“As a Manager, How Do You Interact With Your Employees?” — J. B. Wood

Sometimes, particularly as Christians, we think we have to compromise between relationships and productivity. The idea out there is that you can either be a nice boss or an effective boss...but is that really the case?

Leadership is about more than being a productive worker; it's about being able to foster a productive, creative, and sustainable community of workers who can come together for a common purpose. The best way to do that is to make all the members of the team feel that their work matters, and that their voice is heard. That's more than just good business practice. It's a high calling.

Want to hear more? You can find this and dozens of other videos over at the High Calling YouTube Channel.

Transcript: As leaders, it's very easy to forget that our team and the people reporting to us and working for us are just that . . . they're people. And people—I don't care who you are—deep down they want to be acknowledged, they want to be appreciated. It's so often a case that as leaders you just want to get something done. You want to get the job done, and you want your people to be productive. We will promote people who have done a really, really good job. Then, you have to step back and ask, "But how are they with managing? How are they with people?" Because at the end of the day as leaders we shouldn't be doing things . . . we should be inspiring and developing people to help them be better, if we can in the process show them that they're appreciated, that they're acknowledged, that we're listening, and we care about them. I think it goes a huge way towards helping those people to be more productive. So you get a better end result than kind of the dictator just checking off tasks and bullying people around.