Malicious Compliance

Your church depends on great decisions, stellar implementation and complete “buy-in.” Without these three things, you aren’t positioned to get the results you are working so hard for—and you aren’t building a cohesive leadership team. Healthy conflict, therefore, is the precursor to these three things.

One of the primary jobs of a leader is to create a culture that fosters this animated, interactive and engaged discussion. But this can seem counter intuitive to many of us. Our unease with tension and our anxious attempts to move past it, become obstacles to the very thing we need to encourage in our organizations. If you’ve ever made a comment like “we don’t have time for this, we just need to make a decision and move on” …you may be avoiding the very thing that will energize your team.

Without this culture that encourages healthy conflict, creativity and motivation are abandoned. In our rush to make decisions, we short-circuit the process, leaving many great ideas and opinions unspoken. Not only have we failed to unearth contrary strategies, we have also left the very people responsible for implementation only partially committed. Harley-Davidson calls this “malicious compliance.” Isn’t that a great phrase? You can picture the smiling, nodding face on the outside, and the shaking head, rolling eyes on the inside—we’ve all done it at one time or another. “Malicious compliance” translates into the stealthy siphoning off of energy – energy that used to foster forward-thinking decisions we make as a team.
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1. Don't fold a laser-printed resume right along a line of text. The "ink" could flake off along the fold.

2. Don't mystify the reader of your resume about your gender; they'll go nuts until they know whether you're male or female. And while they're worrying about that, they're not thinking about what you can do for them. So if your name is Lee or Robin or Pat or anything else not clearly male or female, use a Mr. or Ms. prefix.

Hiring Managers spend an average of just 10 minutes to form a negative or positive opinion of a job applicant during an interview. When interviewing staff-level applicants, they spend an average of 55 minutes in the process compared to 86 minutes when interviewing manager-level applicants. Although churches may invest more time in the process, don’t count on it. Like anything else, you have only one opportunity to make a good first impression. (A Robert Half Finance and Accounting study, 2006)

Pastors have the second-highest divorce rate among professions. (Monday Morning Insight 11/27/06)

For every 20 people who go into the pastorate only one retires from the ministry. (Monday Morning Insight 11/27/06)