I was having a conversation recently with a new manager, one who had never managed as many people as he was up to this point in his life. We had been conversing over the weeks prior about his new position and how things were going. I started noticing a trend that kept grabbing my attention, it seemed like every week we talked, another person was being let go.
At first I chalked it up as normal. Anytime there is change in management there are usually people who quit or get fired due to the changes that are taking place but this was beginning to seem a bit excessive. Most of the team that was employed during the new managers promotion had been under the same management for a long time prior to the transition and had always been able to complete their work satisfactorily so I was having trouble placing my finger on what the problem might have been. As far as I was aware there were no pressures from upper management and they were meeting their budgets to the best of my knowledge.
Most of the people being let go were not the companies top performers but nonetheless they were still people who had lives that depended on the income they received from their employment. While speaking with the manager about the new people on the chopping block he casually mentioned that he would always pray about letting the person go and felt at peace about it. This really struck me. After managing people for many years, firing someone was always very difficult for me and rarely did I feel peace about it leading up to the moment, in most cases the peace came afterwards.
Typically I never saw a mass layoff of people unless there was some kind of financial struggle or some other catalyst for the layoffs. This one felt different. Most of the employees who were let go did not see it coming and the ones who were left were either scared of what was next or not wanting to stick around and wait for the hammer to drop. Needless to say, tensions were high.
After leaving that day I was still trying to put my finger on what was happening. I decided to do what we should always do when we are trying to gain understanding or need help. I started to pray. I asked God to help me understand what was happening, how could people who were seemingly well at their job be terminated weeks after a new manager had taken place and on top of that for there to be peace about it to the manager and the opposite for the person being terminated.
God did what He always does, He pointed me to scripture. In his direction I was taken back to the building of the first temple. God had appointed some men to be in charge of the building of his temple and He gave exact dimensions and descriptions of how it was supposed to look. In 1 Kings 6:12 God tells Solomon that if he keeps his decrees and regulation that He would fulfill the promise He had made to David. God set the expectation and the reward and also that punishment that would occur if it wasn’t kept. Now God is not just referring to the building of the temple in this verse but the commandments he had given prior to this as well but in this instance God used this to show me that expectations were the missing piece to the puzzle I was trying to solve. In the rest of the story God fulfills his promise and is good on his word until the expectations are no longer being met. In the case of our manager the employees were still working under prior expectations and never given the new set of expectations but were receiving the punishment of not meeting them. This void of not understanding the new expectations further caused dissension and resentment among the staff that remained.
One thing that applies to many more facets than just this is the fact that God detest unbalanced, or unfair, scales. Weighing someone’s performance against a scale that is unbalanced is not the way to show your team that you care. Clearly setting those expectations for your team up front will at least give them a goal to try and hit but we do have to be careful on not setting those expectations to be unrealistic. God commands us to lighten the load of those who work for us (Isaiah 58:6), so we must be careful to balance our expectations and leave room for God to be at the forefront of your team’s lives. God is the God of multiplication. He can do more with less as long as you trust Him to do so.
I encourage everyone to take the time to write down your team’s expectations but before you present them to your team take a few days to pray and meditate on what God has to say about these expectations. You might be surprised where He shows you to place your expectations and the team members who may be ready to shoulder more.
