to include a link to his blog on my Monday Morning Meditation posts.

For additional inspiration throughout the week, I would point out two sets of blogs: (1) the list of devotional blogs that follow the enumeration of Monday Morning Meditations on the sidebar of this blog and (2) my blogroll, where I am following a number of inspirational priests and writers about spiritual matters. I learn so very much from all these people. I highly recommend them to you.

Work and Spirituality

I read a post today on Catholic Spiritual Direction, a wonderful blog, listed on my blogroll in the right sidebar, to which I would refer anyone interested in very insightful posts on living a godly life in today's world. The question a reader had posed was "how do I deal with issues of advancement and self-promotion at work?" The answer was splendid, and I suggest you wander over there to read it.

I have often commented on work issues on 100th Lamb, and its predecessor blog, Blest Atheist. As with anything else, if one lets go and lets God, as the saying goes, work goes better. One does not need to tout one's accomplishments. God will ensure that they become known and noticed when that is important, and otherwise it is not important. Among the things that I have noticed when it comes to inviting God to take over my work life are the following (far from a full litany of benefits and blessings):

(1) Servant leaders become powerful leaders even though that is not their intention. Jesus showed us the way to be good servant leaders when he washed the feet of his disciples. I ask of those managers who work for me that they think constantly of when the feet of their employees need washing and to tend to that task with alacrity. Recently, a would-be leader who had run into some complications with his team members asked me as someone he considers his mentor how to handle the situation, and I told him he needed more humility, to throw his inflated ego in the trash because it was doing him no good, and forgive those who were creating problems for him. Oh, he found that hard, but he tried all of it. He even sent me a self-learning plan for developing humility, at which point I called him to my office to explain that one does not achieve humility; humility simply comes as a result of something that is so easy that is almost impossible for some people: always put others first. Others can say whether or not our actions are examples of our humility; we cannot begin to measure our own level of humility without being arrogant about it. A strange characteristic this humility! But so desirable!

(2) Power grows the more you give it away. This fact is one of the most counter-intuitive realities with which immature managers must cope. Most new managers want to hang onto power. They want their employees to defer to them, even sometimes to call them "sir" and "ma'am." They want overt respect. As a result, they get the titles, the overt behavior, and the public respect. What they don't get is the implicit respect that is not demanded but freely given, the love and support that comes with it, and the willingness to go the extra nine or ninety yards, as needed. I am tickled pink with employees who point out some shortcoming or inconsistency in my behavior. It means that we are working as a team, and teams are more powerful than individuals. I also notice that when both responsibility and authority are delegated to them, employees are willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish the tasking. In turn, if the manager asks them to do something that they would prefer not to do, they do it anyway, without grumbling, because of the bond between them. That is real power. The power that comes with position is multiplied a thousandfold when it is bestowed upon a manager not by his/her superiors but by his/her subordinates.

(3) Dealing with difficult people becomes easy, fun, and rewarding. I have said it often, and I truly mean it. I love difficult people. They are my greatest reward for being a manager. Watching a disaffected employee become a contributing team member produces one of the warmest fuzzies that any manager could ever want. I have very few difficult people among the 400 or so who work for me although four years ago when I began this position the division was considered riddled with difficult people. Now the division is called the "black hole" of our organization by the EEO office and by the Union because even people who used to practically live in those places, complaining about their supervisors and work conditions, no longer visit. They are happy contributors to their teams' work. Once a senior manager, who no longer works for me, asked how to deal with difficult people. I told him that the key was so simple that most managers won't use it: genuinely love them. He told me sorrowfully that he could not do that and not long after resigned. I replaced him with someone who could do that, and the 30 or more chronic complainers in that particular subdivision now appear in the corridors and at group meetings with big smiles. When the new manager first appeared, many stopped me in the hallway to thank me for the change in leadership. Now when they are unhappy about work conditions, they do not run to the Union or the EEO officials for help; they come to their supervisor.

(4) The workplace becomes a place of worship as well, a place where people are inexorably drawn and from which they do not wish to depart. Many a night I have chased people home with the words, "we work to live; we don't live to work." Actually, it is not the living to work that compels people to stay in the office after hours. It is the palpable presence of God in our workplace. Who would want to leave that? Once I had a manpower team from headquarters visit for a week for the purpose of determining staffing needs -- were we understaffed (yep), overstaffed (nope), or staffed just right (not that, either). After spending a week of visiting and talking to employees, during which the visitors had open access to everyone, thanks to a building schematic and names/titles of employees that I gave them with the invitation to go wherever they wanted whenever they wanted and talk to whomever they wanted. They did. The head of the visiting team came to my office at the end of the week, ostensibly, I thought, to talk to me about staffing levels. Instead, she told me that she wanted to talk about the atmosphere in the work place. "I have read about places like this," she said, "but I have never actually seen one -- where people love to come to work, support each other, and willingly remain to make sure that all tasks are completed and everything is ready for the next day. I wish I could work here." There is nothing to my credit in what she found. Rather, that is what happens when one lets God into the workplace.

(5) Moreover, once God is in the workplace, God does what God does best. Miracles happen. Chestnuts get pulled out of the fire by unseen hands. Cutting-edge and seemingly-impossible-because-no-one-has-ever-done-it-before work gets done with amazing ease. Where task and mission require, 48 hours of work finishes itself in eight hours. Pride in the accomplishment of the division and not in the accomplishments of individuals appears; employees give credit to each other, supervisors to employees, and employees to supervisors. People talk about God and even pray together -- in an institution where separation of Church and State is the norm, the expected, the required. The most amazing, though, are the real miracles. We have had several people literally on the brink of death who have reappeared in our midst. I have blogged before about some of them, among these being Jackie, who ended up with a blog clot in her lung and comatose after surgery but survived and will be returning to work, and Tareq, an Iraqi immigrant to the United States who suffered from cancer and heart failure and did eventually die but not before a miraculous post-surgery recovery that gave him an additional year at work and at home, a year he desperately needed to put his family matters straight and save the life of his son who had to be rescued from Iraq when he was personally targeted by insurgents. For all these people, we have had employees of several faiths praying together, our own little ecumenical world, where religious flavor and fervor come second and God and each other come first.

Well, this is not at all the post I had planned to write today, but the writing of it took on a life of its own, inspired by my reading of Fr. Todd's response to the questioner on Catholic Spiritual Direction, and here it now is. So, I shall post it. Tomorrow I will post what I had planned to put up today.

(Note: I know that the image is not entirely appropriate, but it is also not entirely inappropriate. I found it on the web and could not resist including it!)

Monday Morning Meditation #36: The Difficulties Leaders Have in Following God

After reading about all the kings who either did good but allowed the worship of Baal or did evil in the sight of the Lord, I began to wonder whether it is possible for royalty to be good/godly. While that may be a discussion for another place and time, with someone possessing greater knowledge of the topic than I, the failure after failure, especially with individuals who started out successfully, resonated with me. And so, I stopped my reading this week at the end of II Kings.

Reading: II Kings 7-25

Meditation: On a daily basis, I attempt to develop the leadership skills of a couple dozen middle and senior-level managers, using concepts associated with servant leadership. While one aspect of developing good leaders involves teaching them how to care about their people, understand those who work for them, and follow and apply organizational rules and regulations, there is another part that is rarely, if ever, discussed widely: God's role in our work.

Personally, I am fortunate. All the senior managers who report to me are believers and willing to discuss issues in spiritual terms, as well as pragmatic and legalistic ones.

The senior managers are not so fortunate. They must provide direction to a range of junior managers, some of whom are committed to personal ambitions that lead to self-centered/self-promoting decisions. Reaching down to these new managers, to help them understand that any decision that does not put God at its center is not likely to be the best possible decision in the long run, is difficult. First, organizational policies do not permit these kinds of discussions, the closest we can get being a discussion of servant leadership, which reflects principles from all three Abrahamic religions. Second, some junior managers, particularly those without any spiritual beliefs, do not want this kind of discussion; they do not want to think about what role God should play in their/our work. Separation of church and state can make leading godly lives as managers and leaders very difficult.

And then, admittedly, there are those times when I really do not want to listen. I know what God is telling me, but just for the moment, I really want to have my anger over some event, some person's failure to perform, or some behavior that has irritated me. And so I turn a deaf ear -- after which, of course, I feel horribly guilty and penitent. But that moment did take place, and there is no way to return to it and make it not take place. One can apologize, take actions to remediate/alleviate and otherwise try to mitigate the damage, pray, go to confession, and otherwise be willing to set things right with God and any individuals involved, but the fact that these moments occur (and probably will continue to occur) point out just how fallible one can become in a leadership position -- and I am far, far, far below the level of king. So, I find it easy to understand how the kings of the Old Testament failed and how the kings of today (whether royalty or just business/political leaders) fail.

There are also those times that the God-directed decision is not the popular decision or even the accepted decision by the uppermost level of management. Surprisingly, those are the easiest situations for me although they have not always been so. With the passage of time and the following of God's direction where I have been able to discern it, I have found that "selling" the "right" decision is possible. Moreover, God rewards us when we follow Him. I have often told subordinate leaders that sometimes to be a good leader one must be willing to lose one's job for making the right, rather than the popular or required, decision. I know whereof I speak. I have lost a job in that manner -- and God found me a better one. Since then, I have had complete trust in God when it comes to work. I don't have to watch out for me because God watches out for me.

And that is far as I can go with you this Monday morning. I must retire to prayer to ask God to intervene when I want to keep my anger or otherwise react in a non-servant, un-godly manner at work (or at home), to thank Him for his daily guidance, to praise Him for the wonderful ways in which He has been present for me and for the leaders in my organization on an every-minute basis, and to repent for those times that I have ignored His presence through inattention or desire to "do my own thing." After that, I will spend as much time as I can in contemplation, my favorite part of the day, letting God take over the direction in which my relationship with Him moves.

I will now leave you to your prayer and contemplation, but first, I would like to bring to your attention a Monday morning prayer post that you might enjoy:
Fr. Austin Fleming, priest of the Archdiocese of Boston and pastor in Concord, Massachusetts, posts a prayer each Monday morning that he calls "Monday Morning Offering." I enjoy his prayers very much. I hope you also will find them inspirational. He has graciously given me permission to include a link to his blog on my Monday Morning Meditation posts.

For additional inspiration throughout the week, I would point out two sets of blogs: (1) the list of devotional blogs that follow the enumeration of Monday Morning Meditations on the sidebar of this blog and (2) my blogroll, where I am following a number of inspirational priests and writers about spiritual matters. I learn so very much from all these people. I highly recommend them to you.

Tickled Pink with Embarrassment

I spend a fair amount of time teaching the principles of servant leadership to new managers and working with all levels of managers on implementing my leadership policies of servant leadership, reverse evaluation, and shared governance. I try very hard to practice what I preach, and I ask God for help every day. However, it is not easy to practice what you preach when it is in the area of servant leadership.

Like anyone else, I am vulnerable to stress upon occasion, and currently there is an inordinate amount of stress as we are poised for explosive growth. Right before Christmas, we reached the zenith of need for new personnel to be identified and the hiring process started and a nadir of activity. Learning the latter, I went in search of the manager of a particularly needy division and found his door locked. The associate manager told me that he was on vacation. I sort of remember approving the time off, but that was much earlier and before we knew that we would need globs of new people in January and February. I was furious that he would take vacation without having completed the hiring that needed to be done and without even bringing me up to date about it.

"Please call him in," I instructed the associate manager, "and, unfortunately, you will not be able to take vacation next week as you planned; no one can be away until we have an adequate number of personnel for the taskings that will appear right after Christmas." After that and until the manager showed up, I proceeded to take over the hiring process for one of the understaffed programs among several growing ones in this particular division, looking over the resumes and recommendations of applicants, and setting the program director about arranging interviews.

I understood from interactions after his arrival that the manager was upset, but I did not know how much until he sent me a note on Christmas Eve, telling me that he had been too distressed to attend Christmas Eve Mass with his family. I wrote back, urging him to go to Christmas Day Mass, that we could discuss issues of work at work on Monday, and that God can often put right what man has messed up. The short story is that he did go to Mass, and he said it brought him some inner peace

After everything had quieted down and we had all returned from the New Year holiday, I had a chance to talk to the associate manager about training some of the new supervisory staff brought in for some of the projects and emphasized the need to help them understand the concepts of servant leadership.

"Let me ask you a question," he said. "Do you consider your behavior last week appropriate to the servant leader model?"

When I queried what he meant, he referred to my calling in his boss from vacation and those rather difficult days between Christmas and New Year when we all had to work.

"Was there some kind of resentment about being called in from vacation?" I asked.

"No," he replied. "It was your reaction."

"Was I rude?" I am not without the capacity to be rude, never intentionally, but, you know, in a work world, things you don't want to happen do happen.

"No, you were polite," he said. "It was your body language. We could tell that you were angry with us and that made it difficult to work as effectively, well, certainly as efficiently."

I had not even realized how I had let that stress level take me over and then splash onto them. The associate manager was right; it was not a good example of servant leadership. Every day I begin my morning prayer by asking God to prevent me from harming anyone. Hm...I guess I was not listening to God that day. I wonder how many times He tried to reach me!

The conversation with the association manager reminded me of the time that 12-year-old Lizzie, having started a course in psychology at Northern Virginia Community College under a gifted student option, sat me down at the kitchen table and said, "Mom, we must talk."

"And what must we talk about?" I asked her.

"Your disciplinary techniques," she replied.

"And what is wrong with them?"

"Well, Mom, they are pretty haphazard, chaotic, and really nearly nonexistent."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, for example, when you punish us you should not expect us to remember that we are being grounded or doing some other punishment. You should remember, too!"

Guilty as charged, I supposed she was right, and she left, happy that I seemed to understand the error of my ways but not at all convinced that I would be able to change. She was right on both counts.

I hope, though, with my managers that, with God's help, I can change.

Back to the associate manager, he was clearly aware of my willingness to discuss the situation with him, both from the point of view of appropriateness on my part and as an example of how managers should not handle stress. He was, though, very unlikely aware of my real emotional reaction. I was tickled pink that he was not afraid to address the issue with me, to tell me how what I had done made him feel, and to suggest how I might better have handled the situation. So, in spite of the somewhat embarrassing and uncomfortable feeling I had from not having practiced what I preached, I had something important: proof that I have indeed established an ambiance of servant leadership; otherwise he would not have presumed to correct my behavior.

Should I have had any doubt about that, the morning after came the clincher. I apologized to the manager while it just happened that the associate manager was in the room. The manager accepted my apology with grace: "We have to work together as a team, or we will never survive this avalanche of new tasks." Just exactly what I have been teaching (but apparently not quite so well modeling)!

I am very proud of my managers although I am less proud of myself. Perhaps what happened was a gift from God in spite of my not listening to Him very well that day. I was given the opportunity to develop greater humility. And that is always a useful and needed opportunity.