Biblical Business Radical: Motivation With a Compelling Vision

 In their book, Lead Like Jesus, Blanchard, Hodges and Hendry describe Christ's primary leadership key as having a compelling vision, communicating it and implementing it. They cite the Great Commission as one compelling vision--go into all the world to make disciples, teach and baptize them. This comes out of Christ's own mission to seek and save the lost (Luke 19.10; Matthew 28.18-20). 

We can see something similar in the vision God gave to Abraham: you will be a great nation and have as many descendants as there are stars (Genesis 26.4). Moses, Joshua and many others were given a vision and mission for what they were going to accomplish.

Businesses often have a vision statement, a mission statement or a combination of the two. In a Harris poll some number of years ago, very few people on the team know the company’s goals—revenue increase, improved profitability, new customers, etc.— and how they can help achieve them. That’s the goals. Not to mention the vision or mission. When you review the probabilities, chances are only one person on a football team knows what to do—get the ball in the opponent’s goal or past the goal line (depending on the form of football) and that they know what they need to do in their offensive position in order to accomplish this. [This is bad news for most businesses; the only good news is that our competition suffers from the same chaos.]

How does Christ keep this in front of us? We have nice mission/vision “plaques” in scripture. We have ambassadors that keep it in front of us—teachers, preachers, missionaries. How are we doing this in business? What methods would appeal to employees? If 80% would rather be somewhere else—mismatched skills, toxic work culture, burnout, stress, etc.—businesses are already on an uphill climb in getting people excited by the vision.

In Christ’s kingdom, we can get excited because we see new people entering His kingdom. We can see the citizens of the kingdom doing exactly what the King desires. We can taste parts of the vision, join forces with like-minded people. Having some small successes hint at the accomplishment of the greater vision.

Thus, it’s important for businesses and employees to enlist ambassadors, spy out our small successes that conform with the vision/mission, and capture those opportunities to celebrate. We can then affirm and continuously communicate what our businesses are trying to do.