Encourage Inspiration

By now, you may have noticed that I have been using Sunday as a day to post my answers to the 20 questions for leaders that Michael Smith of ClearView Baptist Church in Franklin, Tennessee asked Mike Hyatt. This week’s question is As an organization gets larger there can be a tendency for the “institution” to dampen the “inspiration.” How do you keep this from happening?

When we consider what the “institution” is, what we find is that it is a structure that defines exactly how things ought to be done. There is a place for the institution. Some rules are important, especially for a large organization. A committee of three, for example, may not need a chairman to accomplish its task, but if there is a committee of fifty, you had better have a chairman and a secretary, just to keep things running smoothly. But there is no reason that has to dampen inspiration.

Inspiration comes from responsibility. If I a person sees a problem and feels personally responsible for solving that problem, he is going to think up ways to solve it, no matter how large the organization he happens to be in. It is poor leadership that dampens inspiration. If a leader takes the attitude, I’m in charge and we’re doing it my way, inspiration disappears and the creative minds start walking out the door. When the leaders go to their people and say, “Look, I’m not qualified to do your job. I’m not certain what you need to accomplish your job better, but if you will tell me what you need, I’ll see if there’s a way to make it happen,” the people in the organization are freed to go to their leaders and say, “If we could do it this way instead of how we’re doing it, it would work better.” But the leader had better mean what he says and he had better do his best to make it happen.