My “godly” micro managing

By Gladys Chandia

magnifyI have recently started my days by handing over my daily tasks to God so that He can establish my plans, this is directly from Proverbs 16:3. As a project manager my day usually involves a number of projects, client interactions and the coordination of service providers, intermediaries and other transaction stakeholders. I truly believe that my job is my calling and I thrive in it. God has taught me so much and opened so many doors for my business partner Zodwa and I in a short space of 2 years that I always get overwhelmed when I look back at where the journey began. Of late, I have been challenged by consistently asking myself whether I am fully trusting God with my life. My immediate initial response was: “Of course, I pray in the beginning of every day, I have been blessed with so much, God has provided when all seemed to be falling apart!”. Both the Holy Spirit and I knew that I was kidding myself.

Our next question (to myself and the Holy Spirit) was, so how come you get so stressed out, then you have more people to manage? In other words, am I micromanaging or project managing? This question was important to me because I generally used to end up taking over the tasks of transaction stakeholders and colleagues all in the spirit of the getting the job done. My reasoning was, as warped as it might sound, was that God has given me the calling to do what I do of course then I will know how to do it best! The result of this was many sleepless nights of working or stressing.

One day it dawned on me, I really wasn’t applying Proverbs 16:3 to my work life. We are taught that God brings us to the end of ourselves in order to get us to rely on Him for everything. I can testify that this is definitely true. I was often burnt out and proud of it because I was “getting the job done”. Being burnt out however meant that many non-career elements of my life like relationships with my family and friends or any social life besides Church was neglected or nonexistent. This life, in my opinion, was not the life of John 10:10. In my quest to find out why I micro managed so much I was led to the conclusion that I was not really handing over everything to God. Although I had good intentions my “I know what is best for the organization” mentality; often lead me to taking over tasks; INCLUDING TAKING WORK RIGHT OUT OF GOD’s HANDS. Thank God that now, a material part of my day is to consciously hand over tasks, projects and negative thoughts to God. He has blessed me by revealing my role in leadership from a business perspective, I need to trust Him.

Other important lessons that I have learned are:

1. Don’t let fear of failure force you into micro managing. Someone on facebook wisely reminded me that “with Gods promises comes provision”. I love that!

2. If you have to pray 100 times a day to remind yourself to trust in God, then do that. Consult with the ultimate expert, for free!

3. In managing any project God does not only use you or speak to you in order to successfully complete the project. Trust that He shall work through others as well. You would be surprised how much you can learn from other irrespective of how junior they are in your organization/project execution team.

4. Micro managing undermines the talents of those around you. As Christians, we are blessed with promoting unity. One of the biggest enemies of unity and good team work in the work place is the undermining of a person’s talent. It might not be intentional from your side, but it hurts your colleagues none the less.

5. Pray not only for the success of your project, but for your colleagues as well. In doing so, your focus shifts from not only receiving blessings from God, but being a blessing to those around you as well.

This article is a reminder to myself and in faith a reminder to you of how we need to put God first in the work place. Our role in the workplace should not only result us receiving blessings from God i.e. in the form of achieving our KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators). We also need to be a blessing to those around us. I am eager to learn about how you successfully implement projects without micromanaging.

Proverbs 27:17 states that “Iron sharpens Iron” submit your comments to the Top women for God website and lets conversation going.

About the AuthorGladys 2

Gladys Chandia is a project manager and co-founder of Notable Beginnings Consulting (NBC). NBC provides business development and business linkages (FDI facilitation) services for companies that wish to penetrate new markets on the African continent. For more information email gladys@notablebeginningss.com

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