ESSENCE:  Sadly, the brokenness of business as usual has led to our Work Relationships–our relationship to work and our relationships surrounding work–bearing little resemblance to God’s design for humanity, creation and work in Genesis.  RESTORE is the fourth and final step in the path of Integriosity.^®  It is about seeing the bigger WHY’s of work and business materialize and manifest in an organization that has been RE-IMAGINED and RE-ALIGNED with Biblical beliefs, values and priorities based upon a RENEWED understanding of God’s purpose for work and business.  It is the narrow “ancient path” back to God’s design.  Our last two posts were looking at how faithfully “doing right” through business a better way RESTORES People and RESTORES Organizations.  As Organizations are just People working together in Relationship, healing the People and the Organizations naturally begins to heal Work Relationships.

At the risk of you saying “Didn’t you just remind us of that in the last post?“, it is fitting once again to begin with a look back at what we said in post #056 (Loving by Serving-Nature of Business) about organizations, work, humans and relationships:

Organizations such as businesses have intrinsic Kingdom value because they are a creation of God’s image-bearers that provides the platform and the opportunity for humans to come together in relationship to express and fulfill their humanity through work by producing and promoting flourishing and “building for the Kingdom” in ways that could not be accomplished by people working alone.

Our last two posts were looking at how faithfully “doing right” through business a better way RESTORES People and RESTORES Organizations.    RESTORING People is healing the brokenness of “work as usual” and RESTORING Organizations is eliminating the aspects of business as usual that prevent people from fulfilling the Creation Mandate.  As Organizations are just People working together in Relationship, healing the People and the Organizations naturally begins to heal Work Relationships.

RESTORE WORK RELATIONSHIPS: Why Do Work Relationships Need Restoration?

Way, way back in post #007 (Work is Broken), we explained that the brokenness of business as usual has led to Work Relationships–our relationship to work and our relationships surrounding work–bearing little resemblance to God’s design for humanity, creation and work in Genesis. In that post, we looked at the various types of relational brokenness analyzed by Jeff Van Duzer in his book Why Business Matters to God:

• God/Human Relationship
  • Work has lost meaning
  • Work has become about self-protection
  • Work has become an idol and a source of identity
• Human/Human Relationships
  • Like the relationship between Adam and Eve after the fall, work relationships have become:
    • Hierarchical
    • Adversarial
    • Competitive
• Human/Creation Relationship
  • Instead of acting as stewards, we act as though business and the environment belong to us
• Human/Work Relationship
  • Work has become a burden, as evidenced by a cultural obsession with “Work-Life Balance” that positions “Work” as an opposing force to “Life”
  • Sabbath rhythm has been lost

RESTORE WORK RELATIONSHIPS: The Fruit of Integriosity for WORK Relationships

As we pointed out in our last few posts, the Cambridge English Dictionary defines “restore” as “to return something or someone to an earlier good condition.”  The fruit of faithfully “doing right” through business a better way–the fruit of Integriosity–is to participate in God’s restoration plan for His Kingdom (post #045 Kingdom–Bigger Gospel).  We need look no further than Genesis to understand “an earlier good condition” (post#046 Kingdom–Lessons from Creation–Why Are We Here).  Humanity was created in God’s image to flourish, and work was created before the Fall as a good thing–a way to reflect our humanity as God’s productive and creative image-bearers–and an organization derives its intrinsic Kingdom value–and God-given purpose–from the purpose of its people.

We believe people can fulfill the Creation Mandate and experience fully their humanity in relationship with God only by living their lives in alignment with Biblical beliefs, values and priorities.  It follows that a collection of people working together in relationship with each other toward a common purpose–an organization–can only realize its full intrinsic Kingdom value–the flourishing it could unleash–if its purpose, values and priorities align with Biblical purposes, values and priorities–with God’s restoration plan for His Kingdom.

In RESTORING Work Relationships, faithfully “doing right” through business a better way:

• God/Human Relationship
  • Work regains its meaning in the context of God’s BIGGER Gospel:
    • Work is restored as an aspect of Imago Dei–something good, necessary and central to our purpose
    • Work is restored to being WHAT WE DO as God’s image-bearers as part of God’s restoration plan for His Kingdom, rather than WHO WE ARE
• Human/Human Relationships
  • Cooperation and mutual respect is restored to relationships between people, particularly between leaders and those they lead, when leaders act with humility and people see each other as worthy of dignity and respect as creations in the image of God
  • Relationships with and among all people touched by an organization (e.g., employees, vendors, customers, communities) are restored when the organization and its leaders are committed to a Re-Imagined Culture that reflects a bigger WHY of maximizing the flourishing of those constituents.
• Human/Creation Relationship
  • Respect and care for all creation is restored when an organization and its leaders:
    • Embrace their stewardship responsibility for the organization, which lies at the core of the Creation Mandate
    • Cultivate a Re-Imagined Purpose, Re-Imagined Values and a Re-Imagined Culture that reflect the stewardship concepts of Respect and Sustainability
    • Recognize that the organization relies on several types of capital–not just financial capital–that must be managed appropriately for the organization to remain sustainable in a broad sense.
• Human/Work Relationship
  • When an organization and its leaders are committed to a Re-Imagined Purpose built around a bigger WHY of human flourishing, putting profit its its proper place as a means rather than an end, people cease to be merely tools of production and work is restored to its original design as an essential part of our humanity rather than a “necessary evil” that prevents us from experiencing life.
  • When an organization and its leaders prioritize flourishing, dignity and community, recognizing the need for people to find “life balance” and work in a cooperative community, sacred rhythms in people’s lives centered around family, faith, fitness and rest, are restored.

Relationships matter!  Work is good!  Organizations are people working in relationship!  Pope John Paul II observed in his Laborem Exercens that:

Thus work bears a particular mark of man and humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons.

We have the opportunity to Restore Work Relationships through the way in which we conduct business and lead organizations.   Every decision has the potential to move God’s Kingdom a little closer to God’s perfect Restoration.  The alternative to faithfully “doing right” through business a better way is business as usual and work as usual.  Perhaps the ultimate problem with business as usual is an observation made by Van Duzer–because business as usual was developed post-Fall, it can’t bring us back to God’s design.  Or in the words of Albert Einstein, “No problem can be solved from the same consciousness that created it.”

It is time to begin executing “business a better way” in alignment with Biblical beliefs, values and priorities–it is time to begin RESTORING by faithfully “doing right” through Integriosity.^®

SPOILER ALERT:   In our next post, we will explore how faithfully “doing right” through business a better way RESTORES by Humanizing People.

PERSONAL NOTE (from PM):   Because “an organization is a merely a collection of people working together toward a common purpose”, organizations function or “dysfunction” toward or away from that common purpose based on relationships.  One toxic person can begin a corrosive effect that spreads like a bruise on a peach.   You may recall a Seth Godin quote from an earlier post:

The attitudes you put up with will become the attitudes of your entire organization. Over time, every organization becomes what is tolerated.  If you reward a cynic merely because he got something done, you’ve made it clear to everyone else that cynicism is okay. If you overlook the person who is hiding mistakes because his productivity is high, then you are rewarding obfuscation and stealth.

A broken relationship in a reporting chain can keep leaders from learning critical information from employees close to the customer.  Broken relationships can create silos, with groups within an organization failing to share important information.  All the best-intentioned efforts by leaders to cultivate a Re-Imagined Culture can be thwarted if “weeds” (forces and influences, such as disruptive employees or ineffective managers, that are working against the growth of the Re-Imagined Culture) are not identified and eliminated.

I was fascinated when a friend, Dr. Mitch Dickey, explained the process by which he analyzes and maps the health of relationships within an organization in order to identify problems–relational brokenness that may be keeping the organization from functioning effectively and efficiently.  Once identified, leaders can begin to fix the problem.

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Photo Credit: Original photo by “My Life Through A Lens” on Unsplash(photo cropped)