How do you treat people? How do the organizations to which you belong treat people? Your church? Are you expected to sit, listen and then do what you’re told?
Perhaps the most important book I’ll read this year is Gary Hamel’s “What Matters Now.” The noted management thinker proposes a new way of management and leadership in organizations in his latest work.
He tells two stories of organizations–an Anglican parish (England) and a bank (in New Zealand)–whose leaders decided to do things differently. They decided to empower “front line” people to make decisions, get passionate about what they are doing and let them do their work. “If you treat people like adults, they’ll behave as adults,” said one of the leaders.
As a result of reading those stories last night, my mediations this morning massaged that idea. I know “managers” who treat people like children–and they are the kindly father who guides them out of his wisdom. Of course, that doesn’t work today. I am in organizations and I am acquainted with other organizations that are so structured with rules and where the leaders see their main job as retaining their positions that they treat people as children to be led or numbers to stroke their egos about the size of their organizations. Those organizations are doomed. It may be a lingering death or a quick demise, but they are doomed.
My habit to continue to develop? Treat people with whom I interact with respect due to an adult. It may not be easy, but I think that’s what Jesus did. And I’d like to be like that.
Faith Venture 
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