[EFI] Paper For Leaders
[EFI]
The purpose of this paper is to provide important supporting information and thinking around how to approach leadership using a prophet, and some of the implications of addressing spiritual issues in the management of your organisation.
Simplistically, there are a few things it is critical to embrace to achieve this (in our view):
- Being committed to doing the will of God
- Understanding what being “in order” looks like.
In the remainder of this paper, we take each of these in turn.
Our objective in this process is to help leaders and their prophets be in a position they can be led completely by the Lord.
The main decision is whether you desire to do the will of God?
There are a number of questions in life, the answer to which can be life-changing. Should I marry this person? Should we have children? Should we move to a different state? Should I change from Starbucks…?
For those that are committed to following the Lord, at some point – and that may already have arrived – you will contemplate whether you are all in. And all in really means am I willing to submit completely to the will of God.
Many people would answer, “absolutely”. But in some cases, this is without really thinking through what it means and whether you are prepared for the consequences. Jesus in the parable of the tower talks about the importance of counting the cost of being his disciple – do not start down this path if you aren’t prepared to pay the price of finishing it.
At the same time, Jesus takes God’s will more seriously, arguably, than anything else. “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me”. “Who is my brother sister and mother? Anyone who des the will of God is my brother sister and mother”. “If this cup can be taken from me…but nevertheless your will be done, not mine”.
It has struck me for quite some time now that, when Paul talks about us being conformed to the image of Christ, I believe this is a big part of what he means. After all, the idea that I, in my imperfection, would become the image of the perfect is at one level ridiculous. But I can become the image in the sense that I share the commitment to do the will of God. After all, that is what Jesus modelled.
Returning to counting the cost – what cost could there be? Why should it not be straightforward to do the will of God? Biblically persecution is obviously a key point. So is spiritual warfare, and we’ll come back to that.
But I would say there are three main costs to being committed to the pursuing the will of God:
- You have to be prepared to put your will down and really believe he knows better. In working with leaders this is the biggest challenge. Do you really believe Romans 8.28?
- Related to this is the furnace of affliction. If you go all in, the Lord will refine you. Hard. Over the years, if I’m really honest, what I want is to follow the Lord without having to go through the furnace. I really believe Romans 8.28. I just want him to work all things for my good without the furnace. Unfortunately it’s not an option. You have to be ready for the furnace. It’s worth it, just painful.
- You have to get comfortable walking through what looks like chaos. This is often tough for a leader because you’re going to have to take your people with you into the storm, and not necessarily be able to explain why. But the fact is that what looks like chaos to you only looks that way because you aren’t smart enough. Nor am I.
All this begs the question, why do it? The answer is that the Lord will show you greater things than you ever imagined, and you will do more for the kingdom than you ever imagined. If you care about living consistently with the plan the Lord has for you, I’m afraid this is probably the only way.
In a sense, just being forearmed with the knowledge of how it can be difficult to “stick” to the will of God is at least half the battle. But you will find your prophet very helpful – as a “brother or sister in arms”, so to speak – to walk with you through these times of difficulty. You will forge a stronger bond as a result. The key is to be ready, because the challenges will certainly come, the closer you walk with the Lord.
Understanding what being “in order” looks like
One of the most important questions we like to ask leaders in particular is “do you want to use your Father’s resources in your organisation or not?” Perhaps unsurprisingly, everyone has said “of course”. But this simple question unlocks a lot of consequences. If you want to use your Father’s resources, you need some kind of a plan because, otherwise, for what are the resources being used? More importantly, once you have your plan, we recommend that you and your prophet go before the Lord and ask for approval for this plan, which will involve the use of His resources.
Now, it’s important to know He wants to give them to you! So this is not at its most basic level a difficult conversation. But there are some things you need to know about the plan. As well as being specific, your plan will need to bless others. That should be obvious. Beyond that, it is important the your behaviour is Biblical. Which means, in other words, your organisation needs to be “in order”.
Our objective is therefore to help you understand what is generally involved in getting support from your Father to use His unlimited resources for Kingdom purposes in your organisation. It should be obvious that this is the single best competitive advantage you can ever have – unlimited resources at no earthly expense. For no purpose other than Kingdom benefit! Specifically our focus is on covering those areas that will help you be “in order”.
We have found that the same issues affecting being “in order” come up repeatedly, and they generally tend to fall into the same eight groups. For ease of writing style, we have written the section as if it were to the leader themselves, to avoid writing in the third person. But this is never an event – we are seeking to encourage rather than demand that leaders adopt a way of leading for which they are not yet readyIt is the business analog to humans being “conformed to the image of Christ”.
This is therefore intended to be an overview to help you understand in broad terms what we tend to see regularly as issues. Here’s the good news though – in our experience you don’t need to start being Biblically strong – the plan simply needs to move in steps towards Biblical order. The Father already knows where you are – He simply wants the leader to move forward into Biblical truth. It may surprise you, but when you map Biblical principles onto the way a business is run, it is astonishing how consistent they are with how success in business, and organisations in general, is actually achieved.
What does a plan need to look like?
This includes one of the eight areas we mentioned above, and we’ll cover it specifically shortly. But thinking through what a plan needs to do is helpful.
The best place to start is with the following question – “how do you want to be a blessing to others for the Kingdom? And specifically to whom?”
On the face of it, this is a very simple question but it’s often hard to answer. It’s easy to say that you want to be a blessing to your customers, but how? And in what way? Also, you should want to bless the people that work for your organisation. There is no Kingdom value in blessing your customers by trampling on your staff. In our experience, if you are able to bless these two groups, then these will tend to bless others on your behalf (including partners, suppliers, etc).
The key is to describe as clearly as you can, how you would like to bless these groups of people. This may take you some time, but it is time well spent. It is perfectly reasonable to include in this, if it’s your heart, that deploying a percentage of profits you make into mission related activities is a form of blessing.
But don’t put too much pressure on yourself – start with something relatively simple and concise. Remember Proverbs where the Lord will “make your paths straight”. This simple truth that follows from this is there’s no point the Lord making your path straight if you aren’t walking. But assuming you’re moving, he’ll evolve your path in front of you so you move in His direction. So start somewhere sensible, and let Him evolve your organisation through time. This happens very easily in a business founded on Biblical truth.
Next, you need to work out what are the two or three most important steps you can take to move from where you are, to being a blessing in this way. By all means identify more steps, but in our experience people will come up with far more steps and not prioritise. More on this shortly. Keep it as simple as you can. Importantly, it is also fine – and perhaps advisable – to come up with steps that you have no idea at this stage how to achieve. This is what the Lord does well and why you need His resources. Spend real time on this and challenge yourself to do your best work. Ultimately, this is what you are going to present to the Father as what you want to do – don’t turn up with anything less than your best. Pray through it, read your Bible, take views from others, be prepared for insight from anywhere. Ask yourself “do I really need to get this done? If I could only do two or three things, would this be on the list?”
One of the eight areas we tend to find is most common in helping organisations concerns the way they plan. The simple fact is that the vast majority of organisations are far too complicated, both in terms of their actual form and what they believe they can get done. Leaders in particular tend to over structure and over work people to their detriment. There are many reasons why this tends to happen but ultimately the problem is a failure to prioritise. Biblically, it’s actually worse – in John 3, Jesus talks about the Spirit being like wind - “You hear it’s sound, but no one knows were it comes from, and no one knows where it’s going. So it is of those born of the Spirit”. While the context is slightly different, the principle is that we often don’t understand what the Spirit is doing, because we aren’t capable. Therefore an organisation based on Biblical truth must leave room for the Holy Spirit to do what only the Spirit can. While the Lord can do anything, people often limit their willingness for the Spirit to move by putting too much structure on everything. In organisations this shows up as over-working people and unnecessary process and constraint.
The point is that your plan needs to be simple enough to implement without overworking, overstructuring and specifically must leave room for the Spriit to move. What if the Spirit brings you a huge, new, left-field opportunity? Is your structure going to prevent you from responding, simply because “it’s not what you do” or people have no free time to respond? Obviously that’s nuts.
We turn next to the other seven areas we tend to see in organisations that affect Biblical order.
Leadership
On the question of leadership, I find a series of leading questions tend to unlock a different way of understanding what God wants of leaders. It’s this – “do you believe that God could get any task He wants done by willing it to be so?” You should know the answer to this. “Do you therefore believe that it is easier for God to do this, rather than have you do it?” again… “So do you accept the logic that the point of God having you do a task, isn’t the task itself but the process? Specifically, that you walk that process with other people in relationship, and you are grown through those experiences?” Generally people will accept this is true, mainly because it obviously is. “So would you accept as a consequence that your focus as a leader is not the task itself, even though that is relevant, but rather that you honour the people through the task?” This is also true as a logical consequence, but is tougher for people to accept, primarily because they are conditioned to focus on getting stuff done.
But if you are still unsure about this last point, consider the Gospels. Jesus really didn’t condemn sinners for sinning, but rather pointed them in a different direction. But look what he had to say in Matthew to and about leaders (all from Chapter 23 except where it says otherwise):
· You shut the door of the kingdom in people’s faces. You yourself do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to”
· “You travel over land and sea to win a convert, and when you have succeeded you make them twice a child of Hell as you are”
· If anyone swears to the temple it means nothing, but anyone who swears by the gold of the temple is bound by it”
· You have neglected the most important matters of the Law – justice, mercy and faithfulness”
· You clean the outside of the cup, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence”
· IF anyone causes one of these…to stumble, it would be better for them to have a millstone hung round their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the seas” (Matt 18:6)
Scary stuff. Not one thing about “getting the task done”. All of it about treatment of people.
I often say to leaders, I can tell what type of leader you are by looking at your calendar. If you day is filled with getting stuff done – or even worse, with stuff that makes you look good (like speeches etc) – then you aren’t a Biblical leader. Biblically, Jesus led as a servant for His people. Are you serving your people? Do you accept that you should be? The test of a Biblical leader is whether they are spending the majority of their time with, or thinking/praying about, their people.
Note the difference between leading for Kingdom and for charity. The point of leading people is that they produce fruit. You should be focusing on those that are producing a lot of fruit. If you have others where you are spending a lot of time and the fruit is minimal to non-existent, it is time to “cut down the tree”, to paraphrase the parable. Producing fruit is a necessary condition for the Kingdom.
If you already are leading in a Biblical way that’s great. If not, build a transition towards it into your plan. Without Biblical leadership, everything else is going to be tough.
Funding and structure
These issues are often not considered in a Biblical sense but they do come up surprisingly often. Without getting into lots of detail, they fall largely into two areas:
- How is the business funded?
- Have you created unintended contractual or other spiritual rights for the enemy? We would include in this being “bound to a fool”.
While the second can often be consigned to the “weird”, it occurs quite regularly. To ignore it is to ignore Ephesians 6.
How the organisation is funded has a good and a bad part to it. The bad part tends to relate to whether the organisation is “bound to a fool” to paraphrase Proverbs. It is easy to create these types of liabilities, whether they are contractual or relational. If you apply the idea of being bound to a fool to your organisation, you probably already know if you have the issue. It is worth talking to someone who’s been through this before to make sure you don’t solve it by binding yourself to a bigger fool. The good part is that if you can start – or re-start – your organisation with a gift freely given – as modelled by the Lord in Genesis 15 – then you have a Biblical underpinning.
The existence of spiritual rights is a deeper subject that I don’t want to dwell on here, and you almost certainly will need help (from your prophet). Signs that this may be present in an organisation are the sense that something just won’t work, whatever you do, or everything is going wrong. You just never catch a break. It’s not an absolute truth but you may have something to address here. This relates well to the next section.
Restoring the prophetic
In Ephesians 4, Paul talks about particular church roles, that are often referred to as “offices” now. If we map these roles onto an organisation, we can see that four map very easily and one doesn’t:
- The Apostle (“Sent one”) is the CEO, usually. I would make an argument that in corporate terms Paul was absolutely the CEO of the gentile churches, even though they didn’t really think in those terms.
- The Evangelist maps to the head of sales/distribution. The type of people that do these roles are remarkably consistent in shaping.
- The Shepherd/pastor is the team leader. They are responsible for the well-being of their people
- The teacher maps to the head of HR. The responsibility should be the ongoing development of the people.
- The prophet maps to….no-one.
The reason for illustrating this is that, in today’s world, organisations have discarded the role of prophet. Partly because they are less concerned about God’s word. But also partly because some prophets have been quite difficult to deal with – the church is littered with stories of difficult prophets. It’s one of the reasons a number of prophets have gravitated towards each other.
But that some people have been difficult doesn’t invalidate the role. A big part of what we have been doing in this area is help to help leaders understand how to use prophets, help prophets understand how o honour leaders and to help them build relationship with each other.
As a leader who has used prophets extensively in organisations, I can give some insight into how this works well. Building relationship is key. But you also have to understand what prophets are able to do and what they can’t. The prophet can give you very strong insight into spiritual issues that you need to accommodate in your plan. They are essential to understanding and addressing the question of spiritual rights and issues an organisation faces. They are helpful in giving you additional information to consider in how to approach business decisions.
But they are not there to tell you what to do, as you will always have more information. They aren’t an intermediary between you and the Lord. You need your own relationship with Him. You need to weigh what you are hearing from the prophet, prayerfully, against everything else you know. And make decisions that are Biblically consistent. I will always argue for having a prophet rather than not. But if you have some of the spiritual/contractual issues outlined in the previous section, you absolutely need one.
Listed below are some thoughts around how I have found it help to use prophets, and what is key In managing your relationship as a leader with them.
Ways to consider using a prophet
· Helping understand where there are spiritual strongholds/bonds that need to be addressed in order to move forward
· Sounding board for plans you’ve made
· Providing additional context for something you are thinking through
· Avoiding landmines
· Understanding the Holy Spirit’s perspective on priorities
· Understanding whether the words or information from the Lord you are sitting on is confidential
· Prayer strategies on people issues (including praying people into/out of the business)
· As your right hand when you pray a plan into action.
How to honour your prophet – what they do and don’t do
· Prophets are not there to tell you the future.
· Prophets are not there to make your life easy and joyful.
· Prophets are there to help give you a deeper spiritual context as a leader
· Prophets are most helpful on “narrow” issues.
· They are generally there to help you think, not for the Lord to give you instructions.
· As a leader, you MUST be biblically rooted. It is your job to lead. You must therefore make decisions in light of what the prophet is given to tell you. If the prophet isn’t given something, the Lord may not want you to know.
· If you want your prophet to trust you, you have to let them into what you’re thinking. This will help them interpret what they are hearing/seeing in context.
Shaping
It is my view that more the 50% (and possibly much higher) of performance problems in an organisation result from people performing roles for which they are not shaped. I have written extensively on this in my books (reference at the end) but the critical thing is that often people are given roles that are not adapted to them. And worse, a role is created by a leader for intellectual convenience, and an individual is put into it because they are available, not because they are shaped for it.
I am often asked what I think about various forms of skills/personality profiling tools. My answer is usually more accommodative, but the truth is I have no interest in any of them. The authority on shaping is Romans 12. It lists what are often referred to as the seven redemptive gifts. They are extremely helpful in thinking about how people are shaped.
The point that is being made more generally in Romans 12 is “do what you’re good at, let everyone else do the same, stop judging everyone else from your own perspective and everything will work better”. By the way – the secular world also believes this because it’s obviously true –economically it’s knowns as Ricardo’s principle of specialisation. He gave it a mathematical underpinning. A Biblical truth is actually true - what a surprise…
If your organisation doesn’t already relate shaping of your people to their roles, this is a good place to start. Maybe the problems you have are just this. It is amazing how much is released and how many problems are addressed by people doing what they are shaped for, and as a result feeling like they belong. The science shows that belonging is the single biggest influence on team performance, and alignment of shaping is a significant help. Consider how you would feel as a compassionate person given a role to do nothing but producing financial reports with little or no contact with others. Do you feel like you belong?
It is worth noting that the beauty of Romans 12 is it is telling you how to do something most efficiently – lead people to do the things they find as easy as breathing, and everything will be easy. The Lord will be in it. It’s where things are being forced that things become problematic. This is one of your greatest competitive advantages, should you choose to use it.
Unity
Biblically, we are called to be unified (Ephesians 4:3). One of the single most important things a leader can do is to create unity.
Much disunity comes from the problems of people doing what they are not shaped for. It creates bad morale which in turn leads to people being disruptive. But disunity can occur for other reasons. As a leader you will need to think about how unity is forged and there are some skills to learn here. The key is to understand it is a Biblical requirement, not a nice to have.
I do want to illustrate something in the Bible that is often not considered in this context. In John 6, Jesus does something very interesting. He deliberately uses challenging words “eat my flesh, drink my blood” that has the effect of the majority of His followers leaving. He deliberately downsized His organisation – clearly the people leaving wasn’t a surprise. Now, I’m pretty sure the ministry’s CFO didn’t turn up and say to Jesus “you’ve got to downside, we can’t afford all these people”. So why did He do it? I think it’s clear from the context of John 6 that he wanted a smaller group of true believers, rather than a larger group where the effect was more diluted. The degree of unity was stronger with a small group. Sometimes it is better to reduce your team to those who are unified behind the central idea – you couldn’t have a better example.
Values
All organisations have values, whether they are written down or not. But practically, they only have merit if, when behaviour emerges that are not consistent with the values, the behaviour is addressed.
There is much more to address on this topic, but simplistically I would suggest you consider the following questions:
- Do you have a set of values? And are the Biblical?
- If you do, do you address behaviour when it is inconsistent?
The values are behaviours that you believe are critical for the organaisation to be a blessing in a way that you’ve already articulated. That connection should be explicit in your mind.
As a helpful aid, these are the values I use. In a Bible context I think of this a little like the Law – Joshua re-committed the Israelites to the Law after a significant transgression. Ezra and Nehemiah did the same. The leaders need to take the Law seriously. Your values are essentially a version of that for your organisation. They are a statement of what you take seriously in behavioural terms.
1. Celebrate each other’s successes
2. We stay unified - no disruptive behaviour
3. Passionate about our serving our clients well and working diligently
4. Respect authority and be wise in your interactions
5. Speak out, and be responsible for resolving differences
6. Help each other cheerfully, give generously where you can
7. Be a blessing to others, inside and outside our family
8. In all things maintain the highest integrity and patience
Succession and Independence
This issue tends to be more of a future question, in the event that a number of the previous problems exist. However, an issue that is often lost on people is that Jesus spent a significant part of His ministry developing His disciples, and then He left. Why did He leave? I think in part because there is no way His disciples would have dispersed if not. Would you? I wouldn’t have dispersed if Jesus had stayed. Independence from the master – at least in a sense – was the point. Jesus sent the Advocate – the Holy Spirit – as a connection for everyone with the divine to help them with this independence.
In an organisational sense, what Jesus modelled was the importance of helping others to achieve this type of independence as a central idea. Organisations generally do the opposite – they grow people to expand the organisation, rather than to disperse them I that’s right for them. Some people are better off being dispersed and are led by the Spirit to do so. It is certainly not for the organisation to get in the way of this, but rather to be supportive and helpful in achieving it.
Now, there is another principle that needs to be weighed here – that of “unequal scales” in Proverbs. The act of dispersal needs to be fair to the individual or group being dispersed and also to those funding the organisation. But this balance is generally easily achievable.
Concluding thoughts
We started with the idea of planning and moved through the eight areas we tend to find most issues in working with organisations, particularly businesses. Let me draw the link back to planning.
The reason for sharing all of the eight is to give you some ideas to think about, that may identify where you have areas in your organisation that are out of Biblical order. The key isn’t to worry about it, but rather to think through what help you need from your Father to respond to that. Are there things you can do immediately, just by focusing more? And where are the areas where you will go before the Father and say “honestly, I’ve got nothing”. That’s fine too. You need help, He’s there to give it to you.
There is nothing wrong with a plan that moves you forward a little way. You can re-plan once you’ve got there. Break it down into manageable parts.
More than anything, I want to leave you with this encouragement. If you prepare a plan and the Lord approves it, He will exceed it. Give Him something He can exceed!
For those seeking more information on the practical aspects of some of these issues, I have written on them in my books Chaotic Leadership and Chaotic Mentoring. The “chaotic” refers to the Spirit piece in John 3 I addressed earlier. While these are written for the secular, all of the underpinning is Biblical.