Leadership and Loving Your Employees: Learning from the Life of Jesus

Philippians 2:3-7 (ESV)

3 Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. 5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

Leadership advice can be found almost anywhere; articles on communicating well, videos about fostering healthy relationships with your employees, books on setting boundaries, and presentations on resolving conflicts. But are we loving the teams we lead well?

With an abundance of resources, perhaps what we need even more so is an example. In Philippians 2, Paul gives us the ultimate example to follow for authentic, self-giving, sacrificial leadership in the person and life of Jesus.

“Christians in leadership positions don’t just have a responsibility to perform well; they also have a calling to love well.”

Philippians 2: 3-7 presents to us a staggering Christology: Jesus, who was fully God, came to earth as a humble servant and offered his life as a means of sacrificial love. As Matthew 20:28 puts it, “...the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” In other words, the most powerful person to ever walk the earth didn’t wield his power over others but instead used his authority to serve others.

This humility that Jesus displayed is in contrast to how we often lead in our work. While Jesus emptied himself, we tend to make sure that our needs are filled first. While Jesus took the form of a servant, we often want others and our work to serve us. While Jesus leveraged his power for others, many times we want to climb the ladder for our own glory. In short, we have a tendency to pursue and hold onto power—influence, social capital, wealth—for selfish gain.

When we meditate on the weight of this passage, we come to an important conclusion: power gained for the sake of power is toxic; power leveraged for the sake of others is transformative. As Christians, we have a calling to selflessly steward the influence that God has given us for others as much as for ourselves.

LEADING IN LIGHT OF THE LIFE OF JESUS

This reality has important implications for our work. Realizing that whatever job we have is a gift from God, we see that the authority and influence God has given us in our work is to be leveraged for human and organizational flourishing. We are commissioned, as Christians, to count employees as “more significant than yourselves.” We have a responsibility to design and implement processes and cultures that uplift our coworkers in meaningful ways. We have a calling to consider the needs of all the voices in the room.

One of the dangers with separating our faith from our work is the way that such disintegration prevents us from thinking and acting redemptively in our work. We often fall into the trap of seeing our work as separate from loving our neighbor, our customers, or our team, rather than seeing our work as a conduit of grace and vehicle for human flourishing. Many leaders see the workplace as a separate domain from their faith, instead of a primary arena for expressing it. However, Christians in leadership positions don’t just have a responsibility to perform well; they also have a calling to love well.

“This labor of loving others through our work isn’t a side-gig to our mission as Christians, but is central to fulfilling it.”

How does your work offer you a chance to love and serve the people you encounter in your work? Cultivating a redemptive imagination allows us to consider the many possibilities in light of Jesus’ example to us, described in Philippians 2.

LOVING LIKE JESUS AT WORK

While COVID-19 has created an immense challenge for leaders everywhere, it also offers an opportunity to model the love of Christ to those we work with. Jesus has given us a template of leadership for how to love and lead well. With Jesus as our example, here are three principles for servant leadership:

Consider the needs of others: Consider how to help solve your customer’s problems, while solving your own (Philippians 2:4). Consider the Nashville-based fundraising and donor management platform, Kindful, who is allowing current and new customers to have a flexible pay-as-you-go plan with no minimum contract, giving their customers the ability to adapt to the economic circumstances that come with COVID-19. If you work for a B2B company, could you serve your customers by leveraging your economic resources to offer flexible payment programs for financially-stressed clients?
Creatively serve your team: Look for ways to meet the needs of others, not only how to maximize their performance (Philippians 2:7). The technology company HP found a creative way to help working parents meet the demands of balancing a job and facilitating their children’s remote learning by offering employees access to online resources including weekly literacy activities curated by education leaders. If you manage a team who are working remotely, could you take the time to listen to the different challenges they may be experiencing and genuinely seek to find solutions that work for both the company and your team members?
Bless others in your work: Be quick to honor the work others are doing, rather than being consumed by your own (Philippians 2:3). Our team has set aside time at the end of each week to specifically call out appreciations about the people on our team in addition to sharing one thing they are proud they accomplished that week. In your meetings, could you commit to time spent affirming your team’s major accomplishments and asking how you can empower them moving forward?

This labor of loving others through our work isn’t a side-gig to our mission as Christians, but is central to fulfilling it. Every place of work is part of a larger system, and it is the calling of all Christians to promote systems that create human flourishing. If you don’t know where to start, ask God to cultivate a redemptive imagination in you, and to help you identify the brokenness within your workplace, industry, or city that you might have the opportunity to address in your work.

If you feel overwhelmed by the challenge of serving others through your leadership, remember that Jesus isn’t just an example to follow but a life-giving Savior who forms and fashions us to love more like Him every day. As leaders, remember, too, that grace abounds when your best efforts fall short (Romans 5:20).

As Andy Crouch writes, “Leadership does not begin with title or position, it begins the moment you are more concerned about others' flourishing than your own."

In a world obsessed with status, how will you instead utilize your God-given agency to serve and love others through your daily work?