Years ago when I was a store manager Lily would come to the store to have lunch with me. We were walking together during one of those lunch breaks in 1994, when I stopped to correct an employee. Afterwards Lily told me she would never again have lunch with me while I was at work. I asked why. She said because she did not like the way I talked to my people. Later she explained I was too hard. I prided myself on being an honest, but no nonsense store manager, but her criticism bothered me because I have always respected her. She is one of those people who just know when something is not right.
It caused me to earnestly seek the Lord on this matter. I remembered that several years before a pastor told me point blank, "Kmart is your God." I was proud of being a results driven manager, but I remember how angry I was at that pastor. I was so angry we never went back to that church. Was it righteous anger? Anger usually means some housekeeping is necessary and necessary quickly, but I shrugged it off. Lily's comments reminded me of this and I started praying that God would give me a heart for people.
My award for the Store Manager in the district with the most 'fire in the belly' began to taunt me. Very slowly my eyes were opened and I began to see myself as the tyrant I had become. I also began to realize that many of the people who worked in my store were not only more creative, but they were much smarter than I was. Slowly my management style changed from top down to bottom up.
If you are a confrontational top down manager you can make things happen and happen quickly. Driving the people, whatever their sacrifice, instead of the processes will make you successful. Eventually the tyrant is promoted. If the next manager is not quite the monster than those quick results may suffer. Why? Because it is easier to ramrod people with fear and intimidation, short term, than fix the processes that deny long term results. Likewise it is easier to move jobs overseas than improve efficiency and cost to profit ratios here.
If sustainability is the goal than a bottom up style, which demands leadership, not management, is the preference. You don't find too many bottom up leaders in the limelight because they are more interested in the people who got them where they are than being singled out for special recognition.
Today, in nearly every field or endeavor the top down management style is in demand. Results are needed and they are needed quickly. Profit, funding, recognition, is everything and the end justifies the means. Forget the work, sweat and discipline necessary to lose weight, let's go for liposuction. Why work to get a car if I can steal yours? I have to do what I do to please the stockholders. We are a world of stockholders in one degree or another. We have a short cut mentality.
Isn't our cookie cutter, one size fits all attitude the same when it comes to God? Many cries to heaven are, "If you are really God how you could let this happen?" We ask that as if we, you and me and our ancestors had nothing to do with the world we live in.
What if God was a top down manager? Since we are all sinners who would God zap first? Would it be you? Would it be me? Who would be left if all the imperfect, flawed, broken people were given exactly what they deserve?
To be sure, God has a plan and a process in place to ensure eventual success. Notice I said eventual. Imagine the patience and the tolerance required to wait for love to work from the inside out!
Instead of replacing us, God has invested himself within us. Jesus is the process, the redemption, the reconciliation that is necessary to make things right. It is not God's will that any be lost. Maybe things have not been wrapped up because God is waiting on you.
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