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The interactions between God and man have particular rules of engagement that help us be successful. God requires that we adjust from what comes natural to us (fear and selfishness) and to base our decisions in faith, hope, and love. These personal heart adjustments produce supernatural thinking patterns and behaviors that transform our relationships and enable us to create heaven’s relational culture. We put our deepest beliefs on display when we take risks, make decisions, and move our team along in our mission.
He was no hard taskmaster…for he believed in ruling by kindness rather than sternness, knowing full well that the way to get the best service out of a man is to let him feel that he is appreciated and cared for. It is said of him that there was not a workman connected with the brewery, no matter how humbled his duties were, that he did not know and maintain friendly relations with…
Edward Cecil’s management style was less connected to the daily activities at the brewery, but he put leaders in place there who carried the company’s values for excellence and benevolence. Most notable of these leaders was Guinness’s chief medical officer, Dr. John Lumsden, who was zealously driven by duty and compassion to address the appalling conditions in which most of the poor and working class—including many Guinness employees—lived at the time.
In every one of us, there is a battle over who we are, what we really want, and who we will choose to be. If we hope to cultivate a heart of honor in business, and in life, we must start with this inner battle—the battle over our identity.
honor is all about seeing what’s valuable, wonderful, and miraculous in other people and appreciating, being in awe of, loving, acknowledging, and otherwise responding to them in the way they deserve.
“Each of us tends to think we see things as they are, that we are objective,” wrote Stephen Covey, “but this is not the case. We see the world, not as it is, but as we are—or, as we are conditioned to see it. When we open our mouths to describe what we see, we in effect describe ourselves, our perceptions, our paradigms.”
Our perceptions and paradigms are essentially the stories we tell about our lives.
We are each especially driven to look for the meaning of us, of who we are as individuals in the story of our lives,
we are all looking for our identity.
we all end up believing things about ourselves, other people, the world, and God that feel true, but aren’t.
This false identity we must unlearn is the orphan identity. This is the identity we form apart from relationship with God.
The true identity we have received, and must learn to walk in, is the identity of a son or daughter of God. This relational identity is the only identity strong and comprehensive enough to be a firm anchor point for our lives.
We all receive an orphan identity as the inevitable result of living in a world that is alienated from God.
shame is different than guilt. Guilt says, “I did something bad,” while shame says, “I am bad.” Guilt is tied to an action, while shame is tied to an identity.
Shame is the fear of disconnection—it’s the fear that something we’ve done or failed to do, an ideal that we’ve not lived up to, or a goal that we’ve not accomplished makes us unworthy of connection.
Here’s the definition of shame that emerged from my research: Shame is the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.
Shame drives every toxic thought and destructive behavior we can imagine. In her research, Dr. Brown found that shame was correlated with violence, addiction, eating disorders, bullying, and depression.
Shame also drives unhealthy performance and perfectionism.
The orphan identity produces a victim mentality that causes us to live with an external locus of control—the sense that everything outside us is more powerful than we are, and is a threat that needs to be managed.
The two primary behaviors that result from a victim mentality are irresponsibility and control.
Shame, mistrust, powerlessness, and poverty have a common motivator: fear.10 Fear is the dominant, driving force in the orphan identity.
When we feel powerless and are not taking responsibility for our lives, we look to other people to blame and manipulate.
responsibility—the ability to respond—
Powerful people do not try to control other people. They know it doesn’t work, and that it’s not their job. Their job is to control themselves… Life does not happen to powerful people…They refuse to be victims of others. A powerful person’s choice to love will stand, no matter what the other person does or says. When powerful people say, “I love you,” there’s nothing that can stop them… Only powerful people can create a safe place to know and be known intimately. They say, “I can be me around you and you can be you around me. We don’t need to control each other, and we don’t want to control
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the self-made entrepreneur is a fiction of the orphan identity, and pursuing it can never produce the kind of lasting success that we all desire.
Instead, we must discover that true success—in business and in life—lies in pursuing the honor-based goals of healthy connection, interdependence, and family.
Honor is not something we demand or require from others; it is something we offer them in a relationship because of who we are.
Learning to overcome fear, embrace our identity, and cultivate honor creates a total shift in the beliefs, motivation, and values of our heart.
The core belief that each person is beautifully unique and valuable, and that there are enough opportunities and resources in the world for every one of us to “happen”—
leads us to commit to building relationships with high levels of encouragement, affirmation, generosity, and calls to excellence.
when the members of the executive team are “on the bus because of who else is on the bus,”6 rather than because of where the bus is going, they can better adjust to a change in direction and are “self-motivated by the inner drive to produce the best results and to be part of creating something great.”7
a 2012 Google study that set out to crack the code behind what made certain teams highly successful and others less so.
no particular arrangement of these traits emerged as the “it factor” for successful teams. In fact, compatibility of team members didn’t correlate at all with a team’s success.
At last, however, the researchers discovered the concept of psychological safety.
psychological safety as a “shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. [It is] a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up…[and]
Edmonson’s definition of psychological safety sounded a lot like Patrick Lencioni’s definition of trust in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team:
In the context of building a team, trust is the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group. In essence, teammates [are] comfortable being vulnerable with one another.
Lencioni and the Google researchers both describe the shared experience that successful teams create among their members. However, I see “trust” and “psychological safety” as aspects and effects of this experience, rather than terms that fully capture what that experience is. I think a better term for this experience is connection.
“Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than based on what they really think.”
As Brené Brown pointed out, a lot of us who think of ourselves as “givers” actually struggle with receiving. We like to give because we think it allows us to stay in control. But as long as this is the case, our giving will be more about us than the person to whom we’re giving. It won’t really be an expression of serving.
Serving well doesn’t mean giving on our terms; it means coming close enough to someone to find out what they actually need, and then trying to meet that need.
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
