The power of process

Tom Harper May 3, 2021

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People, whether young or old, are made to disobey. It's a condition we all inherited from our father Adam. Human nature is naturally sinful and often forgetful of its sin.

Which is why we need all the help we can get with our sinful employees and volunteers. King Joash gives us an effective methodology in 2 Kings chapter 12.

The king assigns his priests to repair the temple with funds collected from the people. But the priests mismanage the money and the king realizes he needs to scrap his strategy and start over.

So Joash puts a chest next to the altar for all to see, where the people put their offerings for the repair work. Now when the priests guarding the chest see it fill up, they alert the high priest, who brings the royal secretary to count it and bag it. They then dole out the money to the men supervising the work, who in turn pay the workers. They also purchase all the necessary materials and "met all the other expenses of restoring the temple" (v. 12).

The priests loved the temple. It was their pride in life, their purpose and in fact their livelihood. You would assume they'd be the logical ones to fix the building – but they lacked the skills to manage tasks and money. Passionate and purpose weren't enough; it took a new process to the get the job done.

When an area of your organization is chronically deficient, a process overhaul may be required.

Systems, rules and procedures may not change human nature, but they at least improve the chances people will get the job done right.

Excerpted from Servant Leader Strong: Uniting Biblical Wisdom and High-Performance Leadership, by Tom Harper (DeepWater Books, 2019).

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Tom Harper is publisher of BiblicalLeadership.com and executive chairman of Networld Media Group, a business-to-business publisher and event producer. He has written five books, including Servant Leader Strong: Uniting Biblical Wisdom and High-Performance Leadership (DeepWater Books, 2019) as well as the Christian business fable Through Colored Glasses and its sequel Inner Threat (DeepWater, 2022). Learn More »

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