In this Bible and Business episode, we start a new series on Becoming Free From the Bondage of Sin. This series will cover Chapter 2 in the book A Christian Theology of Business Owners, written by Bill English. Many Christian business owners and leaders struggle with persistent, private sin. This series will give those living in bondage to sin a Biblical, practical way out of their sin. You can view the companion video at the Bible and Business YouTube channel. You can also download the slides for this series from the download section on this web site.
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Bill English [00:00:05] And welcome back. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. If you’re watching this particular episode or listening to this podcast, that means you’re in chapter two of my book, A Christian Theology of Business Ownership. This series is an eight part series, which we’ll talk about the content that is in Chapter two, becoming free from the bondage of Sin.
Bill English [00:00:28] Before we dove into our topic today about common ownership dysfunctions, I’ll invite you to head over to our website. Bibleandbusiness.com, where you can download the slides for this video series in PDF format and you can read some articles about how to become a better business owner. You can listen to my podcasts, participate in our surveys, and also register online for our CEO and ownership groups that I run every six weeks on a Saturday morning. So feel free to head over to Bibleandbusiness.com and I’ll also ask you to take a moment and subscribe to my newsletter as well.
Bill English [00:01:08] So today’s topic is about common ownership dysfunctions. And here’s really the big idea. Kind of a central idea. It’s this: an owner’s personal dysfunction is going to be imprinted on to the business or the organization that she leads and will present itself as a business problem that requires business solutions rather than a personal problem that requires personal resolution on the part of the owner. In other words, each business owner and I include myself in this because I’m a business owner too. Each business owner has – we each have our own dysfunctions. And these dysfunctions get imprinted onto our business in a way that creates problems in our business. And as a result, we think of the resolution to those problems as being something that is a business problem, that requires a business solution, rather than looking at ourselves and saying, boy, you know, if I improved in this area, that would also improve the operations in my business.
Bill English [00:02:15] This comes really from Second Chronicles Chapter seven verses 13 through 14. This really occurred to me about six or eight years ago when I was reading this in my personal devotions. So let me read these two verses with you: “when I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain or command the locus to devour the land or some pestilence among my people. If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”.
Bill English [00:02:55] Now look at that last phrase, heal their land. That’s emphasized for a reason. You see, organizations like I’ve already said, always take on the personality of their leader. And to the extent that you live with sin or dysfunction in your personal life and in your professional life, then you hinder your ability to faithfully steward your business. In addition, your organization is going to end up having entrenched problems that are a direct result of your personal dysfunctions and potentially your personal sins. Now, you may not see your problems that you’re experiencing in your business as relating to you, but others are going to see it. And sometimes prayer is going to be the only tool to have to resolve the problems that we’re facing. But there will be other times when we’re going to need professional help or we’re going to need somebody to step into our life to hold us accountable to certain things. The point is, is that we need to work on ourselves not only to improve our walk with God and our daily functioning in life, but also also to improve the operations in our business.
Bill English [00:04:11] Now, let me be clear about something. Dysfunction is not always sin. Sin is always dysfunction. But dysfunction is not always sin. And here’s an example. As a leader, you might not be a person who’s well organized, so you might not be able to find critical information quickly because you have misplaced it. And sometimes you won’t be able to be effective in meetings or effective on a phone call as a result of this. That’s an example of where you might be dysfunctional, but you’re not being sinful. So what I’d like to do here is to go over some common ownership dysfunctions and the common results that that come from these dysfunctions. And I’m going to encourage you, if you’re a business leader, business owner, a ministry leader, a leader of any kind, I’m going to encourage you to take a hard look at yourself as we go through this list. If you’re like me, you’re going to find yourself on this list somewhere, maybe more than once. Probably more than once, actually, like I do. And I think it’s going to be good for both of us, for both you and I, to really face into some of the dysfunctions and potential sense that we have and say, you know, this is something I need to shore up within myself.
Bill English [00:05:27] So, look, if you’re an owner or a leader who avoids conflict, for example, you’re probably going to lose top talent because top talent likes to be at organizations where conflict is resolved. You might be tolerating some incivility on your staff, which is going to kill your staff’s productivity. You may not have good teamwork because there’s constant fighting between your departments, people kind of snipping and sniping at each other. You may even have employees who refuse to work with other employees because you’re not facing into the conflicts on your staff.
Bill English [00:06:02] You may even procrastinate on difficult decisions because you know that that difficult decision is going to create conflict. Not everybody’s going to like it. It’s going to create conflict. And you avoid conflict, so you avoid difficult decisions.
Bill English [00:06:16] Another area where owners are commonly dysfunctional is that they tend to not trust easily. I’ve known a number of of owners who do not trust, so they do not delegate well. And when you hire top talent, top talent wants to be trusted and they want you to delegate decisional and other kinds of authority to them so that they can do their job. If you don’t do that, you’re going to lose them and you’re going to be left with nothing but mediocre talent in your company. Sometimes, if you don’t trust easily, you’re going to be highly secretive and you’re going to be highly secretive. And you might also be overly micromanaging other people, such that all decisions route through you no matter how small they are. They route through you. And if you’re real secretive with your banker, you’re secretive with your lawyer, you’re secretive with your other trusted advisers. If you even have trusted advisers, you’re going to find that you’re going to be isolated and you’re not going to get a lot of mileage out of them. And then you’re going to complain. Guess what? You’re going to complain that they that they just cost you money and don’t provide you any real value. Well, the reason they don’t provide you value is because you don’t trust them and you’re not opening up to them and you’re not fully disclosing to them the good and the bad of what’s going on in your in your business.
Bill English [00:07:37] And just a note here on bankers. Never surprise your banker. Be open and honest with your banker. You’ll be surprised at how many bankers will work with you. If you’re really honest with them about what’s going on in your company, not just the good stuff, but the bad stuff too. You might be an owner that’s kind of arrogant. And if you’re arrogant, guess what? You’re going to believe that you’re right about most things, even those things that are well outside your training and competency areas. And as a result, you’re going to demand perfection from other people, but you’re not going to demand it from yourself. And a lot of arrogant owners that I’ve met do not know the difference between being foolishly stubborn and tenaciously committed. They become foolishly stubborn, and they keep going after things and after goals that other people look at them and go, We don’t know why they’re doing this. They’re never going to achieve this. And the owner, because they’re arrogant, says, No, I can will my way into success here. But circumstances and other other people in the situation say, no, you’re not going to be successful here and you keep trying and you keep failing and you lose the confidence of other people around you because you don’t know the difference between being foolishly, stubborn and tenaciously committed.
Bill English [00:08:59] Sometimes owners do not really engage with reality. They live in the future rather than the present, and they excuse bad behavior because they perceive a value that a particular employee brings as being more valuable than the bad behavior that the employee exhibits. And they don’t understand the reality that bad behavior incivility just kills the culture of your organization. You need a great culture in your organization. You can have a mediocre strategy and a great culture. And that culture will execute that mediocre strategy pretty well. And you’re going to get a lot of miles out of that strategy. But you can have the best strategy in the world. And if you have a bad culture, guess what? Your strategy is going nowhere. Good culture trumps strategy. You’ve got to be able to have a good culture. And to do that, you have to engage in reality, engage with what is not with what you wish was. And so one of the ways you can look at that is a standard operating principle that I’ve mentioned in other podcasts and videos. And it’s this: the truth is never the problem. Make sure that you’re engaging in the truth, because if you’re engaging in the truth, what you’re not engaging in is fantasy. You’re not engaging in fantasy. You’re engaging in the truth. So make sure that you’re engaging in reality and that you’re dealing with the truth. And remember that the truth is your friend. It’s not your problem. Another common ownership dysfunction is is you just work too much.
Bill English [00:10:34] Examples of this or results of this is that you work to the point of missing important family or church events. If you’re doing emails at your kids weddings, you’re working too hard. If you’re doing emails on Thanksgiving or Christmas, you know what? You’re working too hard. If you’re doing emails during church, you’re working too hard. Okay. And if you have intake of taking a vacation or taking some time off in the last couple of years, you know what? You’re working too hard. And if you think you can’t get away from your business because it’ll fall apart, then you haven’t trained your staff well enough. You haven’t trained your staff well enough to get away. If you can’t take at least two weeks away from your company and know that everything will be okay, then you haven’t trained your staff well enough. You haven’t delegated enough. You’re micromanaging too much. Another common ownership dysfunction is that your passion for your business is out of balance. Here, the results look like this. You don’t have any real interests outside of your business and you neglect your family time and missed significant family events due to your work. I’ve seen this more than once where business owners get to the end, they get to, you know, mid-sixties, early seventies, and they don’t know what to do with their lives because they don’t have anything else in their life to go do. They don’t have any passions outside of their work. You need to have something outside of your business, outside of your work, outside of your leadership role that is really fulfilling for you. For me, it’s writing books and producing content and doing these videos right and doing these podcasts. I don’t get paid to do this. It’s my passion. It’s my call. I have a I have a business that I’m running right now that has 700 employees. I love doing that. I love leading an organization, but it’s not the only thing I do. And you know what? I take 24 to 36 hours every weekend and I shut off email and I don’t respond to email or do any work. You need to have balance in your life.
Bill English [00:12:46] Some business owners are really hot tempered. They just get mad easily. I’ve met a few of these. They’re not fun people to be around, and the results are that the staff doesn’t give the owner bad news because they don’t want to incur the wrath. So the owner doesn’t have good information to work with. The owner thinks that people lie to him or her. That’s not a good place to be. And when the owner is really hot tempered and gets mad at somebody, they always create conflict. And when they do that and it doesn’t get resolved, people shut down or they stuff their emotions or they stuff their own anger or they stuff their own resentment towards the owner. If you’re an owner that can become angry in a matter of seconds, you have a real problem on your hand. And it’s not a business problem. It’s a you problem. And you need to get that resolved. You need to get on your knees before God and figure out what’s behind your anger. And you may need to go get professional help to get that resolved. Another issue or another common ownership dysfunction is that you make excuses. When you don’t perform well, your own underachievement is excused, or you blame outside forces or other people for why you are not doing well in execution of your role as an owner. When the employees execute better than the owner, you have a problem. I’m the person who should execute better than anybody else in your business is you. And when you don’t do well, when you make mistakes, you need to own that. And you need to own that in front of your employees. A lot of owners lead through power. That can be really nice. Some of the results here, they can be really nice in public, but they can be very mean behind closed doors. A lot of these power oriented CEOs and owners also have hot tempers. By the way, when you’re a person who leads through power, you’re going to have a tendency to disrespect other people. I’ve known these kind of leaders to be just plain mean to their employees and to remind others that they are the owner. You do this because I’m the owner, and if you find those words or those kind of words coming out of your mouth, that means you’re leading through power. You’re not leading through servant leadership, which is a biblical model. And you have some real dysfunction that you need to take care of.
Bill English [00:15:13] Finally, another common ownership dysfunction is that they are impulsive. They’re like a they’re like a squirrel. They just go after every shiny new thing and they refocus their staff every day or every week or every month or quarter on some new, important goal that is disconnected from the last important goal. And I want you to take this hill today, but I want you to take that hill tomorrow and forget about this other hill. What that means is that you’re really a moving target. And when you when you create everything or create all these important emergencies, one right after the other, you know what? If everything’s an emergency, nothing’s an emergency, and your staff just kind of shuts down. You’re probably the kind of person, if you’re highly impulsive, that you do not assess risks when making significant decisions, you make a decision quickly. And then when you see the negative results, you pull that decision back and you and you make another decision. And you, in this push pull that happens with your staff, causes top talent to leave. Mediocre talent stays. Because you know what? I got a job and it’s only 40 hours a week. And I just put up with the owner and then and then I go doing my thing on the weekends. And your business is never really going to go anywhere because you can’t implement a long term strategy. You’re really too impulsive. The other thing about impulsiveness is that you’ll tend to make decisions without critical information and you’ll, in your kind of pride yourself a little bit on making decisions on instinct or intuition. And that’s good. I’m not saying don’t make decisions based on intuition. Just make sure you have all the critical information before you move forward. Here’s my challenge. I’ve mentioned a number of common ownership dysfunctions here. Maybe I’ve been a little harsh, a couple points. But look, I think you need to take a moment and check yourself against these common dysfunctions. If some are persistently present, if some of these dysfunctions are persistently present, then you need to take time to sit down with God and go through them. You need to hear his voice and begin the process of letting God transform you so that those two dysfunctions are at least lessened, if not mitigated. This is the beginning of you facing your dysfunctions and becoming free from the bondage of sin. And you’re going to need to do this. This is necessary for you and I to do this. If we’re going to be the business owners God desires us to be. This is something that we have to do if we’re really going to steward the businesses the way God intended. If we’re going to steward the organizations that He has entrusted to us as leaders, if we’re really going to do that. If we’re really going to step forward for God’s kingdom in the marketplace, then we have to look at ourselves. And this isn’t a one and done thing. We’re going to do this for the rest of our lives. We’re going to look at ourselves for the rest of our lives and try to improve ourselves as best we can. Moving forward.
Bill English [00:18:26] So here’s our lesson that we learned today. Only one. Here it is. Our personal dysfunction will become imprinted onto our business, and we’ll tend to see this as a business problem to solve rather than a personal problem that we need to address. The lesson is let’s address our personal problems as best we can. Now, in our next episode, in part two of this eight part series on becoming free from the Bondage of Sin, we’re going to look at this concept that bondage to sin is more than addictions. What a lot of Christians here about bondage descend. They immediately think of alcoholism or drug abuse or being addicted to pornography or something like that. And what I’m going to suggest in the next episode is that bondage to sin is a much broader concept than simply being addicted to something as we think of that in the American vernacular. Hey, I want to thank you for joining me today. I look forward to seeing you next time. And until then, I hope we go out and make it a great day. Take care.