The Redemptive Business: Managing Human Resources

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We have already written in this space about different aspects of business and leadership as inspired by a faith perspective. We have written about a kingdom-influenced business model, where business is understood as stewardship and faithfulness expressed through the flourishing of others.

We have written about the entrepreneur as a reflection of divine creativity — and how society and the church alike flourish when the entrepreneur is supported rather than vilified.

And we have written about how our work is an opportunity to worship our Creator. Our work allows us to express our calling and virtue through the manifestation of the gifts God has given to us.

Now, we will begin to connect these threads to the specific functions of business. We start where every organization starts — with people.

People Are Worth Our Investment

We do not call them “human resources” as a mere catchphrase. It is the highest honor and a sacred responsibility to invest in and develop the talents and potential of a human being — and to help that person add genuine value to the world (Banks and Stevens, 1997). Consider the purely economic case: it costs at least one and one-half times an employee’s annual salary to recruit, train, and fully bring a replacement up to speed (Noe, 2007).

A veteran employee carries with them something no job posting can recover — a thorough knowledge of the company’s processes, its culture, and its unwritten rules. It literally takes years for employees to learn to navigate an organization most effectively (Noe, 2007). To treat such a person as disposable is not only theologically wrong; it is economically foolish.

The Christian faith goes deeper than a cost-benefit analysis. It sees people as created in the image of God, possessing an inherent worth that organizations have both the opportunity and the obligation to develop and honor. God Himself is in the people-developing business (Van Duzer, et al., 2004). This is not a peripheral concern — it is central to our faith. Jesus, as teacher and example, declared His vision for people, and He sacrificed completely for those He led:

“(J)ust as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matthew 20:28, NIV).

That is the model every faith-informed manager inherits.

Thinking that hiring involves simply drawing from a normal distribution curve until you find a “winner” is a significant disconnect (Blanchard, Zigarmi, and Zigarmi, 1985). Recruiting, training, and retaining talented people are three critical competencies, yet they are rarely given the focused attention deserved in organizational life (Sullivan, 2002). They are not simply a function of the human resources department. Ultimately, managers must live with their own efforts — or their failures — at developing a competent and committed workforce (Yukl, 2002).

The Tension at the Heart of Employment

An uncomfortable contradiction is embedded in much of American workplace culture. Organizations work hard to recruit the best individual for a role — not simply a job —and then classify that new employee as an “at-will” member of the organization, meaning they can be separated from the business at any time, without notice, and without cause.

Yet, the same supervisors who invoke this arrangement without hesitation will also preach loyalty and commitment to the organization. The irony is rarely acknowledged. Treating employees as expendable, while demanding their devotion, is not only hypocritical; for the Christian leader, it is a failure of the calling.

Research confirms what Scripture implies: Managers generally demonstrate a perceptual weakness in properly applying human resource best practices to the realities of the workplace (Subramony, 2006). Too many supervisors manage their employees as they would manage parts or inventory — seeking efficiency and expediency rather than engaging in the messier, more demanding work of developing a person (Subramony, 2006). The result is a workforce that is managed rather than developed, compliant rather than committed, present in body but absent in spirit.

Treating employees as human beings with genuine dignity requires something more than policy. It requires an appeals process for those who are terminated, an investment in training beyond the annual performance review, and feedback systems that give employees a real sense of where they stand and how they can grow (Blanchard, Zigarmi, and Zigarmi, 1985; Chewning, 1990). These are not expensive luxuries. They are the minimum expression of the conviction that people bear the image of God.

Shalom in the Workplace

The theologian R. Paul Stevens has written that “Business can be an agent of the kingdom of God by bringing a measure of shalom to people and to nations” (Stevens, 2006, p. 28). This is a breathtaking claim — and a breathtaking responsibility for the faith-informed manager. Shalom is not merely the absence of conflict; it is wholeness, right relationships, and human flourishing. The manager who treats the workplace as a site of shalom is not softening the hard edges of business; he or she is taking business more seriously than most.

This begins with the recognition that Christ is not a guest we bring to the workplace — He is already there. As Robert Sirico has observed, the challenge “is not so much to bring Christ with us into our work, but to discover His presence already there, precisely through the natural order that He created in the first instance, because, of course, God is no stranger to the world He has made” (Sirico, 1996, p. 65). Faith-oriented managers do not impose a foreign framework onto business; they learn to see what was always true already.

That vision has direct implications for how we structure work. Personal knowledge of employees’ capabilities and task challenges leads to a better focus for managers in directing motivation and improving communication, and these behaviors dramatically improve overall job satisfaction (Schermerhorn, 2005). Managers who are not skilled in these people-centered practices are themselves candidates for development (Blanchard, Zigarmi, and Zigarmi, 1985).

It is a major responsibility of managers to guide employee behavior, to help their teams maintain healthy working relationships with one another, and to make clear what is expected in terms of conduct and character on the job (Yukl, 2002). This is not bureaucratic management; it is pastoral leadership.

The Gospel Transforms the Workplace

The gospel transforms the hearts of men and women. If this transformative methodology is cultivated and encouraged on the job, employees can act and think in ways that honor God and express genuine care for their fellow workers:

“Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you.” (Colossians 3:12–13).

These are not soft virtues. They are the operating system of a redeemed community — and they belong in the office and on the shop floor as much as anywhere else.

And each employee brings talents and gifts into the workplace that can be used for the glory of God and the common good — gifts that, when recognized and invested in, release something far greater than the sum of any organization’s job descriptions (Romans 12:3–8; 1 Cor. 12). Here is the opportunity for leadership to become something more than management: the fostering of vocation itself.

Human resources, working alongside managers, has the opportunity to promote this kind of individual flourishing through intentional training and career-development plans (Chewning, 1990). This is not merely a programmatic exercise. It is an expression of the conviction that the people in our organizations are created for more than their current role and that a Christian employer has a stake in helping them discover it.

Redemption as a Management Philosophy

Cornelius Plantinga, writing from within the Reformed tradition, argues that if all has been created good and all has been corrupted by the Fall, then all must be redeemed (Plantinga, 2002). God’s concern is not simply for souls in the abstract; it is for the saving and restoring of human beings in their actual activities and for the restoring of social systems and economic structures as well (Plantinga, 2002). The workplace is not exempt from this redemptive vision. It is one of its primary theaters.

This means the discipline of leadership can and should empower people through training, mentorship, personal development, and ownership — so people can improve themselves, their communities, and their societies (Tunehag, McGee, and Plummer, 2005). It means managers must accept that all people are fallible, not perfect, and need training and nurturing to be successful. There is real value — theological, economic, and human — in restoring an individual created in the image of God to a position of fulfilling their calling, supporting an organization’s mission, and providing for their own and their family’s needs (Plantinga, 2002).

God has established leadership to look beyond itself and to trust in His benevolent wisdom in guiding people through significant change — to help them overcome their weaknesses and be restored to a greater capacity and service (Ephesians 4). It is a viable and noble pursuit for a faith-informed manager to consider a leadership intervention based on the mission of Christ Himself, “who gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed, and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession, zealous for good deeds” (Titus 2:13, NASB).

The redemptive business, then, is not a business that merely tolerates faith. It is a business shaped by the conviction that people are worth the investment — that the work of developing another human being is not a distraction from the mission but an expression of it. May God give us the vision to lead that way and the courage to begin.

Sources

• Banks, R. J., & Stevens, R. P. (1997). Firing. The Complete Book of Everyday Christianity: An A-To-Z Guide to Following Christ in Every Aspect of Life. Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press.
• Blanchard, K. H., Zigarmi, P., & Zigarmi, D. (1985). Leadership and the one minute manager: Increasing effectiveness through situational leadership. New York: Morrow.
• Chewning, R. C., Eby, J. W., & Roels, S. J. (1990). Business Through the Eyes of Faith. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
• Noe, R. A. (2007). Fundamentals of human resource management (Rev. ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.
• Plantinga, C. (2002). Engaging God’s world: A Christian vision of faith, learning, and living. Grand Rapids, Mich: W.B. Eerdmans.
• Schermerhorn, J. R. (2005). Management. New York: Wiley.
• Sirico, R.A. (1996). The entrepreneurial vocation. In Beyond Integrity (pp. 60–66). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
• Stevens, R.P. (2006). Doing God’s business. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.
• Subramony, M. (2006). Why organizations adopt some human resource management practices and reject others: An exploration of rationales. Human Resource Management, 45(2), 195–210.
• Sullivan, J. (2002, August). The true value of hiring and retaining top performers. Workforce Management Magazine.
• Tunehag, M., McGee, W., & Plummer, J. (2005). Business as mission: Abbreviated version (Lausanne Occasional Paper No. 59). Lausanne, SW: Lausanne Committee for World Evangelism.
• Van Duzer, J., Franz, R. S., Karns, G. L., Dearborn, T., Daniels, D., & Wong, K. L. (2004). Towards a statement on the biblical purposes of business. In M. Naughton & S. Rumpza (Eds.), Business as a calling: Interdisciplinary essays on the meaning of business from the Catholic Social Tradition (pp. 1–19). St. Paul, MN: University of St. Thomas.
• Yukl, G. A. (2002). Leadership in organizations (5th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.