In this Bible and Business podcast, Bill English explores how damaging an abusive partner can be to a business partnership. Verbally, emotionally, mentally, or physically abusive partners will likely kill your business and drive top talent away. Watch the video here. Download the slides for this series.
[00:00:18.540] – Bill English
Music and welcome. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. I want to thank you for joining me today. It’s so good to see you again. Listen, in the last series I did a series on partnerships, the ten elements that you need to grow healthy partnerships.
[00:00:38.380] – Bill English
And today I’m going to start kind of the negative side of that, the other side of the coin, so to speak. And we’re going to look at a series here called The Eight as that kill healthy partnerships. So if there’s ten things you need to form a healthy partnership, what are some of the things that can kill a partnership? And today I’m going to start looking at those elements that kill healthy partnerships. Now, this content is taken from my book a Christian Theology, a Business Ownership an Introduction for Christian Entrepreneurs, and what the Bible Says about owning a business.
[00:01:14.260] – Bill English
I’ve also now published recently a condensed or an abridged version of a Christian Theology of Business Ownership. And that book is titled what the Bible Says About Owning a Business. It’s about half the length. I’ve stripped out almost all of the quotes, almost all of the footnotes, and I kind of just get to the point and then I move on. So either of these books will work for you?
[00:01:41.680] – Bill English
What the Bible says about owning a business or a Christian theology of business ownership. The core content is the same. The theology book is just a little bit more in depth and a little bit more academic, as it were. But before we get going, I just want to take another note here about these as. First of all, if you have one of these as, any one of these as, anger, apathy, affairs, abuse, addictions, arrogance, ambiguity, or an autocrat, right?
[00:02:15.630] – Bill English
If you have any one of those, it’s just going to take more cycles and energy and time in order to have a good partnership. If you have two or more of any of these as, then it’s just going to become really difficult to maintain a healthy partnership. And what I say here on this slide is that three or more and your partnership is done. Just pick any three. Just think about a partnership where there’s addictions with a really arrogant partner and that partner’s having affairs, it just isn’t going to work.
[00:02:50.740] – Bill English
Or think about a partner that’s really angry and is really verbally abusive and is a huge autocrat. It’s just not going to work. So pick any three and chances are your partnership is dead. Pick any two and it gets really difficult. But if you have just one of these characteristics in your partnership, you can have a good partnership.
[00:03:14.890] – Bill English
It’ll just take a lot more energy and a lot more cycles on your part to make the partnership work. I’ll also encourage you to head over to Bibleandbusiness.com, where I have some articles and other podcasts. You can also download the slides in PDF format for this broadcast and here on this YouTube channel. If this is helpful to you, I’ll just ask that you subscribe. I try to publish on Saturday mornings at 09:00 a.m.
[00:03:41.590] – Bill English
Central time, my next videos. And so if you just subscribe, I would appreciate it. Okay, let’s get going. Let’s talk about the first A that kills partnerships. And that first A is anger.
[00:03:55.460] – Bill English
Anger is really an emotion that strongly expresses displeasure, as you know. But when a person becomes highly angry, they also can either cause other people to be angry and very argumentative, or they shut down communication and they cause others to walk on eggshells. When it’s you, the owner, who becomes highly angry, you just shut everybody down around you because you have all the power in the room. There’s a power imbalance there. And between the power imbalance and your anger, you’re just going to shut everybody else down around you.
[00:04:30.940] – Bill English
It’s going to kill their creativity. They’re not going to want to collaborate with you. And even if you’re only angry one or 3% of the time, the reality is that that anger can outweigh all of the wonderful calmness and happiness that you get the other 97, 98, 99% of the time. That anger, I can just tell you, it kills the other good times. It also takes a good relationship and makes it bad, and it takes a bad relationship and prolongs it to the point of exhaustion.
[00:05:08.470] – Bill English
So anger in a business partnership is generally not a good thing. So there are a number of sources of anger, you know, hurt, frustration, that kind of thing. But for this presentation, what I want to do here is to focus on one particular kind of source of anger, which I think we often get in business, especially as business owners. And that source is hearing the truth. And what I really mean is the unvarnished truth.
[00:05:39.540] – Bill English
Let’s read from two Chronicles 16, verses seven through ten. At that time, Hannah and I, the Seer, came to ACA, King of Judah, and said to him, because you relied on the king of Aram, and not on the Lord your God, the army of the king of Aram has escaped from your hand. Were not the Kushites and the Libyans a mighty army with great numbers and chariots and horsemen, yet you relied on the Lord, and he delivered them into your hand. For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him. You have done a foolish thing, and from now on, you will be at war.
[00:06:23.960] – Bill English
ACA was angry with the Seer because of this. He was so enraged that he put him in prison. At the same time, ASA brutally oppressed some of the people. So here you have a prophet of God coming to the King of Judah and saying, look, you have made a mistake. You have sinned, and here’s what God is going to do in response to your sin.
[00:06:49.350] – Bill English
And that King, when he hears the truth, he just gets livid. He just gets angry. And you kind of wonder why he’s getting angry, because it’s really about himself. It’s his own dysfunction, it’s his own mistakes that has caused the situation that he is in. And yet he’s projecting his anger onto the messenger rather than taking a look at himself personally, right?
[00:07:14.590] – Bill English
This is why I bake into every company that I ever run here. I bake in this idea that the truth is never the problem. It’s a core value for the business. The truth is never the problem.
[00:07:29.440] – Bill English
Regardless of what’s happening, how we got there might be a problem. How we’re thinking about our current situation might be a problem. But the fact that we are in a situation with certain particulars, certain things that are just evident and truthful, that is not the problem. The truth itself, the raw truth, is never the problem. How we got there, how we’re thinking about it, those all things can be problems, but the truth itself is never the problem.
[00:07:58.380] – Bill English
So let me give you an example. Let’s say that you’re running a company and you decided to take your company out for lunch, and so you took your, I’ll just say, 60 employees out to lunch, and the bill comes up to just say, $2,500. And you kind of get angry, like, man, this shouldn’t be this expensive to take 60 people to lunch. And you know what? The truth is not the fact that you spent $2,500 to take your employees to lunch is not the problem.
[00:08:33.690] – Bill English
The problem is you didn’t count the cost before you went, right? So that’s just kind of a weird or an absurd example of the fact that the truth is never the problem. And what this does is that, by the way, if you’re Hannah and I the prophet here, how likely are you to go back and talk to ASA and say a second time and say, you’ve really screwed up. Here’s what God says. You’re going to be really hesitant because the last time he put you in jail and he oppressed you and some of your people, right?
[00:09:10.060] – Bill English
So here what I like about this, is this enables everybody in your company to talk about the truth without getting angry. And so I just leave this with you as a little bit of a bunny trail here, a little bit of a side note. But just remember that the truth is never the problem, and it’s never the problem in your partnership either, okay? So there are other sources of anger. Like I said earlier, you can be hurt.
[00:09:38.760] – Bill English
You can have your goals that are blocked by somebody else. You can be afraid. Maybe you’re arrogant. Arrogant people are often very angry because they feel slighted and they feel disrespected when people disagree with them, when reality. Other people are just trying to collaborate and point out some problems.
[00:09:57.310] – Bill English
And the arrogant people take it as personally. They take it as a personal front. Arrogance, really. That’s why we’re going to get to it later on in this series. Angry people, just so you know, they make horrible partners.
[00:10:15.710] – Bill English
People who get angry easily are not good partners. Your staff isn’t going to want to be around them. Frankly, you’re not going to want to be around them either. So I would just encourage you to remember that they do not make good partners and they’re very difficult people to work with. I think whatever success you have in business with an angry person is going to be diminished compared to what it could have been had they been able to keep their anger in check or had they been healed enough by the Lord that they were genuinely not angry people.
[00:10:49.390] – Bill English
So just something for you to think about there, whatever success you do have. I look at a Steve Jobs who is a really a very abusive, angry person at points internally with his staff. I think he could have even been more successful. Bill Gates was that way sometimes too. He could get pretty angry behind closed doors.
[00:11:12.100] – Bill English
Many presidents get that way, especially a couple of our more recent presidents. And you know, you just your effectiveness is diminished when your anger takes over. And the reason is because when emotions run high, sense runs low. And when a strong anger is running high, you’re not thinking clearly. And so whatever success you have in business with an angry person is probably diminished success compared to what it could have been.
[00:11:46.310] – Bill English
And here’s a warning for all Christians who are business owners. Using anger as a management tool to motivate your employees or to manipulate them into action is a particularly pathetic way to lead. I think about a Bobby Knight who used anger for 30 years to try to motivate his teams. And it motivated some of his players, but not all of them.
[00:12:13.990] – Bill English
He was known at the time because I grew up in Indiana and played basketball and three years of varsity ball when Bobby Knight was at his zenith at Indiana University. And I just remember really admiring him growing up and kind of hoping I could play for him someday. Now, as an adult, I would have never wanted to play for him, ever. The guy was verbally and physically abusive to his players for years and no one really said anything. And I think that is a particularly pathetic way to lead.
[00:12:54.280] – Bill English
The purposeful use of anger as a management tool should never be characteristic of a Christian leader in business. And there might be some of disagree with me, and this is by the way, this is particularly true in the church where you have pastors who have very few people management skills, and so they default to anger as a way to get their staff in line. And I just don’t respect that. In fact, I remember asking an associate pastor at a rather large church that I attended for a while do you have to be a horse’s ass to be a senior pastor of a large church? Because every senior pastor of a large church I’ve ever been to is a poweroriented angry guy behind closed doors.
[00:13:48.570] – Bill English
And I think that’s wrong and it says a lot about how we’re not training our pastors to be solid leaders. And it might actually be an indication that we’re allowing our churches to get too large and that maybe instead of growing a church to ten or 150, maybe they needed to plant ten or 15 churches and keep them at 1000 or 1500. So again, the purposeful use of anger as a management tool. I don’t respect it and I don’t recommend it and I do not believe that it should be a part of a Christian leader in business or in ministry. Proverbs 22, 24 and 25 do not associate with a man given to anger or go with a hot tempered man or you yourself will learn his ways and find a snare for yourself.
[00:14:43.690] – Bill English
Okay? So if you’ve got an angry pastor, you may have to change churches. If you’re an angry business leader, you need to get on your knees and figure this out because this is not anger is not something that God values in his people and in his stewards.
[00:15:04.240] – Bill English
Instead, we should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry. For man’s, anger does not produce the righteous life that God desires. Take this to the bank, man’s. Anger does not produce the righteous life that God desires. When you pound on your employees through anger to get certain results from them, you are doing it the wrong way, quite frankly.
[00:15:29.260] – Bill English
And what you think is getting results is not getting you the results that you really want. You might get some short term results, but the long term results are that they’re going to avoid you. They’re going to stay away from you and they’re going to find other jobs and they will not leave your company. They will leave you. And that is not a good place for you to be.
[00:15:50.430] – Bill English
Highly angry business owners have mediocre talent on their staff because top talent doesn’t stay for that. They don’t stick around to work for an angry guy. Top talent goes somewhere else where frankly, they can lead. They can be themselves. They’re respected, they’re valued, they’re listened to, and they don’t have to argue with somebody every day or once a week or something like that.
[00:16:15.490] – Bill English
So every time I have consulted with a business where the owner has been an angry person, that owner has had mediocre talent around him and his business. And then of course that reinforces the owner’s idea that, my gosh, I’m the only one talented here. Nobody is as talented as I am because look at all these people around me. They can’t do this and they can’t do that. They’re not even beginning to live up to the standards that I have for them.
[00:16:45.780] – Bill English
And that’s just arrogance and pride. And it’s anger that has created a mediocre environment. And angry owners need to get a hold of their anger. And angry partners need to either get a hold of their partner or their anger, or they need to leave the partnership. So in review, anger is the distancing emotion that damages a partnership in a business when present in a consistent way.
[00:17:16.080] – Bill English
Christians in business should stay away from angry people. We saw that in proverbs. And Christians in business should not be characterized by anger. We saw that in the James passage. So next week we’re going to look at Apathy and we’re going to look at what apathy is and how it can kill a partnership.
[00:17:36.190] – Bill English
I want to thank you for joining me today. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. So good to have you aboard. And if this is helpful to you at all, just drop me a line at Bill@bibleandbusiness.com. I’d love to hear from you.
[00:17:52.210] – Bill English
So until next week, I want to say have a great week and a great day, and I give you the blessings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Take care.