Salt & Light Part 2

I received a letter from a woman who wrote that a year before, she was so heavy that she had to be wheeled into the Y. Her husband would help her change and then wheel her to the handi-cap lift so she could get in the pool. Her letter shared how she can now walk in to the Y and change and get in and out of the pool unassisted. The letter noted that she was more than 100 pounds lighter. She attributed her lifestyle change to our welcome center staff calling her name and encouraging her every time she came to the Y. Basically, she had her life changed because we knew her name. That’s powerful.

As leaders, we can go about getting change out of people by doing the typical external motivational things or we can start to tap into the deeper issues of meaning and significance and the nobility of serving other people. Soon it will become a habit and ripple like a wave onto the people around us.

There is nobility in serving that we sometimes lose sight of that adds meaning and significance to work. Part of what happens to us that hurts a servant mentality is we get our scales out, and we start weighing people according to their job titles in a way that compares and dismisses them. On the heavier side we will put the full time staff, or a CEO, or an Executive. Those people might be more important and have more meaningful work.

Then in our minds, the lighter side of the scale gets filled with other management or serving positions of administrative assistant and receptionist and people behind the scenes. When we do this in our minds and in our behavior, we are operating out of a false economy. We are valuing things very differently than God values them. We would be wise to remember that the person at the front desk, or the person that drives a bus are all part of the meaningful work and part of what it means to serve. When we understand that everyone has meaningful work, our role should be to remind people of how important they are and their job is! 

Salt & Light - Part 1

When we were kids, and someone asked us, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” we had this magical response for them. What happened to that?

There are such awesome possibilities with the gift of work. Work is about the creation of value. And no matter what your job is, you have an opportunity to live that out every day. Work gives you an opportunity to make a meaningful and significant contribution to the world. Work gives you an opportunity to live out what it means when Jesus says, “You are salt, and you are light.”

I love when our Y is in a groove, especially when we are away at a retreat. We not only accomplish great things, but we become better people in the process. I believe that is the kind of emotional release that is available in our work every day.

It is a shame that many people go to work every day where there is no direct correlation between what they do and any meaning or sense of significance. There is no creation of value. For those of us who are Christ-followers, I believe it is incumbent upon us to create work environments where it is a noble thing to serve.

It is the nature of God to serve. We forget sometimes in our jockeying for positions in the politics at work that we are called to be a servant.

Early on in my career I watched Harry Brace, the late CEO of the Charlotte YMCA. Even though he was from this huge YMCA you never got the sense from him that what you did was any less important than what he did.

Oftentimes, after our YMCA made headlines, he would call me and congratulate me. Sometimes, he would run into somebody from Shelby and he would write me and thank me for doing my job and starting this Y. I saw him talk to Charlotte program directors and thank them by name for doing a job well done. I heard about him picking up the phone and calling a branch staffer and thanking him or her personally for being a part of the team that made a difference in somebody’s life. I bet he knew the names of everybody in the housekeeping department, all those who would come in late at night to clean up and get the facility ready for the next day.

One of the things that I saw Harry do repeatedly was to visit his people and tell them specifically that how they were doing their job had made his job easier. He would thank them for serving. He had a very quiet way of living among us and reinforcing the nobility of what it meant to serve. He had a great impact on me as I started off in my leadership role.

It doesn’t matter what you do if it’s true that God sees work as the creation of value. Everything you do matters. When you serve, you are most accurately reflecting the character and the nature of God. An amazing transformation would happen in our places of work if that emotion was first and foremost in our minds.