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This is a book to tell that what do Christians actually do when they are leaders or managers. In addition, the author is trying to use sound quantitative and qualitative research methods to discover that how do those Christian leaders put their faith into practice in the workplace.
And through the whole book, the author has introduced some new management/leadership concepts from those successful Christian adders’ many years of experience, in order to help other Christian managers to learn. I think this is a very interesting book and fresh view for business student, especially for unchristian students. Since I came from China that Christian is not very popular in there, I am not familiar with this religion. So there are many management ideas in the book make me very interesting in.
For instance, in the book the author talked that Christian leaders are very accessible to their employees. “Throughout scripture, Christians are called to e encourages of those around them (see, for example, 1 Thessalonians 5:1 1, Proverbs 15:23, Proverbs 31:31). In the context of the workplace, this means that it is the responsibility of the Christian leader to recognize and praise employees for their efforts??to pat them on the back for a job well done, to commend and publicize their successes and to actively support their continued effort on behalf of the Cigarillo, page 6).
In other words, in Christian leaders’ view, their employees’ needs are more important than customers. They really care about the people they lead in the aerospace. As we know, most business books teach company managers that customer is their “God” and do anything to meet their customers’ satisfactions. Actually this Christian leadership theory recalled me to remember an experience. When was doing my intern during last summer. My filed advisor is a Christian and she is a really accessible manager. One day during my intern, I got sick and could not go to work, so I called her to explain.
Her response was really impressed me. She asked me if I have medicines to make me feel better, and was there any friends could take care f me since am an international student at here and families are far away from me. In addition, she made some soup and brought to my apartment after she got off work. When I ask her why you treat me such nice and kind even we are not familiar with each other, she said one word to me-God. She explained that as a Christian, you have words from God to follow: to love people around you, to help people even not familiar with.
I think this experience could be the example of how Christian leaders put their faith into their employees and workplace, just meet the management theory in the kook. In the book, the author also talked about how Christian leaders deal with the conflict between performance and family needs. When I looked at the topic, I was guessing that Christian leaders would follow employees’ needs first, then consider about performance. However, the result was really shocked me. “Christian leaders are resistant to making decisions based on employee family needs and they resist because of performance Cigarillo, page 14).
This theory has confused me when I related this idea to the management theory just discussed above. Actually, I do not agree with this leadership theory as a Christian. At least, I do not think this theory is a right choice for managers to deal with conflicts between employees’ needs and performance under all situations. God has told us to love people, to help people, to encourage us do benevolent things; and we try hard to follow through donate clothes, food and money to needs people, or providing free service at some public area to deliver God’s love.
But why we should not put our employees’ needs at first consideration when deal with the conflict? There are many interesting leadership ideas from the book I would like to discuss, but because of the limitation of the paper, I only discussed two of them. If there will be a chance, would recommend this book to my friends and my family members. Since most of them are not Christian, they only knew about the leadership concepts from business school and that will limit their thinking. If some of them want to do international business in the future, it is better for them to learn leadership concepts from difference standpoints and religions.