Stewarding your Business for God

I was looking at a Pew research study the other day that showed that 53% of Americans say that religion is very important to them. Another 24% said that it's somewhat important. Religion is a topic that somewhere between 53% and 77% of Americans have on their mind.

Today I’m thinking about those leaders and business owners who see their relationship with God in a way that they see the business itself as a stewardship they are managing on behalf of God. There's a motivation to do it in a way that honors him.

So the question becomes, how do you do manage your business as a stewardship for God? 

Three Ways to Think About Your Business as Stewardship

1. Define and Align Purpose

First is the ability to define and align purpose. In my view, the number one responsibility of a leader is the ability to define purpose. But it does require alignment. It's not as simple as declaring a purpose for the whole organization. 

Defining purpose in a way that allows people to work together requires a purpose to be aligned with other purposes:

• How does your business align with the purposes of your target market? 
• How does the purpose of each family and your organization align with the people you have hired? 
• How does one department's purpose align with other departments?

There's a lot involved. If you're going to build a business that honors God and works well, you have to align and define purpose. It’s a tall order!

2. Collaborate and Communicate

The second thing you have to be able to do as a leader is to collaborate. Collaboration is the ability to get your team to work together, to communicate well enough to figure out who's doing what, and to overcome all the barriers to execution that occur each and every day. It's one of the primary skillsets that a leader needs. Collaboration involves planning and running meetings, dealing with conflict, one-on-one conversations, doing performance feedback, developing people, and more.

3. Caring for People

The third area after defining purpose and aligning it, and the skill to get your team to collaborate, is caring for people. Organizations are not like the world of science where materials are held together by physical properties Organizations are held together by caring for each other.

Authentically caring for the people in their group is a most-do capability of a leader. Caring opens up the ability to trust each other. Trust leads to more open communication required to collaborate with each other, and builds unity and oneness. Caring is a foundational capability.

If you're going to build a business that honors God you look at the person as a whole person — someone of infinite value — because they're created in God's image. Leaders need to learn how to demonstrate that they care for people by their actions. The number one indicator of caring is the time you spend with people one-on-one.

Stepping back to where we started: How is it that you can build a business that honors God and steward that resource on behalf of him? 

Three things are involved: 

1. Defining and aligning purpose. 
2. Building teams that know how to collaborate and communicate, and last of all
3. Building leaders who know how to care for the whole person.