Relational Skills in Business and Church

The first thing I turn to when BusinessWeek comes is the back-page column "The Welch Way," by Jack and Suzy Welch. They simply respond to people's business-related questions, and always provide rich insights. Very often, their words apply directly to the church.

This week, they responded to a question about how business schools can best prepare today's students.

They lamented the scant classroom time given to people issues--hiring, motivating, team-building, and firing. Instead, business school focus on "brainiac concepts" like disruptive technologies and complexity modeling (whatever those are). "Those may be useful...if you join a consulting firm, but real managers need to know how to get the most out of people." While business curriculum emphasizes strategy and finance, the Welches would prefer seeing people-management front and center.

There are parallels to how ministers are trained. Seminaries, from what I gather, focus on learning biblical languages, theology, strategy (mission statements, goal-setting, etc.), and church administration. How much is spent on developing relational smarts? Not much, according to what I've seen from my perch at my denomination's headquarters.

Ministers never need to leave a church because they lack sufficient understanding of Greek and Hebrew, their theological understanding is sub-par, or they don't know how to develop a mission statement. Rather, almost always it involves bone-headed relational skills. Ministers get in trouble because they do and say stupid things in their relationships with parishioners. Do seminaries not teach people-management skills, or do students just not pay attention, and revert to their default behaviors once they get assigned to a church?

I've always admired my Dad's ability to deal with people. Relationships are tricky in small churches. Tricky and treacherous. Young bucks fresh out of seminary regularly get eaten alive. But Dad knew how to keep the church bosses in line, how to marginalize or chase away carnal laypersons who sow discord, and mobilize persons to move the church forward. Nobody ever ran over him. I wish I had more of his relational smarts. It's a whole lot more valuable than (to take something from my field) knowing how to diagram a sentence.

Posted on December 9, 2006 12:22 AM|

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