A Global Effort for Charitable Excellence

CCCC stands with 20 international monitoring organizations as part of Charity Monitoring Worldwide (CMW), a global network committed to enhancing transparency and accountability in the charitable sector.

CCCC’s Leadership Role

Our engagement with CMW isn’t just passive; it’s a testament to our leadership and commitment to charitable excellence worldwide. Curtis Towns, our Head of Accreditation, represents us in this important network and serves on the CMW board. This involvement underscores our active role in shaping global charity monitoring and accreditation standards.

A New Name: Charity Monitoring Worldwide

At a recent conference in New York, CMW unveiled its new identity, transitioning from its former name (ICFO) to better reflect its mission and reach. Ana Benavides, president of CMW, introduced this new era, emphasizing the network’s role in empowering donors to make informed decisions, thereby contributing to the impact and excellence of nonprofits around the globe. Benavides presented the new brand and new website, sharing, “Our network of 20 monitoring organizations from around the world empowers donors to make a difference. CMW members contribute to the excellence of nonprofit organizations worldwide. With our new name, we are taking the next step in creating more awareness for our network.”

CCCC: Canada’s Representative in CMW

As the Canadian representative in CMW, CCCC has been pivotal in upholding and advocating for high standards in the charitable sector since 1991. Our membership in this global network, alongside monitoring organizations from 20 countries, showcases our commitment to Canadian charities and the integrity of the nonprofit sector worldwide.

About Charity Monitoring Worldwide

CMW brings together 20 monitoring organizations from across the globe, collectively overseeing more than 7,000 NGOs and representing over 68 billion in aggregated expenses. This network fosters global standards for charity monitoring and empowers organizations to achieve and maintain these standards, promoting a culture of trust and accountability.

Take the Next Step: Become Accredited

Becoming accredited by CCCC means joining a group of Christian organizations that have demonstrated their commitment to the highest standards of integrity and accountability. It’s a mark of trust and excellence in the eyes of donors and the public. We invite you to learn more about the accreditation process and how CCCC can guide you on this path to excellence.

Visit our accreditation page for more information on becoming accredited and to explore the benefits of joining this community.

To learn more about the global effort to enhance charitable practices and to see CCCC’s role, visit charitymonitoringworldwide.org

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So let’s take a look at sin within the Evangelical community and what we need to do about it. We tend to think of sin mostly in terms of behaviours such as lying, stealing, and such. But if we think of sin from a biblical standpoint, which adds other dimensions that we might easily gloss over or excuse, well… let’s just say that I find the broader concept of sin pretty challenging, so I’m talking as much to myself as I am to you.

Personal Sins

Paul explicitly told the Corinthians to stop judging the people outside the church entirely. We should only judge those inside the church, who know better.

We should each start with a personal self-examination. We need to do this scrutiny because as individuals we can undermine the public witness of our churches and ministries. You don’t want people saying, “So THAT’S what people who go to that church are like!”

Authors Barr and Citlau raise the issue of public witness in their book, Compassion Without Compromise, and question why non-Christians should take Jesus seriously given that even Christians don’t seem to do so when it comes to personal morality and following Jesus’ commands. Ezekiel 16:49-50 lists some sins you and I might judge ourselves against:

• Pride
• Excess of food
• Prosperous ease
• Not aiding the poor and needy
• Haughtiness

Can you imagine checking out a church filled with people committing these sins? Who would want to come back a second time?

Who’s in Your Church?

Next, we should look to our local church communities and see if we are doing anything as a group that might drive people away from our church.

Andy Stanley writes about the messiness that happens as we engage our culture.¹ When we try to eliminate all the grey areas to make a very clear line of distinction between what is acceptable and what isn’t, we end up with a caricature of what Christ intended his church to be. My own thinking is that when we make decisions about what makes a person comfortable enough for us to sit beside in a worship service, we are being just as exclusive and judgmental as the Pharisees were, and Jesus had very harsh words for them!

Think about the people Jesus surrounded himself with. Matthew recorded the time Jesus came to his house to eat, and Jesus raised complaints from the Pharisees because he attracted the despised tax collectors and sinners to his house. Would today’s “tax collectors and sinners” (those who are despised or marginalized) be attracted to our churches the way they were to Jesus?

So look at your Sunday morning congregation and ask, “Are we attracting tax collectors and sinners like Jesus did? If we haven’t got people like that in our congregations, shouldn’t we wonder why not? Could it be that our public behaviour is turning people away from our churches before they even reach our doors? Is our public behaviour preventing them from hearing the Good News of Jesus Christ? For us to truly be witnesses to the ends of the earth, we must be witnesses to everybody whether we’re comfortable with them or not. In fact, we must make ourselves comfortable with them or they will see the gospel of reconciliation as just another insincere idea that doesn’t deliver on its promise.

The Plank in Our Eye

When we examine ourselves for sin, go beyond obvious sins and take a holistic view of what constitutes sin. Ron Sider, in The Future of Our Faith, writes that the Evangelical church usually defines sin in terms of personal misdeeds, while the liberal Mainline church usually defines it as unjust, racist social structures which oppress people. Both wings of Protestantism have an incomplete understanding of sin. I’ll focus on Evangelicals here because the Evangelical church is the focus of this series of posts.

Sider says Evangelicals have reduced the Good News to an individualistic forgiveness of sins, which doesn’t come close to doing justice to Jesus’ self-declared mission of announcing the in-breaking of the kingdom of God and all that the kingdom means in terms of justice for all. We need to pay more attention to the many passages about corporate sins, two of which are:

• Malachi 3:5, which mentions the sins of defrauding workers of their wages, oppressing widows and the fatherless, and depriving foreigners among us of justice.
• Ezekiel 22:29, which mentions oppressing the poor and needy.

By buying in to the prevailing North American ideology of personal responsibility we tend to blame people for their misfortunes, assuming that they are reaping the consequences of their own poor decisions and habits. “It’s their own fault,” we might say. “Why should I help them?” That simplistic analysis overlooks the fact that society is structured in such a way that it is very difficult for the poor and needy, the addicted, and others to get out of their downward spiral. And even if it is their own fault, does that mean we shouldn’t have compassion and help restore them to the life that God intended for them?

The Mainline church and the more liberal wing of the Evangelical church understand the broader social issues and call it social justice. But while many in the conservative wing of the church are okay with giving out meals and backpacks (let’s call that kind of help practical social justice for individuals), we are very reluctant to challenge social structures and practices that reinforce social inequity and injustice. It’s too left wing for conservative tastes. But we have to ask, what do we mean by conservative? Are we talking politics or theology? We must not ever fall into the trap of equating the two!

By avoiding the more abstract social justice issues (which we can refer to as systemic social justice for communities), we have in effect become callous towards the suffering of people whom God loves and wants to redeem.²

Uncovering Our Sins

Everyone has blind spots. Entire communities can have blind spots too, because everyone in them shares the same cultural perspective and norms. In particular, we Evangelicals have our blind spots. We understand individual greed but we overlook rampant consumerism because it is so pervasive and is simply the unquestioned way the world works. We don’t realize how much secular society has ingrained itself into our attitudes and beliefs.

In Return to Justice: Six Movements That Reignited Our Contemporary Evangelical Conscience, authors Rah and Vanderpol suggest that the only way to discover our blind spots is:

to hear from believers from different cultural and class contexts because they notice things we don’t. We have often so habituated ourselves to our cultural environment and the compromises the church has made in regard to the status quo that we are like fish swimming in water without realizing that they are wet.

Any self-examination should include Christians from other parts of the world and from different strata in our own society.

When we find a blind spot in which we have compromised our faith, we need to call it for what it is and repent, which means we really must change our ways. In Return to Justice, the story is told of World Vision confronting its own way of defining the poor in terms of what they lack. They realized this definition did not live up to a biblical view of humanity. They repented of their way of defining poverty and developed one that is biblically-theologically correct: the poor are now defined as fully capable and worthy to be listened to and partnered with.

Rah and Vanderpol’s Return to Justice is an excellent prophetic word to the North American church. We can follow along and learn from the stories of six ministries and movements as they move from one understanding of how to promote justice and mercy to another. We see them mature in their understanding of the systemic issues which, if not addressed, will mean that the traditional handouts will always be necessary. It reminds me of the old aphorism “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” Return to Justice covers topics such as:

• what individuals can do personally to promote social justice,
• what organizations and groups can do to speak prophetically to our society, and
• what we can do within the church locally and globally to model God’s justice within our own church communities.

Getting Past Our Sins

Some self-reflection among Evangelicals has already started in the United States, and could at least be a starting point for Canadian Evangelicals. An Evangelical Manifesto was issued in Washington in 2008. It isn’t perfect, and it has been critiqued by Albert Mohler, Richard John Neuhaus, and Roger Olson (part 1) and (part 2). Nevertheless, it is an important document to spark creative self-reflection.

The Evangelical Manifesto reports that some of the sins we need to repent of are:

• worldliness of our churches
• factionalism
• living as practical atheists
• racial and ethnic separation in our churches
• loss of our independence and dedication to Christ alone by serving as “useful idiots” for one political party or another
• engagement in culture wars that have incubated conflict, hatred, and lawsuits

Canadian Evangelicals need to examine ourselves and humbly confess our own sins and weaknesses to Christ and ask for his forgiveness. We also need to seek forgiveness from each other and from the outsider communities whom we’ve hurt by starting with some sincere apologies. We must:

• hold true to our biblical-theological truths
• speak prophetically to, and engage with, the outside world
• avoid attitudes and behaviours that hurt our ability to promote the cause of Christ beyond the church.

Going Forward

We’ve come through a sea of change since the mid-twentieth century and now that we have some distance from the traumatic changes, we should be able to objectively and dispassionately assess where we are, make things right, and then move on—unencumbered by the past and with God’s blessing.

Key Thought: We need to get our own house in order if we want credibility outside the church.

“The book, Return to Justice has been provided courtesy of Graf-Martin Communications, Inc. Available now at your favourite bookseller.”

The post The Plank in Our Own Eye appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Ulterior Motives?

The most important question though, is: What did Peter recruit these people for? Did he have another, unstated, goal for why he needed to recruit them? Did he have hopes of winning enough people to take over the government some day? Did he want to use the people to change Israel’s culture? No!

Peter preached, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.”¹

Peter’s only concern was for the people themselves. His one goal was to help them live the way God designed them to live, to be in relationship with God and to live with compassion, generosity, commitment to one another, friendship, and community spirit. Peter doesn’t say all this in the recorded part of his sermon, but we know this is what he preached because the immediate response of the people was that they did all these things.² It lines up with how the Ten Commandments tell us to live and it lines up with the entire Old Testament and all its lessons about living God’s way.

And the result of Peter bringing people to Christ is that non-believers looked at the new Christians and found the Christian way of life very appealing, so much so that “the Lord added daily to their numbers those who were being saved.”³

Attractive Actions

Moving forward a few years, we see the church developing its prophetic voice so that it could speak to people about God’s ultimate vision for humanity. They preached about how society could be, but they ‘spoke’ first through their deeds. They committed themselves to social action and cared for Christians and non-Christians alike. My favourite quote from this time period is Emperor Julian’s complaint:

“For it is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galileans [Christians] support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us. Teach those of the Hellenic faith to contribute to public service of this sort.”

The church developed a powerful prophetic voice that could not be ignored because individual believers demonstrated, at their own cost, what a better society looks like, giving credibility to the church’s suggestions.

Our One Motive

The key thought for the church to remember today is that Jesus gave the Great Commission to the church, but God gave all of humanity the Creation Mandate, so the church is to help humanity do its job, not do its job for it. Our fundamental role is that of a helper, a servant, an advisor, not a ruler or a judge. We shouldn’t think of ourselves as over anyone else. A holier-than-thou attitude is not appropriate for Christians because we must always remember that “There but for the grace of God go I” We have received God’s unmerited love, and having found a good thing for ourselves, our attitude should not be one of superiority but of letting others share the great gift just as we have. We are co-labourers with the rest of humanity in stewarding this world. We need to help them steward it well.

We can be guided in how to help humanity by looking to Jesus and seeing how he helped us. Jesus came into our world and took on a lowly, humble form to serve humanity from within.

What We Can’t Do

For the church to move forward with God’s blessing, we need to get rid of any lingering spirit of triumphalism, hunger for power, desire to have status, or anything else that takes us away from a spirit of service. Any hurts we have suffered that cause us to want retribution, any harshness in our tone, has to go.

I don’t think these problems are widespread in the church at the organizational level, but I do think the problem is something we have to deal with more frequently at the personal level. I know how much I struggle when I’m with secular people who disparage Christianity. If you regularly step outside our Christian sub-sector, especially if you have contact with the social elites, you know firsthand the negative comments people make about Christians, and particularly evangelicals. My natural tendency would be to respond in an unhelpful way that would make me feel good but do nothing for my Christian witness, and it is only by consciously thinking about the points I’m making in this post that I choose to restrain myself.

We can’t let our own human failings get in the way of presenting others with the Gospel and the Christian way of life. We must present an authentic witness to the Gospel’s power and application in our own lives. We can’t give those who disparage us any excuse to see behaviour that confirms their opinion. Instead, when they encounter us, everything about us should jar them enough to challenge their stereotypes and prejudices.

Christian Service

We can be of service individually acting on our own, or as a group acting through specialized ministries or church programs. But whatever we do, we need to be attractive through our words and our deeds to those who do not yet know Jesus or God’s love.

There are times when confrontation is necessary, and Jesus had those times too, but our signature impression on the public should be one of love and service, showing a better way of life in which everyone can flourish and be all that God intended them to be.

Building Community

This beautiful window at Trinity United Church in Kitchener Ontario depicts Jesus during his ministry, and is a powerful reminder of the place of the church in society. Jesus is by the well, an important central part of community life, welcoming into his presence men, women, and children. He is not aloof, waiting for people to find him and come to him, but he has come to where they are, and is among them, touching a boy and looking directly at a woman and her child, inviting them to come closer. The people are the focus of his attention, and he is the focus of theirs. All eyes are on him, and everyone is drawn to him.

The Challenge

This is the exactly how Christ’s church should be seen today: people in our communities should find us out and about in the community, in the midst of their lives. They should see from what we do, how much we love them and care for them. And when they need help, they should know they can get it from us.

Key idea: The church is a servant to humanity, joyfully and lovingly serving all people

The post What Is Our Goal, Really? appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

How do you respond when people or circumstances are distressing you? When it seems the world is just not unfolding according to plan? Sometimes difficulties may cause leaders to feel they are up against supernatural forces, especially when there are several difficult issues all at once. Maybe they are being attacked by Satan, or perhaps even being crushed by God.

If you feel you are breaking under pressure, you need a better way of thinking about the difficulties. Sure, you need to do everything humanly possible to overcome the problems. Don’t ignore the obvious! But try switching from the “under attack – victim” mentality to the more profitable question, “What does God want me to learn through all this?”

Because the truth is, God wants broken leaders.

Breaking Experiences

Life is full of ups and downs, and no one has written more realistically about life than David, the shepherd-king of Israel, who was utterly vulnerable and completely transparent in his psalms. He learned from his own painful life that being broken was crucial to developing his ability to serve God as a faithful king over God’s people.

A spirit that has been broken is a spirit that has faced selfish ambition, pride, opportunism, or any other negative traits, and rejected them. It is a spirit that has learned to do right no matter how painful it is, how unfair it is, and how hopeless the future seems to be. It is a spirit that truly has “let go in order to let God.”

A broken spirit is a formerly wild spirit that has been subdued and harnessed by the Holy Spirit. Having a broken spirit does not mean it needs fixing. It means that the person has submitted to God and given God first place over any personal aspirations, thoughts, or feelings that place self first. This is a person ready to serve God.

Brokenness

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; A broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.
Psalm 51:17

There is no soft-pedalling what David meant in this verse. The verb translated as broken means exactly that – broken, shattered, destroyed. The adjective translated as contrite means crushed, broken in pieces. God wants people who make no excuses, who blame no other person, and who can only say honestly to God, “You’re right.”

We’ll never really know if we are broken and contrite until we have the opportunity to test ourselves. So God allows breaking experiences, either to help us become broken or to put our brokenness to the test.

By definition, a breaking experience is painful. I wish we could avoid it, but the fact is, as much as they are never enjoyable, I am glad when breaking experiences come because they are always times of transforming growth. Through them, we deepen our relationship with the Lord and discover profound insights into our innermost thoughts, attitudes, and traits. They make us better people.

Moses, Jeremiah, Paul, and many others had their breaking experiences which made them useful to God. And of course, Jesus is the model for how to get through a breaking experience, and we see him reaping his reward on the other side of the experience: being exalted by his Father and receiving a name that is above every other name (Phil 2:9-11).

Learning from Breaking Experiences

Before you realize you are in a breaking experience, your situation just seems very painful and life is hard.

The moment of transition from experiencing pain to learning from pain comes when you change your perception from one of being:

• assaulted on all sides
• a victim
• certain of your rightness
• blaming others, Satan, or circumstances for your problems

to an understanding that God is redeeming the situation by letting you grow from it. At this point, your focus turns inward as you explore parts of who you are that you may never have confronted before. When you go through a breaking experience, you emerge on the other side as a better person who is far more useful to God than ever before. You emerge as a true servant of God rather than master of yourself.

Brokenness and Leadership

To help you understand brokenness, there is a terrific little book I recommend just as highly to you as Pastor Bill Pipke recommended it to me when he gave it to me many years ago.

A Tale Of Three Kings is a short study in brokenness (it’s only 105 pages and it has fairly wide margins!). It tells the story of how David suffered so that he could be the great king God wanted him to be. Even though already anointed to be king by God’s prophet Samuel, David did nothing to bring himself to the throne. And later in life, he did the same in reverse, doing nothing to defend his throne from Absalom. He lived a hard-pressed life of danger, persecution, and discomfort, yet that is what made him a man with

• a broken and contrite heart, and
• a broken spirit

In short, it confirmed him as a man after God’s own heart.

Pastor Bill gave me A Tale of Three Kings back in 1993 when I was a deacon on a badly divided church board. My experience during my first two terms on this board was quite upsetting. A Tale of Three Kings was like balm for the soul. And just as Pastor Bill has done, so have I come back to this book many times over the years. It is the one book in my library that I have not highlighted because I don’t ever want to scan it.

I remember sitting in an airport departure lounge somewhere reading a book and highlighting it as I read. An elderly Sikh man came and sat beside me, watching me make the highlights. He finally asked why I was highlighting. “Because,” I responded, “the next time I will be able to quickly scan it for the key ideas.” He responded right away, saying, “I do not ever mark a book. The next time you open it, it will be a different book speaking something different to you because you yourself will be different.”

Food for thought!

I still highlight, but I have to admit he’s right. Sometimes I wonder why I thought something was important enough to highlight, and sometimes I wonder how it was I didn’t see the significance of something that I didn’t highlight.

A Tale of Three Kings is one of those books you shouldn’t highlight. It speaks fresh whispers from God’s heart to mine each time I read it. The book restores my peace and lifts me up again. I see myself more clearly than ever. It helps me remain a leader who can be useful to God.

When being crushed and broken, will you respond in the spirit of David, or in the spirit of Saul and Absalom?

The Discipline of Self-Examination

As ministry leaders, we need to examine ourselves regularly with incisive questions that get to the heart of our soul, and we need to answer them with brutal honesty. We need to pick up a scalpel and lay bare our hearts, our inner thoughts, attitudes and motivations, for intense scrutiny in partnership with the Holy Spirit. Questions could include:

• What is the real reason I have made or propose to make this decision?
• Am I trusting God for my position in leadership, and am I willing to follow him away from leadership?
• Am I truly leaving my welfare in my leadership role to God rather than taking it into my own hands?
• Am I exercising good stewardship of my call to lead?

One of the best tools for self-examination is to write a case study about yourself. I dare you to try this!!!! It is the most powerful tool I know of for stepping outside of yourself, objectively analyzing your behaviour and innermost thoughts, and then finding the very best human and godly wisdom to help you move forward.

And of course, nothing replaces the very best thing you can do: ask the Holy Spirit to assess you, and then wait in silence and solitude for his response. Give God some quality time – a few hours at least – and you will be amazed at what you learn.

The post A Tale of Three Kings: Broken Leaders appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Overcoming the Fear of Confrontation

If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.
Romans 12:18

“I might get fired if I say anything” is what probably keeps many ministry employees from doing their Christian duty to make peace. But that thought assumes the leader is malicious, vengeful, and unwilling to make things right; it assumes the Christian leader is unChristian in behaviour. It also assumes there are no systems to protect employees and that the leader has ultimate power, neither of which is usually true (and should never be true). Not dealing with conflict also means you are missing an opportunity to develop your own Christian character.

People may react badly upon hearing they are involved in a conflict, but the presumption should be that given a bit of time to reflect, Christians will examine themselves and do all they can to resolve the conflict. Leaders are fallible, just as their team members are, but they do want to be good Christian leaders. It should be safe to talk with the leader because they should be committed to leading the ministry in a godly way and should welcome someone giving them a chance to either correct a misunderstanding or to apologize and correct the problem. That’s a lot of shoulds, so what protects the team member if one of the shoulds isn’t true?

• Leaders are subject to other, more senior, leaders and the senior leader is subject to the board (which should be a group of independent people strong enough to discipline or fire the senior leader when circumstances warrant). The fact that the leader is accountable to another person or group is a check on their behaviour.
• A grievance policy protects against unfairness to an individual and a whistleblower policy protects against unethical behaviour that harms the organization. Employees are also protected by board policies that guide the senior leader’s behaviour and by the board’s verification plan to ensure its policies are being followed. This ensures you have a way to elevate your concerns to someone who can do something about them.
• But a caution is in order, people normally assume that what they know, or think they know, is objective reality when often they have only seen a piece of it. What looks unreasonable to you may turn out to be very reasonable. The safest assumption is to assume you don’t know everything and therefore the basic approach to resolving conflict is to ask questions, rather than make assertions. Before elevating your concern, ask questions. Questions lead to dialogue and resolution.

Why Problems Arise and Their Solutions

Conflicts with leaders can arise for various reasons and the nature of the conflict will influence the way the conflict should be addressed:

• The same types of issues that challenge any relationship can challenge a team member’s relationship with the team leader. These are personal, not leadership, issues. Personalities may rub each other the wrong way. Assumptions and misunderstandings can get in the way. Stereotypes and prejudices interfere. Most of these are not true conflicts, because the issue is your willingness to work with people who are not like yourself. You want the other person to be like you, but God made them differently. So…
  • start with prayer and an honest self-examination coupled with reflection on what a Christ-like character should be (start with the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22-23, Paul’s discourse on love in 1 Corinthians 13, and the Beatitudes in Matthew 5:3-10 and add a dose of commitment to cooperate with the fulfillment of God’s promise in Romans 8:29),
  • abandon the attitudes and prejudices that are not in line with conforming to the image of the Son, and
  • grow in your own emotional and relational maturity.
• Occasionally a leader creates conflict by treating staff unfairly or by not acting in the best interests of the ministry. This is when you use the grievance or whistleblower policy. It is now the board’s issue, not yours, and they can do an objective assessment of the situation.
• A team member may not agree with the strategic or operational decisions made by the leader. The fact is that not all decisions have unanimous support. But it is a rare decision that is made by one person absolutely on their own. Most often a leader makes decisions either in consultation with others or with a consensus from others. (See The Leader’s Veto Power for more on this.) Most often team members can accept that a decision went another way and while there may be disappointment, there isn’t a problem. But sometimes the issue may be so serious that a team member cannot let it go. If a team member truly believes the consequences could be disastrous  (meaning the continued existence of the ministry is at stake), and the leader refuses to reconsider, then follow the whistleblower policy and inform the board. Even though this is not a matter of ethics (which the whistleblower policy is all about), the whistleblower policy does provide an appropriate channel through which staff members can contact the board for a review of the situation. The important point is that the team member followed policy and did not act in a rebellious way.
• Sometimes people have issues with authority and hierarchy in general. There could be an “us vs. them” attitude towards management. Paul uses the ‘body’ metaphor to explain how different roles fit together on a team, including the roles of those who are in authority. A team leader is responsible for the performance of the team, yet is part of the same body as the team members are. There should be no “us vs. them” attitude between management and staff (or between staff and board)! That is a most unChristian attitude to hold against fellow members of the body of Christ. As Jesus said in Luke 11:17, “A house divided against itself will fall.”

What NOT To Do

Do not complain or grumble to other staff members about your issues with leadership. Follow the guidance in James 5:9, “Don’t grumble against one another, brothers and sisters, or you will be judged.” Complaining or grumbling to other staff members is not helpful. They can’t help you, it sows seeds of dissent and that impairs the leader’s ability to lead because it poisons the environment. It also means you are not testing the accuracy of your perceptions. Going through proper channels or speaking directly with the leader opens up your complaint to testing and then the issue can be resolved one way or the other. But when a leader discovers you are grumbling to others, the trust relationship the leader has with you will be severely challenged, if not completely broken!

A Better Way to Discuss Issues

When talking with a leader, remember that private meetings are the only appropriate setting for blunt discussions. Otherwise, in a public venue such as a staff meeting, matters of disagreement should be discussed in an exploring way rather than a confrontational way. For example, saying “I am concerned about the effect this would have on …. Has management considered how to deal with this potential problem?” is a respectful way to raise your concern. On the other hand, saying “I disagree and don’t think we should do this” does not lead to helpful discussion but to open conflict.

If All Else Fails…

If you simply cannot resolve the conflict to your satisfaction and it continues to be an issue for you, then for your health, happiness and career you should remove yourself from the conflict. Life is too short to stay in a place where, because of your attitude towards someone, you are robbing yourself of the joy that Christ died to give you. Find a place better suited to who you are.

Final Thought

In Loving Teamship: Loving your team leader, I quoted Hebrews 13:17 and it fits here too, so here it is again:

“Have confidence in your leaders and submit to their authority, because they keep watch over you as those who must give an account. Do this so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no benefit to you.”

There are two key points here:

• There is a system in place (or should be) for a leader’s performance to be reviewed and for them to be held to account for their leadership. Everything you think that needs to be dealt with will be dealt with — if it really is a legitimate issue.
• It’s to your advantage to contribute to an environment that allows the leader to find joy at work because how a leader feels has an effect on the office environment, and I’m sure you’d like to have a pleasant place to work. Make a positive contribution to the leader’s work so that it is a joy.

Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.
James 3:18

The post Making Peace with Your Team Leader appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

Furthermore, there’s no suggestion they will do anything differently in the future, and there is no hint of any intention to make things right. They are simply sorry that someone has a hurt feeling!

A second form of unapologetic apology is to believe that “It is better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.” People who say this aren’t sorry at all. They got their way, so they’re happy. They disrespected everyone else who should have had a say in the decision they made. At best, they are counting on your goodwill to prevent any negative fallout for themselves and at worst this is spiritual manipulation, knowing that you will probably feel it is unChristian to withhold forgiveness. If a senior leader does this repeatedly to the board, then he or she is intentionally circumventing both the oversight and the policies of the board and can hardly be thought to be apologizing.

While everyone needs to apologize well, meaningful apologies are especially critical to a leader’s success. If they want to stay in their position over the long term, they need to recognize two traps they can fall into by virtue of their position:

1. Leaders are in a place of formal authority over other people. They run the risk of being corrupted by the power that comes with their authority and running roughshod over people. If power goes to their head, they are setting themselves up against God, who has said, “For all who are mistreated, the Lord brings justice (Psalm 103:6). A readiness to apologize is one way a leader can keep the misuse of power in check because apology is an equalizer between people with different degrees of power. Apologies acknowledge the rights that God has endowed every human being with, regardless of position or title.
2. Leaders represent an organization to the public, and if they don’t apologize publicly when they should, the entire ministry can suffer reputational harm as a result. An aggrieved person might say, “Oh, ABC Ministries? They’re the ones who think it is okay to…” No organization can put up with a leader who doesn’t apologize well!

This topic came up because a Harvard Business Review article really intrigued me —  Why “I’m sorry” Doesn’t Always Translate. One of the author’s points is that in the U.S. an apology is seen as an admission of wrongdoing (“I am the one who is responsible”) while in Japan an apology is seen as an eagerness to repair a damaged relationship (“It is unfortunate that this happened”). It got me thinking about what makes an effective apology.

What are we trying to accomplish when we say, “I’m sorry”?

When people are in a state of happiness, they say they are happy. When people are in a state of sorrow, they say they are sorry. There are three principal uses of “I’m sorry”:

1. “I’m sorry” can be an expression of sympathy for a particular person or group. Sympathy comes from the Greek words sym (meaning together or with) and pathos (which means both emotion and suffering). To be sympathetic is to identify with another person’s emotion or suffering. When we use “I’m sorry” in a sympathetic way, it is not an apology at all but a way of saying “I share your emotion.” You are saying, “I’m suffering with you” or more colloquially, “I feel your pain.” The Latin translation of sympathy is compassion.
2. “I’m sorry” can mean regret, as in “I’m sorry it has come to this.” This seems to be the way the Japanese are using the word to apologize.
3. Finally, “I’m sorry” is an expression of sorrow for having done something wrong, which is the American meaning for apology.

I’m writing about the third meaning of sorry.

A Biblical Perspective

I haven’t been able to find the words apologize or I’m sorry in the Bible. Instead, biblical apologies are found by looking up forgive and confess. Asking for forgiveness carries with it an admission that a wrong was done.

The biblical model for apology is for the wrongdoer to express sorrow, confess the fault, repent, and then ask for forgiveness. On the flip side, the aggrieved person is expected to forgive the person upon hearing their confession. Whether or not forgiveness is received, the offender needs to change their thoughts, attitudes, outlook or direction in order to reorient their life and behaviour to a more godly way. If a person really is sorry, that person will change so it won’t happen again. You can’t say, “Well, that’s just who I am” and expect people to be satisfied with that. Our faith is about becoming Christ-like, not about remaining permanently in the state we were in when we found Christ.

Numbers 5:7 contains God’s instruction that an offender will not only confess the wrong and make it right, but will also pay a penalty of 20% of the damage so that the wrong actually costs something. Applying that to apologies today means that you should be generous in your restitution. Don’t be mean and stingy with your apology. Go overboard so that your words and actions together make a full restitution and then some.

Making an Apology

Given the above, and assuming you have wronged someone, a good apology needs to include the following elements:

• Admit that you recognize the wrong that was done and express regret for it.
• Acknowledge your part in the wrong. Do not talk about the other person’s responsibility (if there is any) for the wrong. Don’t make excuses (“When you said…, that made me…”). Never ever say “But…” Own your behaviour. No matter what the provocation, if you wronged someone, that was your choice. Don’t put any blame on the other person. Leave it to them to decide whether or not they will apologize for their part (if any).
• Suggest how you can make things right and restore the relationship.
• Ask for forgiveness.
• Mend your ways so you don’t need to apologize a second time for the same behaviour!

Leaders and Apologies

Some leaders wonder if saying “I’m sorry” will display weakness and undermine their ability to lead. I suggest a sincere apology will accomplish exactly the opposite. If you’ve caused offense, believe me, everyone who was offended or who observed the offense knows you are at fault. So the fact that you did something that needs an apology will not be news to anyone. If you don’t apologize, these people will think worse of you. Mark Twain once said, “Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” If you do the right thing and apologize, people may be surprised that you were transparent and vulnerable enough to admit the error, but it will be a pleasant surprise and increase their trust that you will always do the right thing. That trust enhances your ability to lead.

Anything to share?

For an example of a well done public apology, see this post by John G Stackhouse.

If you have a story of a really well done apology you could share, please share it. You don’t have to identify anyone involved and we could all learn from and be inspired by what others have done.

The post The Unapologetic Apology: Saying “I’m Sorry” Well appeared first on CCCC Blogs.

The point is not that leaders have a dark side that others don’t. Everyone has a dark side, but when you are in leadership, particularly in the senior leader’s role, your dark side has the potential to wreak greater havoc than would be the case with most people simply because you have greater ability to affect people. This is why I’ve written that leaders should be held to a higher standard than others. As you rise through the leadership ranks acquiring more power and authority that you plan to use for good, your foibles from the dark side are also acquiring greater power to potentially do serious harm to yourself and others.

In addition to having the power to cause greater damage, senior leaders also have greater potential to use that power because they are relatively unconstrained. Without the nearby presence of a superior authority (the board is not present in the work environment), a key moderating influence on behaviour is missing. This point is recognized by the French politician and poet Lamartine, who wrote in 1848, “Absolute power corrupts the best natures.” In 1887 Lord Acton phrased the idea as, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

If a senior leader is either unaware of their dark side or is not able to manage it, and is not subject to meaningful oversight by a board, you have the potential for a failure. The ability to resort to power as opposed to influence (coercion rather than persuasion) makes it more likely that the dark side will rise up and manifest itself in a senior leader than in someone who is subject to more checks and balances that are close at hand. The protection against failure starts with rejecting absolute power (or anything close to it) and submitting to an independent, active board.

Accepting Your Dark Side

McIntosh and Rima point out that Saul (paranoia), Solomon (narcissism), Moses (control), Samson (co-dependency), David (pride) and Jonah (anger) are all biblical examples of people who succumbed (at least at times) to their dark sides. Having a dark side is, they say, normal — just part of being human.

However, it is crucial that leaders allow the Lord to redeem their dark sides because the traits associated with the dark side are usually the same ones that brought people into their leadership roles. They give them the drive, ambition, determination, perseverance and creativity that can lead to great and successful leadership, as long as the negative applications are held in check. God allows leaders to have breaking experiences precisely in order to help them overcome their dark sides.

If you are reflective, you can learn a lot through these experiences. Out of one such experience I gained a fresh perspective on my role in leadership. I was seriously sidetracked by some people’s agendas, and needed to learn that my job is to lead in a godly way and focus on accomplishing the mission. I was allowing a dark side need for external validation to derail my leadership as I sought approval. God places us in leadership to accomplish his purposes, not to satisfy our own needs. I needed to understand this aspect of who I am in order to conquer it. The desire for validation had to shift from validating me to validating the assumptions and strategies I am using to guide us in accomplishing our organizational mission. McIntosh and Rima quote someone who says he is:

…convinced that they [our dark side traits] hold the potential for our most effective ministry and leadership. Without them integrated into our life, our leadership will remain somewhat superficial and manufactured — a leadership of our own creation, built out of what we feel are our best qualities and greatest gifts.

The traits that are associated with our dark sides can be redeemed and added to the gifts and skills that we are already using. When we overcome the dark side, we are then able to lead with the fullness of who God made us to be.

Overcoming Your Dark Side

McIntosh and Rima say the way to overcome your dark side is to:

• Acknowledge it — Most people don’t want to admit they have any dark side at all, so they blame others for everything and see their own actions and thoughts as totally pure or totally justified. The authors say that blaming others indicates that you are in denial. I like to think I’m perfect just as much as the next person does, but I freely admit I am a flawed work in process. Actually, that’s a very liberating position to hold because it takes a lot of pressure off. Perfectionism is one of the two key indicators that you are on the slippery slope to failure. I can’t find who first said it, but there is great comfort in acknowledging, “I’m not yet the person I want to be, but thank God I’m not the person I used to be.” Acknowledging that you have a dark side doesn’t mean you are ruled by it, it simply means you are aware that there are components of your make-up that could, if unchecked, result in selfish motivations that lead to your downfall.
• Examine it — Look for events in your life that stand out in your memory. These are probably significant, so think about how they have shaped you. The authors say if you can’t remember it, it likely isn’t important. The events don’t have to be traumatic. They could be quite benign or even positive. The important thing is how they affected you. I set the book down at this point and recalled a business professor saying, “Three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves.” That event is not dark or evil and it may not be significant to you, but it has had an enormous influence on me. Much good has come from it (ambition to make something of myself), but I have also seen its bad side (a focus on self rather than purpose). Look for these events and connect the dots to see how they are working in your life.
• Resist the expectations that lie beneath the dark side — The ones that are unrealistic or selfishly motivated are the ones you must fight against. When you acknowledge events that have shaped you, ask yourself what expectations flow out of that event. For example, shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves refers to a successful entrepreneur and his or her children and grandchildren. The first generation builds, the second generation enjoys and the third generation loses. In other words, the third generation is lazy or incompetent. This saying stung me because I’m a third generation person in terms of this saying, and I don’t see myself as a ‘shirtsleeves’ kind of guy. This saying incited entrepreneurial aspirations in me with expectations of achieving significant business success, yet that meant I was trying to relive my grandfather’s life. I finally realized that my grandfather lived his life true to himself and I need to live mine true to myself too. Once I grasped that thought, I re-interpreted shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves to mean that every generation needs to forge its own way and not rest on the success of the previous generation. Rather than trying to be something I’m not, I dedicated myself to following wherever God would lead me so that I could make the most of who God made me to be. I’ve never looked back!
• Engage in spiritual disciplines (prayer, reflection, etc) for progressive self-knowledge — You need an accurate picture of who you are as a human being. In addition to the spiritual disciplines, using personality profiles and other external feedback will give you a more clear-headed assessment of yourself and the areas you need to address. From about 1997 onwards I used prayer and reflection to get a really good understanding of my strengths, weaknesses, motivations, gifts and potential. This prepared me for the call I received on May 25, 2001 to go to seminary. I did not fight the call, which was a 180 degree change in direction for me, because I knew that the call fit who I am. Obedience in 2001 is the reason I was ready to accept the call to CCCC in 2003.
• Understand who you are in Christ — Your true value lies not in your title, performance, achievement or power, but in your worth and value as a redeemed child of God. Set aside the world’s measurement of success and adopt God’s. Success for me is being faithful to God and the purpose for which he made me. Power is not a goal. My current job was never a goal. Neither gives me any value at all, because my value as a person lies in my creation by the Father, my redemption by Christ, and my availability to be used by the Holy Spirit.

You can protect your ability to lead a Christian ministry by being aware of the dark side within you, giving it over to God to be redeemed, and taking care not to let it rear its ugly head.

I discipline  my body and make it my slave, so that, after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified. Paul – 1 Cor 9:27

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“People lack trust in leaders because of the poor character demonstrated by so many leaders. My interviews with 6,000 Christian leaders show that one of the greatest struggles they have is demonstrating godly wisdom. The issue is how worldly wisdom aligns with godly wisdom and how to discern the difference.”

I quickly wrote the quote down because it is exactly the reason why I write this blog. My purpose is to help Christians who are leaders become more authentically Christian in their leadership practices. I don’t think it is that hard to figure out a Christian approach to leadership, but it does take time to reflect on your faith and your work and how they intersect. That’s why I call this blog Christian Leadership Reflections. By sharing my own reflections, I hope to help you with yours.

Human Wisdom

Human wisdom is developed from a human perspective without any reference to God or his ways. It is often positioned as the opposite of godly wisdom, as if the two were diametrically opposed to each other. In this paradigm, human is bad and godly is good. But it is not as simple as that:

• If we believe that God created our universe with certain rules for how it works, then we can study it and learn about it.
• And if God gave us the ability to think, to discover and to create new knowledge, then we should do so.

It is inevitable that, quite apart from God’s revelation, humans will work out some knowledge and wisdom about how things work, or the way things are, that is right and aligns with God’s design or his ways. Don’t be surprised when this happens because it is simply the result of the orderly ways of God.

But sometimes we get it wrong and develop ideas that are not in alignment with God’s ways. This happens because our values are not in alignment with God’s or we have forgotten to leave room for God. Most often it is just a case of someone who doesn’t know God and doesn’t know any better, but sometimes a person develops something with evil intent such as when a con artist develops a con game based on understanding our (fallen) human nature.

Human wisdom, therefore, is not like godly wisdom. Godly wisdom is always 100% right. Human wisdom has a range, from downright ungodly to wisdom that unintentionally aligns with God’s ways. For example, people with no awareness of God can still do good deeds because they believe it is the right thing to do.

The issue isn’t that human wisdom is the opposite of godly wisdom, but that even at its very best it is incomplete without godly wisdom. On a continuum from foolishness/ignorance to godly wisdom, human wisdom can be anywhere from 100% wrong to being 100% right (about the topic at hand). If human wisdom meets godly standards, then feel free to use it.

Godly or human? Discerning the Difference

So when it comes to Christian leadership, there is much human wisdom we can draw upon to understand group dynamics, organizational theory, governance, motivation, planning and so forth. There are many very good secular writers whose models and advice are just fine for Christian ministries. But we must be careful to discern where human leadership wisdom is deficient and falls too far short of godly wisdom to be able to use with integrity. And that is why a Christian leader needs to take time to reflect on his or her leadership practices.

How to distinguish the difference? How to tell if a secular leadership technique is appropriate for a Christian to use? Here’s some advice from a great little book:

“From a Christian point of view, it is only when the direction and the method are in line with God’s purposes, character, and ways of operating that godly leadership takes place.”
(Reviewing Leadership by Robert Banks and Bernice Ledbetter)

That is how you tell. Ask the question, Does this align with God’s purposes, character and ways of operating? This is why I say it is helpful if at least one of your ministry’s senior leaders has formal theological education. It is not good enough to just find a verse here or there to justify something. In this context, verses are little thoughts, and you need BIG thoughts. You need to know not just the verses, but taken as a whole, what does Scripture say about God and his ways? What’s the big theological picture? You also need a vibrant personal relationship with God in which you submit to and then experience his leadership. You will get to know pretty quickly how to assess opportunities or methods for suitability.

Here are some illustrations that may help:

• In a commissioned sales environment, sales managers are trained to motivate their staff by appealing to their self-interest and greed. They have them develop vision boards – pictures of all the good things in life they want to have or experience. Looking at these every day motivates them to sell more. Since when would God have us motivate people by appealing to their greed or self-interest? What relationship does this build between the salesperson and the customer? Instead of truly helping customers, the salesperson has objectified them into a means to an end, an end in the best interest of the salesperson, not the client! Does the technique work? I guess so. Is it godly? No. This style of management cannot be introduced into a Christian workplace.
• Traditional strategic planning is based on analyzing the past to predict the future. To ensure the plan is achieved, staff are evaluated based on achieving goals that support the plan. Where does this leave room for God to do something new? When God told Paul to go to Europe, Paul went. He didn’t say, “I’ll do it on to my next mission trip” or even worse, “I’ll have to work it into my next 5 year plan.” The Holy Spirit blows where he will, and we have to stay nimble and flexible to respond quickly to his leading. Traditional strategic plan also relies heavily on setting your strategy based on distinguishing yourself from a competitor, but God wants you focused on what he has called you to do. In traditional strategic planning, your strategic options are limited by your SWOT analysis. Since when has God been restrained by your weakness? I’ve written more about this in Strategic Planning for Christian ministries. Strategic planning can be done, but be careful to design the process to include God!

Questions to Ask

So when I am confronted with a new leadership technique, I look for the aspects of it that need to be tested against God’s purposes, character or ways of being by asking:

1. What is this advice or method based upon? What assumptions does it make? Why does it ‘work’?
2. How would this affect the way I relate to another person or group?
3. Why does this appeal to me? What emotion or motivation makes this solution desirable? Does the appeal call upon something in me that runs counter to the fruit of the Spirit?
4. How does it maintain or contribute to my status as “a holy vessel, consecrated to God” and to our ministry’s representation of what life in the kingdom of God looks like?

Then compare your answers to what you know of God. Be wise. Be discerning. Take time to reflect.

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Dads and Their Kids

I’ve seen a fair bit of research over the years that shows how important fathers are to the development of their children. A contributing factor to many of our social problems turns out to be the lack of a father in a person’s life. I admire single parents who are able to raise their children on their own and I know they do their best. But there is no doubt that the best family experience is when a mother and father live as Christ-like parents caring for and nurturing their children together. Courageous shows how five fathers, in different scenarios, come to a place of decision about their role as fathers.

This is the fourth movie by Sherwood Pictures, a ministry of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia. Every one of their movies (even the first one that was done for less than $20,000) has been excellent. Flywheel dealt with coming to faith; Facing the Giants with maintaining faith through adversity; Fireproof with marriage; and now Courageous with fatherhood. You have to hand it to this church, they have done a wonderful job of developing a creative outreach ministry against all odds.

Leaders and Their Work

Leaders need to ensure that the way they lead at work does not cause their employees to be unable to fulfill their duties to their spouse and children. In some environments, particularly large global consulting firms for example, I have heard people talk about the employer’s demands that they put their career ahead of their families. People at any level of leadership may self-impose demands on themselves that effectively put their work ahead of family too. They need to set appropriate boundaries for how much claim their ministry will be allowed to have on family life. Several years ago one president told me he divided the week up into 21 blocks of time (morning, afternoon and evening) and would give his ministry up to 12 of them (or perhaps he said 14). He would not go beyond that for the sake of his health, marriage and family.

From 1994 to 2001 I was self-employed and working from home. I discovered that in that situation, not only was there no separation of home and office (I did have a dedicated office in the house, but it was in the house), but there was also no sense of ever leaving work. Who’s to say when the job is done? It was never done. There was always more that could be done. And then there is the feeling of achievement from work that can become addictive. I ended up not being as ‘present’ as I wanted to be with my family. Boundaries are the foundation for a well-balanced life. They should be augmented by a clear set of priorities that will help you and your family make decisions in those seasons when work and home schedules collide.

The movie Courageous shows the dads signing a covenant that outlines the principles of fatherhood that these men will follow. I have to admit, my very first thought was that this was a cheap marketing ploy. They probably already have these in stock ready to sell by the thousands. (However, as of today, they don’t appear to have done this.) My second thought was that I wouldn’t sign the covenant because it would be a mass event sort of thing and who wouldn’t sign it? It wouldn’t be meaningful because it would be an event rather than my personal commitment. I thought it would be better as a personal commitment. “Just do it. Just be the father I aspire to be.”

I believe the best outcome of the movie will be that dads sit down with their families and talk honestly about their relationships with spouses and kids. It’s never too late to make a course correction. You can’t change the past, but you can change the future.

My dad died a year ago this week, and I have such good memories because I committed years and years ago to being the best son that I could be. Your children and mine deserve a similar commitment from us, that you and I will be the best parents that we can be. Your ministry is important, but so is your family. You are replaceable at work, but not as a parent.

Any thoughts to share?

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Hebrews 13:17 is a good starting point for this topic. It includes some very practical advice about how you should relate to your leaders, which the biblical author points out is in your own best interest to follow:

“Have confidence in your leaders and submit to their authority, because they keep watch over you as those who must give an account. Do this so that their work will be a joy, not a burden, for that would be of no benefit to you.”

Restated, the key point is “Let your leaders lead because when their work is a joy, yours will be too!” You can have confidence in them and submit to them because they in turn are accountable to someone over them (perhaps a board or an overseer, and always ultimately to God himself).

It is a lot easier to say “Yes, we should love our leaders” than it is to say, “so I should love my leader” because it is easier to love people in abstract than to love a specific human being with specific traits in a specific scenario. Team members should keep in mind that Christian leaders are as fallible as they are. We all do the best we can, earnestly desiring to grow more like Jesus every day. So I understand that it can be hard to love your leader. It can also be hard to love your neighbour, but that doesn’t give us an excuse not to.

The power differential in an employment relationship does present some potential obstacles to loving your leader and these do need to be dealt when they arise. One of these I’ve already posted about and more will come in future posts.

But on the topic of demonstrating love for your leader, here are some basic ideas to start with.

Relations with the Team Leader

The best way to show love for a leader, aside from what you would do for any other person, is to help the leader lead. There are several specific ways a team member can do this.

• Pray for them. Pray that the leader would be sensitive to the Holy Spirit, for God’s blessing on their leadership and that you would be helpful to the leader as you work together to accomplish the ministry’s mission. Don’t forget to pray that you too would be sensitive to the Holy Spirit!
• Offer your suggestions. Leaders love suggestions. While leaders should have lots of ideas, they are not the only ones to whom the Lord gives vision and ideas. Suggestions are welcome because:

• 1. it shows that team members are really thinking about the organization and not just their jobs – this indicates they are engaged in the mission
  2. it reinforces the “we’re in this together” attitude, which really builds team spirit
  3. it shares the burden of being creative. It’s one thing to do what has already been thought about; it’s quite another thing to think about what hasn’t already been done
  4. it shows that you are creative, and that is good for your career if you aspire to a leadership role
• Support the organization’s values. Leaders are particularly concerned with maintaining a healthy team, so team dynamics are very important to them. Leaders would love it if every staff member were a perfect model of the organizational and team values in action because then life would be much easier for everyone. Not working by the values creates all kinds of problems, and leaders would rather capitalize on opportunities than fix problems. As Peter Drucker famously wrote in Managing For Results, “Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems. All one can hope to get by solving a problem is to restore normality.”  Don’t be a problem!
• Be flexible. Maybe a task requires you to stay a little late. Perhaps something pops up and you have to set a project aside temporarily. Leaders try not to disrupt workflow, but when something happens that they feel requires a team member to make an adjustment, be accommodating. That makes life much easier for the leader, who will always appreciate a flexible employee. An employee who says ‘yes’ more than ‘no’ will always be more highly valued because they provide the leader with more options.
• Do your very best. Check your work and do it right the first time. Eliminate re-work! There simply is no excuse for doing less than what you are capable of. Your job or the task you’ve been assigned is never done until it is correctly done. In some cases your work must be perfectly done and in others just well done is enough (perfectionism can be costly and sometimes good enough is good enough). Be sure to get guidance on what level of ‘perfection’ is needed from you.
• Own your own personal and professional development. Every employer should have an annual development plan for each staff member, but whether they do or don’t, you should have one for yourself. If they won’t pay for a course you think you need, then you pay for it yourself for your own benefit. If they don’t appreciate your development efforts, someone else will. Employers love staff who are continuous learners. If you have done nothing to upgrade your skills within the last five years, you are likely very close to being obsolete. I’ve been told by someone working in technology that if he stopped reading technical journals he would be obsolete in less than six months. If you think you are too old to learn something new, you have decided to sideline yourself. If you think that you finally graduated from college last year and are done with learning, your future looks bleak.  Be a continuous learner.
• Extend your leader’s leadership throughout your work area. I’ve already discussed this in The ‘Ripple Effect’ of Leadership, so here I’ll just remind team members that the board chose the senior leader as the person best suited to lead the organization to achieve the ministry’s mission, and the senior leader chose the best available people to serve as other leaders to help him or her do that. The best thing you can do is extend your leader’s influence as far as you can. Leaders work hard to get the whole team to pull together as one unit to get the job done. Whatever you can do to help create unity will only help the leader move the whole organization or department forward.

These ideas all come together in this piece of advice: The best way to love your team leader is to exercise leadership yourself in tune with theirs.

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