Anna English
Hello, I’m Annie English, and I want to welcome you to another episode of Profiles and Stewardship, a podcast where my dad, Bill English, has conversations with business leaders about how they integrate their role as a leader in business with their faith in Jesus Christ. Today, Bill is talking with Dr. Dale Hutchcraft, professor at the University of Northwestern St. Paul. Bill and Dale will be discussing Christians leading in business and how a servant leadership approach is the better way to lead than an authoritarian or top down approach. So if you’re a Christian who leads in business, I think you’ll find their conversations to be helpful to you as you grow in your leadership skills. Now I invite you to sit back, relax, and listen as Bill and Dale unpack a servant leadership approach to leading in business. Now, here’s my dad, Bill English.
Bill English
Thank you, Anna. I’m Bill English, the publisher here at Bible and Business. And I want to welcome today Dr. Dale Hutchcraft, who’s a former professor or current professor at Northwestern.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Still part of the time, I can.
Bill English
Say that I have a college professor with me from the University of Northwestern St. Paul in Roseville, Minnesota. Today we’re going to be talking about Christians in leadership and really kind of two different veins here, both of them business related. The first vein is Christians who are in leadership in for profit businesses like a three M, a Medtronic, a GM, a Chrysler, one of those business where you are middle manager. And then the other context that we’ll refer to from time to time are Christian business owners. But Dale, welcome. Glad you’re here. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? Thanks for joining us today.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Good to be here. I’ve been married to my lovely wife Kathy for 50 years now. I have two sons and an adopted daughter, and we between them have 15 grandchildren that we lost one here a few years ago. I pastored for about 28 years, went and got a PhD in leadership and entrepreneurship and started teaching at the University of Northwestern St. Paul. And now I’m semi retired and do freelance work. And my latest project is helping a larger church in California put together a mission training program for their people. So that’s it in a nutshell.
Bill English
Well, you’re staying busy, aren’t you?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
That’s right.
Bill English
So Dale and we met through the University of Northwestern. Of course. I’m on Faith Radio over there, have been now starting my 8th year. Dale, can you believe it? Yeah, it’s hard to believe that kept me around that long. That’s really what I am.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
That’s not what I’ve had.
Bill English
But I had the privilege of teaching a class or two over there under the auspices of Dale and his leadership. And I’ve just enjoyed my friendship over the years with you. So let’s get going. Let’s talk about some Biblical verses. So the first thing we want to talk about today is the biblical foundation for Christian Leadership. Dale when you think about what are the core passages in the Bible that says this describes leadership, this defines leadership from God’s perspective. What are one to three passages that come to your mind?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Well, the first couple of passages are foundational for all believers, but I think we lose sight of them when we get involved in business or government or education. And that’s John 638 that just simply says jesus is saying, I didn’t come here on my own will, I came here to do the will of the Father that sent me. And I think constantly if you’re in a position of leadership, I’ve had a lot of people say, well, I’m not like somebody CEO doesn’t have anybody they report to. We all have somebody to report to basically accept the Father. And even Jesus had some follower leader dynamics in that he was here to do the will of the Father. And I think one of the things that we have to keep in perspective, constant perspective, is just exactly that. And then of course, the next one for me that I always need to keep in mind is the great commandment love the Lord thy God with all your heart and your mind and all your soul. And the second commandment is likened to the first, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Two things there we need to keep in mind that our first allegiance is our relationship to God and our love of Him.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
And that love is demonstrated by faith that results in obedience. And then the second one is to love our neighbors as ourselves. And love is just not I have warm tingly feelings toward them. Love is taking those actions that are to do what is best for the individual love. And the third one generally that I put in there is the Matthew 20 that says we’re to be servants. Now, the first verse I shared with you demonstrates that Jesus came here with a mission. And one of the things that we don’t notice about Jesus is everything was subservient to the mission, which was to bring glory to God and establish the kingdom. And so when we focus on the servant leadership dynamic of Jesus’s life, what happens is we go, oh, we’re just supposed to be servants. No, we’re supposed to be transformative. But the dynamic that is takes place in our transformative is we’re servants. And then being the Old Testament guy that I am, I have one Old Testament. I know you said just three, but Psalm 78 72 basically says this the upright heart, he shepherd them. We have to have a right heart.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
The dynamic of leadership is shepherding and somewhere along the line someday maybe we can go into that greater detail and to guide them. And so it involves a heart and a skillful or skilled hand. So there’s competencies of leadership. It’s just not I have a heart for people and I want to improve the situation. It also has to be that there is certain competencies. And so for me, and what I often express to people in various venues is that is the core. I’m here to do the will of my father, no matter what I am teacher, businessman, middle manager. My son just went or grandson, 17 year old grandson just went to work for Taco Bell. We had a conversation. The essence of what I said is, you’re there to do the will of the father. Yes, you’re serving Tacos and Burritos, but you’re there to do the will of the father. Great commandment. You’re a servant. You build into people’s lives. And then lastly, you got to have a heart for leadering, and you get to shepherd people, and you got to have the skill to do it.
Bill English
That really flies in the face of the power model of leadership, right? So what you’re talking about is that leadership really comes more from who we are and who Christ has transformed us into being, as opposed to a leader who takes the power model and just says, this is my decision. Go do what I’ve told you to do, and I’m the one to hold you accountable, to get your work done and that kind of thing. Is that accurate to the way you’re thinking?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Very much so. Some of that goes clear back to my Navy days. I had a situation. I had a commanding officer that got very involved in making sure his NCOs understood some things about leadership, and it wasn’t totally understanding. And one night we were on the bridge together. We had an anchor watch so that the anchor didn’t move, and he just came up and was watching me do my thing. So I got brave and I said, sir, you spend a lot of time with your NCOs more than most commanding officers do. Why the comments stayed with me for all this time. And it also really plugs into business, and it really plugs in just the Christian leadership and being a pastor even. And he said, look, when I went to the academy, I could boil down their leadership to three things. And he says, in fact, couple my professor said, here’s the three points of leadership for you as a Navy officer, a commanding officer. One, you have to make sure that you and your troops can accomplish your mission. And I kind of went competence.
Bill English
Right? That’s competence.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Competence. And I sat there and I went, oh, wow. In essence, the same thing is true for the Christian life. If you’re leading other Christians and you’re discipling, you need to make sure that they can accomplish their mission. Then the second one was, I am responsible for taking care of the troops. Now, the thing he made there is while he is responsible for taking care of the troops, he says, But I have officers and non commissioned officers that I oversee to make sure they do the job of taking care of the troops. Made me think of Jesus feeding the 5000. He did it, but the disciples were caring the food and making sure everybody got fed. The second 3rd thing he says, my third thing is I’m responsible to Bake leaders or develop leaders. And I looked at him and I said, sir, I don’t plan to spend the rest of my life in the United States Navy. He says, you’re probably right, Hutch. But my guess is you’re going to be leading somewhere and my job is to prepare you for wherever you’re going to lead.
Bill English
So it sounds like it’s competence, accountability and development.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Exactly.
Bill English
When you were going through those things, I was thinking that to do those three things right, to develop to use that word in a different way, to develop competence, to hold people accountable and then to help them develop professionally takes a lot more out of the leader in that servant model than the power model, where I just get to tell you what to do, and I hold you accountable to get your stuff done. And that’s just the end of what I need to do. In other words, it seems to me like the power model that is authoritarian based doesn’t really require much from the individual, him or herself. But the servant leadership model that you’re talking about, that focuses on the competence and the accountability and the professional development, that takes a lot more inside of a person. It takes a lot more of their persona in order to do that. I wonder if you have encountered people or leaders who like the power model and they get scared when they think about the servant model because they know kind of internally that they don’t have what it takes to do the servant model well.
Bill English
So they revert back or they fall back to the power model. I’m wondering if you’ve ever encountered that.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Yes, a lot of times. And in fact, I have to admit, not only as a pastor, I also had a small business and had employees and then was a dean of the school for a while. And I would have to admit that it’s a battle of any leader to stay in a transformative servant leadership model and not slide back into the power model because as you pointed out, it is just easier. It’s almost like the T shirt that sometimes you and I may have wore that says I’m dad, that’s why I wore that.
Bill English
But I would like the coffee mug.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Yeah, in many instances and I think it really comes down. We read a lot about emotional intelligence today and what makes it so much work is you have to be both self aware and socially aware. You have to be aware of you yourself and your own emotions and how things function within you, which takes work to know yourself. But it also means that you have to understand your environment that you’re operating in. You have to understand the people you’re working with and that just takes work and it’s just flat out easier to go just do it.
Bill English
I’ve had managers who have reported to me and they talk about how they and sometimes in my one on one with them, I’ll ask them about their direct reports and how are they doing, and you get a glimpse into how they manage. They sometimes have more of a power model because they don’t know how to train people, they don’t know how to encourage them, they don’t know how to develop them. So that’s an interesting dynamic. Look, let’s move along. Let’s talk about one of the questions that was in the marketing materials for this. How does a Christian in a mid level management, how did they manage up when they have an ungodly Narcissistic boss and still maintain the love and the persona of Jesus Christ in their lives? In other words, you got a boss who’s a jerk. How does a Christian handle that in business?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Yeah, well, that’s always a great question. I’m going to try and keep it short and sweet. First of all, again, you want to do what’s best for your organization and what’s best for your boss, even though your boss may be a cranky crowd or even in some ways diametrically opposed to the way you live your life. You and I share some things in common from the standpoint of being very interested in Daniel and Joseph, and you’ve talked about possibly exploring that in terms of middle management in this very question. Throughout the years, I’ve joked about writing a book entitled The Monkey in the Middle, although it’s probably very you might.
Bill English
Want to get a different title there.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Yeah, I might want to get a different title, but it came from the fact that in working with people that were taking graduate degrees that were in middle management, that sometimes they felt like they were the monkey in the middle. And so I would say that there’s just some common things. You got to keep the vision and mission of the organization in toe and work from that aspect so that you stay focused on what is the goal, not the individual’s personality. And again, this is kind of like proverbs it’s the general picture. The other thing is you have to take it as more than a job. You have to say, Look, I have a commitment to serve this organization. For now, it goes back to one of the first items we talked about. This is where God has placed me for this place and this time we see that in Joseph as well. I would probably put it down to maybe five different things. I would say you got to consistently do the right thing. No matter what’s flying at you from the bosses in, you have to do the right thing. The second thing is whether he’s a good boss or she’s a good boss or they’re a bad boss or an in between boss, they’re still your boss.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
You have to submit to authority. That’s something we don’t like to talk about. The word submit is one we don’t like to use today in any context. But that’s the boss generally. My thing is, unless you are told to do something illegal or immoral, illegal is the state says you can’t do that, or the state says you should do it this way or it is immoral, it goes against God’s law and practices. Then if they tell you to do something, you can always respectfully point out the consequences to that. You can respectfully say, is this really what you want to do? Because this is what might happen. But when they finally say, no, this is the way I want it to be done, you say, as we used to say in the Navy, aye, sir, I understand, and I will carry out that order. And the other issue, of course, is there are things that may be legal, but you still may find yourself in a place where they may not necessarily be moral. And one of the things at that point is if you’re in a position of following, you have to trust God in every situation like that.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Because if you have a boss that is arbitrary, capricious, narcissistic, and we could go in and define each of those terms, but essentially a bad boss, the reality is, at any point in time they could turn on you and say in those famous words from the TV show, you’re Fired, depending on Dale.
Bill English
I look at that, though, and I say, because I’m a consultant, right, I’m a partner at the Platinum Group and we do all kinds of business consulting. But I look at my life as I’m always within 15 minutes of getting fired. And people kind of wonder about that when I say that. But it’s because I know that if I get fired, god has something else. I’m not whimsical about it. I don’t enjoy getting fired. I don’t enjoy a customer saying, we’re just not going to use your services anymore, so forth and so on. It’s not fun. But I think people need to remember that losing a job is often God’s way or can be God’s way of saying, I have something better for you and we shouldn’t be afraid to walk away from a job.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Yeah, we need to be ready to accept the consequences and at the same time realize the consequences of being doing the right thing may be God’s way of, as you said, taking you into some other situation. I think you have to look at just exactly that way. The other thing is you take the initiative, and I often say it’s taking the initiative in a couple of different ways. One is just taking the initiative and doing your job, not necessarily waiting to be told what to do, but gaining the idea of what needs to be done when and doing leadership, but not in a threatening fashion. The second thing that I say you need to take the initiative of is this especially true of Narcissistic leaders. But there’s a tension there. On one hand, they don’t want people close. They are frightened of people. They’re always worried about somebody who’s going to overtake them and they’re not going to be in the limelight anymore. Somebody else is going to be in the limelight. And yet they are in desperate need of people. And deep down, oftentimes many of them understand that they need people who will tell them the truth.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Max Dupree once said that the first job of a leader is to define reality. And I would say that’s true whether you’re the CEO or you’re the middle management or if you’re even working on the line. You need to give honest feedback and you need to define what is truly there. Not what people would like the truth to be, but what the truth really is. And so also take the initiative and puts a great deal of onus and responsibility on the employee or the middle management individual. But taking the responsibility to become I almost hate to use the word friend there might be a better word. But being the colleague, the second fiddle, the individual that gives stability and balance to the individual. And you see that with Daniel. You really see it with Daniel.
Bill English
I’m going to try this. I haven’t done this yet with these. I’m going to try and share a screen real quick here because what you’re talking about, this Narcissistic guy, got me to thinking about this book that I’ve read. I don’t know if you’ve ever read this book. I’m going to share my other screen here just momentarily.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Okay?
Bill English
But the book is called Not Sharing. Okie dokie. There it is. The book is called Snakes in Suits. Psychopath, go to work.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Yes.
Bill English
And it’s written by a guy named Paul Babiak or babyak, I’m not sure how to say his last name. And Robert Hare and I’ll stop sharing the screen now and just come back to us. He was doing a psychological study of people who were on the fast track to upper management in Fortune Five Hundred s. And he was across industry verticals and across different men and women and other demographics. But what he noticed is that in over 200 of them, when they did their psychological testing with him, that they scored well outside the normal range for the population for traits that were associated with sociopathy or psychopathology. And he started to study them, and he realized he had stumbled onto something. And so Snakes and Suits, for those who are watching and listening and who will be watching and listening in the future. If you have a difficult, overbearing Narcissistic boss, you may want to take a look at that book, Snakes and Source. I don’t know dale, have you ever read that book or taking a look at it?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
I have taken a look at it and it’s on my reading shelf right now. To go into deeper, I’m just intrigued because it seems that it follows many of the things that I have experienced and studied myself. And so that’s why I say Nebuchadnezzar was not a nice man by any stretch of the imagination. Daniel was being able to serve him in such a way that he became a trusted individual. Probably the biggest point of trust came when Nebuchadnezzar went crazy, started eating grass, living like an animal. Did anybody ever ask, who do you think ran the kingdom for those seven years? Daniel did.
Bill English
Yeah.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
And then when Nebuchadnezzar came back to his senses, daniel just went, here it is, Nebbokenessor. Now, I have to be real honest. I think if Nebuchadnezzar went crazy and I could grab the reins of power and hold them for myself and pass them down onto my children, I’ve been really tempted to do that. Please don’t think I’m kindly to me, but Daniel didn’t. And that type of trust that I have worked for some people that I’m not going to say they were bad bosses, but had some flaws that made it difficult to work with them.
Bill English
Let’s recap here, Dale. For those who are working with ungodly, narcissistic, difficult bosses who might be jerks, let’s recap. So what you’re saying is, and I’ve just kind of jotted some notes here, keep the mission and the vision of the organization at the forefront. And I have to say, I’m a CEO of a home care agency here in Minnesota. We got almost 700 employees. I listen to advice from my management team much more readily if they can connect the advice to the vision and the mission of our organization. If they come in and say, bill, if this is our mission, then we really need to take a look at X, Y or Z. Right?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Right.
Bill English
The second thing is to keep God’s call in mind and to keep it at the forefront. And that will also help us to do the right thing. That’s number three. Number four, proper submission to authority and really, submission to proper authority might be the better way to say that. Let’s not do anything illegal or immoral and take the initiative to do your job and do a good job. And I think that’s in line with what the scriptures would say.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
I think I quickly add one more to that. Do not take attacks personally.
Bill English
That’s really hard to do. Your backside. Yeah, that’s just tough to do.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
But we see that in Joseph.
Bill English
Oh, with Pottifer.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Yeah.
Bill English
Yeah, I got you. Yeah. He’s in prison going, Why am I here? I didn’t do anything. All right. There is a thing called moral courage. Let’s shift gears to moral courage. Dale there’s a thing called moral courage. We just talked about doing the right.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Thing to do the right thing.
Bill English
What’s moral courage?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Moral courage, if I was to define it as simply the ability to take action even though there might be adverse consequences and it’s taking the right actions. So when you’re confronted years ago, when I was in St. Louis, Missouri, I was a friend of a young middle management individual that was given the task of entertaining some people that came in from overseas. I can’t remember the country exactly. And he was basically told to give them a good time. And the good time basically didn’t fall into his Christian morals. And he just said, I can’t do that.
Bill English
Right.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
I just can’t do that. And they said, well, if you can’t do that, then you can’t do your job. You’re fired.
Bill English
That’s moral courage again, being willing to be fired, right?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Yeah. And holding onto your job, loosely realizing that it’s in the hands of God, which encompasses everything from the rise and fall of governments to being carried off from your hometown to Jerusalem to Babylonia to be a servant. So moral courage is really having the worldview and having the Scripture in your life in such a way that you know what is right. And moral courage is the doing what is right to oversimplify it.
Bill English
So what happens? I think I know what you’re going to answer here, which seemed to me that if a Christian leader lacks moral courage and I’ve been under pastors and I’ve been under leaders in business who are Christians who lacked moral courage. And in the church, what I found is that when the Scriptures came to difficult conversations, let’s say they’re preaching through a book and they come to a difficult conversation, the pastor just glosses it. They just kind of gloss over it and they don’t really deal with the difficult conversation that the Scripture is giving us in business. I see that as just capitulating to what’s expedient rather than what is right. Would that be your take on those kinds of things?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Yes. Very often that’s the case. What we do is it’s just the easy thing to do. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating that you just go out to rock the boat. To rock the boat. But you’ve got a terrible line comes to my head. You got to know what hills are worth dying on.
Bill English
Yeah.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
And definitely things that are issues of moral right more wrong and legalities to take that stand. But yes, whether it’s churches, businesses, education, I’ve seen it over and over again where leadership will it’s easier not to confront the situation and deal with it transparently, uprightly, make a decision and carry out the decision. Then it’s easier to put it off, to kick the can down the road or ignore it. And the end result of that is what happens is the folks lose confidence in your leadership because you’re really not putting the organization and the mission of the organization first. You you expend valuable resources, milling about smartly, trying to deal with it. I hate to use the word cover up, but covering up or not dealing with it, you expend needless energy and it takes you off track. And then your best followers kind of go, look, if we’re not going to accomplish what we’re setting out to accomplish and we’re not going to deal. It’s kind of like you were saying when somebody comes in and says, our mission is to do this, this doesn’t seem to be consistent with our mission. Why are we doing this?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
That should be dealt with immediately. Either it should be somehow with a mission or you deal with it. Yeah, go ahead, Bill.
Bill English
But there’s a loss of respect there too. Your top talent is going to want you to have moral courage and if you don’t have that, you’ll eventually lose your top talent and be left with a mediocre talent who is not going to challenge you. Right?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Right. I know we’re talking business, but there’s a corollary in the church world. The church folks are more volunteers than paid staff. And so in the business world, one of the things you always have over someone is you are writing out their paycheck and signing it and so they sit there and go, well.
Bill English
The power can go anywhere.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Exactly. And that’s where the corollary comes in with the church, is when that confidence is lost and the mission is no longer the key thing. It’s your top talent. I’m a big proponent that churches should grow through making disciples. But one of the reasons we see a lot of church drifting is not just the consumer mentality. That’s part of it. But when you look at the top talent, it’s not consumer mentality, it’s the lack of leadership and the inability of leadership to deal with issues in terms of doing what’s right with moral courage.
Bill English
By the way, when you talk about I don’t know why I’m doing book recommendations today, but I am when you talk about moral courage within churches and the consumer mentality, I’ll share my screen here again. There’s an excellent book that people can pick up. It’s by I’ll share this here real quick. It’s called?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Yes.
Bill English
The divine commodity by sky. Jafani. I’m reading through this right now, fascinating book and he outlines the consumer culture that exists in our churches. That probably is not healthy. I’ll just put it that way. It’s probably not healthy.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
That’s one of the issues of moral courage within the church today is that very issue. Do I go for getting people in the seats and the numbers or do I go for the mission that Jesus gave us, which is to make disciples?
Bill English
So for those who are speaking with I’m Bill English, the publisher of Bible and Business. I’m speaking with Dale Hutchcraft who is a good friend of mine and specializes in Christian leadership consulting and is an entrepreneur as well. And he is. A part time professor now, I think semi retired, I guess semi retired at the University of St. Paul I’m sorry, the University of Northwestern St. Paul where I actually am part of their Faith Radio ministry and I’ve been part of that ministry now for eight years. And we’re talking about Christian leadership mainly in the business context. I want to let you know that if you’re watching today and you’re attending this live stream, you’re welcome to enter comments in the Facebook or YouTube or LinkedIn interfaces and they will show up at this end and we’ll be sure to interact with you as time permits and as best we can. So Dale, moral courage, we talked about moral courage, we’ve talked about foundation, some of the biblical verses, foundations for Christian leadership, that kind of thing. We’ve talked about how to handle a narcissistic, ungodly jerkish type of boss. If you’re in middle management in corporate America today, let’s shift gears a little bit and let’s just unpack a little bit how Christian business owners, as they are growing their businesses, can get stuff done through other people without being jerks and without using the power model of I’m the CEO, you do what I say.
Bill English
That’s the power model that never works with anybody. So how do we do that? How do Christian business owners do that? You have the floor, my friend, which is a dangerous thing for me to do, right, give you the floor, right, well, yeah.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
First of all, I think sometimes no matter what you do, you’re going to come across as a jerk because again, it goes back to moral courage. If you’re operating on the basis of moral courage, staying in line with the vision and mission that you have for your organization, sometimes you make hard decisions and that will make people uncomfortable and they’re going to look at you as a jerk. But I think in that context, part of it is you’ve got to develop and it’s always been difficult for me because I’m kind of a nice warm lovable fuzzball, as somebody else once said. But you’ve got to have a hide of a rhinoceros and you got to be able to do what is right. On the other hand, there’s some dynamics that come into that and the reason why we go to the power structure and we become jerks or we operate out of that mode is first of all, it’s the example. We have a lot of famous leaders. I mean you look at Steve Jobs, you look at the founder of Microsoft, even Walt Disney operated out of basically a power structure per se. So that’s the model we get oftentimes when we’re looking at success.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
By the way, they also did a lot of things right. But the other thing that just really is a precipitator of that power model that you were talking about is we as human beings seem to be hardwired to pay more attention to negative events than positive ones. So consequently, we have a tendency to do that.
Bill English
Let me interrupt, and let’s just come back for just a moment because I want to explore that jerk part a little bit more, because you were saying that in order to be an effective leader, sometimes we have to be jerks. And I’ve really been wrestling with this question, and a couple of thoughts came to mind, and I want to get your reaction to this. Yeah, sometimes we have to make really difficult decisions. Right. And we have to make unpopular decisions. I’m fond of saying in my organization that only the most crappy, difficult decision should land on my desk as the CEO. That’s why I have a management team. They’re there to make the other decisions that are less controversial, less crappy, if I can put it that way.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Exactly.
Bill English
But I think part of that jerkishness, when people perceive you that way, comes from two things. Number one, they don’t have all the information that you have as a CEO, and so they misunderstand or there are gaps in their understanding of why the decision was made. That could be one reason. But secondly, I just wonder if you handle yourself appropriately over a long period of time, and you don’t have to make many of these types of decisions. Will not your reputation, your persona, put people in the place of saying, look, I don’t know why he did this, but I know he’s not a jerk and so I trust him. And you get people to follow you that way. Can you speak to those, the misunderstanding piece and the reputation piece?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Well, and that’s why I use the word perceived. You have access to things that, as a CEO that probably nobody else or very few other people have and are able to give input on, your responsibility is not only to define reality, but have a handle on reality and have a big picture of where it’s going. And the buck does stop at your desk. But I think the second one becomes extremely important is when you have developed that track record and trust to the degree that, like you said, the individual goes or your team goes. I don’t know what my leader is actually going here, but I trust him.
Bill English
Right?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Don’t we do the same thing with Jesus? Jesus takes us into places and we go, I don’t know what Jesus is doing here, but I’ll trust him. And not that any of us as leaders will ever reach the full perfection of Jesus.
Bill English
Yeah, right. But I doubt it too.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
We need to move along and in the consistency of our leadership and the competency of our leadership, that those that we need because of our transparency, our adaptability, our achievements, our initiative, our competency, our confidence, they go, yes, sometimes my leader is wrong, but my leader seems to be right more times than he’s wrong. And a big chunk of that is also the willingness to take your team and interact with them. If you really try to be that singular individual who comes down off the mountain and says, thus say at the Lord, we’re going to go do this and not take in that input, you’re going to get more pushback than if you sit down and go, what do you see? Now you’re processing all that. But they’re the boots on the ground, right? And so they’re going to give you and it’s your responsibility as a leader to put all the pieces together and come up with a good direction and a good decision that’s going to be most beneficial and in line with a mission and morally correct. That’s your job. But their job is to bring you the information.
Bill English
So is that the main thing? Because you and I talked before this about the main thing and what is it and what happens. But are you kind of referring to the main thing now?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Yeah, when I talk about the main thing, I often have a caveat in our lives. There’s the primary main thing. Primary main thing is to love God, love our neighbors, make disciples. And I hate to call it a secondary main thing because that delegitimizes it to some degree.
Bill English
Secondary main, right?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Yeah. But it’s secondary to that primary thing for which we were created for. But in a sense, we were created within that. We were created to do a particular task or job. And we’re all leaders and we’re all followers. There’s a continuum. Some of us may be leaders of organizations, leaders of departments, whatever. Others of us may be just interacting with our families. But no matter where you’re at on that leadership spectrum, your job, the main thing for you is to define reality and make good decisions that are beneficial to making it to your mission. That’s it. That’s what you’re interesting.
Bill English
I’m sorry to interrupt, but the whole define reality thing, how many leaders make decisions based on what they wish it was rather than on how it is? Right.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
I think a lot of us, most of the time will make decisions based on what we think it is or what we’d like it to be and not what really is. I’m not sure I would necessarily want to go into all sorts of examples, but throughout history that’s been the case where people made decisions based on, I think, of the launching of the Spanish amarta philip II made that dish decision was based on what he thought or what he wanted things to be. He didn’t make decisions based on the reality of the dynamics of the geopolitical situation. And he lost.
Bill English
Yes, he paid dearly for it, didn’t he? But that’s really the balance that a leader takes on. They can see into the future. At least some leaders can see well into the future. They’re visionaries. They can see into the future. And it’s a reality for them. Even though it’s not a reality for anybody else. And yet they have to throttle their decision making to make good decisions based on the reality of the here and now with a view to pushing the organization forward to what could be in the future. To me, that’s a balancing act.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
And.
Bill English
It’S not a commonly found skill set.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
It is learnable, is it? It is learnable. And I think the reason why we don’t have as many people learning it is twofold. One, when we are teaching, and by the way, when I mean teaching, I don’t mean the classroom. By the way, I’m in the classroom. Don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me, but people really learn most by observation, by discussion, by interaction. If you take a look at what Jesus did all the time, he go, he’d do something. And then he gathered around, said, let me explain this to you in a debriefing. This is what’s happened. Put this in your head. Interaction, solidify it, move on to the next lesson, so to speak, right? By learning, I mean, you may not learn it to the degree of the grades, but you can learn it sufficiently that you can make it part of your toolbox and repertoire, okay? And the way you learn it and the way you teach it is not by sitting down and reading a book. Going back to my I am just still startled at times of how many leadership lessons I learned in the military, primarily from a commanding officer named Fletcher Barnes III and a department head of mine and a second ship called Lieutenant Garavito.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
And it wasn’t that they said, today I’m going to give you a class in leadership, right? It was by watching their lives, they were consistent. They were competent. They were just they knew when to show mercy. They were not only teachable, but they could teach.
Bill English
Sure.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
And so you look at that and the other thing they did is they taught. I began to look at things they both anticipated things. They planned for contingencies, even though those contingencies may not even have been on the radar screen. And I began in my responsibilities, doing likewise, looking out and saying, well, if we’re going to do this, then here are the possible options, then I need to be prepared to do this, this, or this. One of my least favorite battle stations. And yet I did a good job at it because the old man initially put me there and I was kind of going like we were talking, old man, he’s 35 years old. Barnes says we want you. And after steering and I’m going, I don’t like closed in spaces. You’re in the middle of the ship. It’s noisy, but it’s very important because if the ship loses hydraulic power, you steer the ship there by hand. From there. The thing I’m going with that is I found myself after the second time down there in a drill going, okay, what do we need to do if something really does happen, rather than just sitting there going, I’m in my after steering station, and I have been trained to do this.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Okay, what are all the contingencies? Where did I learn that? I learned it from watching my commanding officer and executive officer always going I mean, he’d walk up to the chart when I’m doing laying out something. He says, So what are our other options of getting into this port if there’s some other problem there?
Bill English
So he was drilling in an anticipatory way in case something went wrong.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Okay, right, that makes sense. As leaders, that’s what we do. We really should be anticipating there’s a lot of things that have caught me by surprise over the years, but we should be anticipating what possibilities might be coming over the horizon to affect our.
Bill English
Organizations, and that gets to risk mitigation. Risk mitigation is largely anticipatory. So for Christian business owners or ministry leaders out there, mitigating risk as part of our leadership role is really anticipating what could go wrong. And that’s where lawyers live. Lawyers live in the what could go wrong space. When they develop partner agreements and shareholder agreements and various contracts, they have to anticipate all the various things that could go wrong and then wonder why everybody doesn’t like them because all they talked about is what could go wrong. But I get all that. Well, Dale, we’re going to have to start wrapping up here, buddy. Why don’t you give one or two things to two different groups here? Just takeaways okay. To the group that is in middle management in corporate America and to Christian business owners. So what would be a couple of key takeaways for both of those groups?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
In some ways, they’re very much the same for middle management people I would keep coming back to god has put you there for a reason. He has so created you, and he’s entered your life, and you’re there for a reason, to be a light to reflect the gospel, and maybe even going back to Daniel Nebuchadnezzar. There’s nothing that says that necessarily that Nebuchadnezzar put his faith totally in God in the way it should have been. However, I think after he lost his mind and came back to his senses, there’s a song he sings there that kind of indicates that he says, oh, wait a minute. I’m not the hot stuff I thought I was. And there is a God in heaven.
Bill English
That’S part of the Bible. I’m not the hot stuff I thought I was.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Well, it’s a Hutchcraft paraphrase.
Bill English
That’s the Hutchcraft paraphrase. Okay, I get it.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
And the point I want to get to realize is daniel was the one that spoke into his life. Sure, you’re the one that spoke into his life. Secondly, in middle management, observe, learn, be a lifelong learner of Christ and lifelong learner of your profession, because some people yes, stay in minute management all of their life. But God is probably preparing you for something else, so be prepared.
Bill English
And that would go along with the first part of the first chapter in my book of Christian theology of business ownership, where I talk about what we’re doing. I start out by saying, let’s look at the end in mind. What’s the end? The end in mind is this what we’re doing on the surface, preparatory or preparation for reigning with Christ in eternity?
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Exactly. For the Christian Business owner. Something that’s near and dear to my heart is I constantly find myself saying to Christian business owners I don’t want to say your business is secondary, but God. And it’s similar to the first thing God has placed you. In leadership over that business so that that business can be used to make disciples that will create a movement for the kingdom, for the glory of God.
Bill English
Right.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
That in a sense, is your primary mission. Yes. It’s to feed your family. Yes. It’s to supply goods and services to people that need it. You have a responsibility to your various stakeholders, your employees and any stockholders you might have. All that comes into play. But your overriding thing is you’re in business to touch lives. I know that goes totally contrary to some of the things I even teach in classes when we talk about economics. And I’m trying to think of the author that wrote basically that the chief end of business is to make a profit. And I go, yes and no. Yes. If you’re in a business and you’re not making profit, you need to think about what in the world you’re doing. And that comes to the primary and the secondary. The other thing I would say to a business owner is you are as important to God as any pastor or missionary.
Bill English
Yeah. And that’s the whole business is calling thing. Right, right. Where I feel called to business even though I have pastoral background and all that. And you too. The other thing that I would just suggest is that if people want to learn more about the purposes because you really touched on the purposes of business there, you got to make a profit. Yeah. But what’s business really all about? What is the chief end of business? And in my book I talk about those four purposes people, products, philanthropy and profits. And so they can check that out in my book as well. Well, Dale, I want to thank you for coming on the Bible and Business Livestream today. I appreciate you being here. You’re a good friend. I love you, brother. And we may have you back to talk a little bit more about Christian leadership. If you are interested in learning more, you’re welcome to contact me at bill@bibleandbusiness.com or just visit the Bible and Business website at bible andandbusiness.com there you’ll find ways to get a hold of me and certainly ask any questions. But Dale thanks for your time today and appreciate you being here.
Dr. Dale Hutchcraft
Thank you so much. You guys have a great day today. All right?
Bill English
Thank you all for watching and we’ll do another livestream here in another few weeks. Take care.
Anna English
Thank you for joining Bill and Dale today. I hope you found their conversation to be helpful to you as you grow in your faith in Jesus Christ. If you’d like to talk with Bill, just email him at bill at bible andbusiness.com I think you’ll find my dad will be helpful to you in your situation. And I hope you’ll join my dad again for another Bible and business profiles and stewardship podcast. So until till then, please go out and make it a great day. God bless.