The Daily CHEW™
Moving God’s Love from Head to Heart for Christian Professionals
A new venture had an eight-member C-suite, nine months of careful business-plan work with an outside writer, and unanimous sign-off from every leader at the table. Six weeks after the writer finished, the CEO unilaterally changed direction — he thought he saw a cheaper way to get there. The team objected. He held the line. Seven months later, the venture was in trouble. The team was fracturing, departments were in-fighting over how to deliver heavy goals on a shoestring budget, and a hidden resentment was building toward the charismatic leader who had raised the money that made the company exist at all. He could feel the team breaking. A friend referred him to me.
We ran a team 360. Every leader gave honest feedback about every other leader. We summed the results into a single number: the team’s Trust Score. The number came back at 2.9 out of 10. We started team and individual coaching. In a 1:1, the CEO told me the truth he had not told his team. He had changed the plan because a major investor had complained about implementation cost, and he wanted to please the investor in hopes of more money later. He “knew” he could not tell the team because they would object. He said it himself: he needed to confess what he had done, own his part in the fracture, apologize directly, name how it would not happen again, and get the team back to a modified version of the original plan.
He did. Trust began to rebuild. The team started growing again. By the time we stopped working together six months later, the Trust Score had moved from 2.9 to 7.1. A team that had been quietly imploding became a team that could disagree honestly and decide together.
This is what happens when a Christian leader stops protecting his image and starts telling the truth.
“Therefore, confessing your sins to one another, and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” — James 5:16, ESV. God does not rebuild a team through optics or another offsite. Scripture reveals that confession is the door healing walks through — and the leader willing to step through that door first becomes the one a team learns to trust again. The Holy Spirit reshapes organizations when the leader at the head of the table stops hiding what only he knows.
If I really believed God’s love is strong enough to hold both my reputation and the honest sentence I have been protecting myself from saying, how would that change the one conversation I owe my team this quarter?
Identify the one thing your team does not yet know — about a decision you made, a pressure you absorbed, or a fear that shaped a call — that, if told, would begin to rebuild trust. Write down the three sentences you would say if you decided to tell them this month. Then schedule the meeting before the week ends. If this is the only thing I do from this CHEW today, it is enough.
If you can feel your team’s trust quietly thinning and you want help naming what is underneath it before it costs you a key player — reach out. Email me at [email protected] or call 404-421-8120. I read every email myself.
With you on the journey,
Ryan
If you had to put this into one sentence for today, what would you say God is inviting you to rest in or return to?
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