What can you do to demonstrate that you value the role of each member? (181-2)

A leader’s decisions affects the stakeholders. Read Jonah 1:1-17.

God gave Jonah a command to preach repentance to the Assyrian king and the people living in Nineveh. Jonah chose to go the opposite direction and caught a ship in Joppa bound for the port of Tarshish. God decided to recall Jonah and in the process sent a mighty storm that threatened to sink the ship. Jonah’s decision to run from God threatened the lives of the unsuspecting sailors. The cause of the storm lay with a man they had never met based on his decision he made before the journey began. Jonah became part of the sailors’ system and their lives were dramatically affected.

As Jonah and the sailors found out, a system is a dynamic and complex whole, interacting as a structured functional unit; and wise leaders think in terms of systems. Systems thinking opens a leader’s eyes to the fact that decisions they either make or fail to make may affect people they will never meet. Seemingly isolated decisions reach beyond a leader’s immediate sphere of influence to customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. When leaders fail to think in systems terms they aren’t able to consistently make wise decisions.

Because a small catalytic event can cause large changes in a complex system, wise leaders also use systems thinking when problem solving, viewing “problems” as parts of an overall system rather than reacting to individual outcomes or events which may only be contributing to the real problem. Systems thinking is a framework that is based on the belief that the parts of a system can best be understood in the context of relationships with each other rather than in isolation.

Have you identified the parts and the whole of the system you live in? How do you feel about your role on your current team? How do you feel about the roles of others on your team? What could you do to demonstrate that you value the role of each member in the system? Wise leaders seek God’s wisdom to help them think in terms of the system when making decisions.