J. N. N. Ng’ang’a Meditations for October 9 – 15, 2011: Christian Professionals must have Excellence in Performance in order to be Good Witnesses

 

Day 1

 

I Timothy 4:15

Be diligent in these matters; give yourself wholly to them, so that everyone may see your progress

 

Excellence in performance is the biggest source of influence for any professional.

 

The best way to influence is set a good example .The importance of becoming a good example is so that you influence others effectively.

 

When a professional has an exceptionally good performance in his job, it causes all to notice him. This becomes like the door that will make your verbal testimony to be worth listening to. You are unlikely to influence others if you are not a good performer.

 

But what determines your performance?

 

For you to have good performance that will influence others, three things are important: Your capacity, your achievement motivation and your relational skills. To be a performer, the employee must have these three things.

 

Day 2

 

Matthew 25:26

“His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed?

 

Our discussion will be more on relational skills but let me just mention about capacity and achievement motivation.

 

Capacity

Capacity refers to your technical competence; your ability to think, your ability to visualize, your ability to conceptualize .If you don’t have that whether you are an engineer or an accountant, you cannot achieve much. Your ability to solve problems will be measured by your ability to rise above the petty and look at the problem in totality. You also need ability to break it up into small pieces so that you fully understand the issue.

Capacity has to do with the way God has gifted you but we can improve on what God has given us by learning. Normally bright people will do very well on the issue of capacity. To test this we  might ask you to discuss the issue of something as general as environment and even if you have never studied environment, bright people will not only define the issue but go quickly to give you the overall implications of the environment, and break it up into its components, and tell you the  advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to the environment .Level of capacity rises as you go above just a general description to  conceptual level- showing you have the ability to conceptualize. By the time you rise to the top in capacity, it means you have the ability to one day be the CEO of the company. What we are measuring is not your ability now, but your potential ability in the future.

Your ability to perform any task will be aided by this skill. If you cannot conceptualize, it will be difficult to lead at a higher level that requires setting the strategies for the whole group.

 

Day 3

Proverbs 12:24

Diligent hands will rule, but laziness ends in forced labor

 

Achievement motivation or drive to achieve

 

The second of the three skills one needs to have high performance level is achievement motivation. Achievement motivation is the inner self drive. There are many people with capacity but no self-motivation or desire to succeed. I want to tell you in terms of performance, many of them don’t perform well. You employ a holder of first class honors degree in your company, if you give them a sum, they’ll finish it quickly but they don’t have the ability to get things done longer term. You pick the very best engineer and you give him a building project to run. Technically he can do the bill of quantities and prepare the project for you. But project management involves many boring activities that determine the success of the project.

 

Do you know what I have discovered as I have supervised many engineers? That if you don’t have the achievement motivation, the project can’t go through on time. Why? First of all you must write the project specification clearly. Capacity will help you do this well. But the project also involves making sure that the tenderers put in the tenders by due date, this is the boring part. The achievement motivation means the ability to think through the project, ring the people who need to participate in the tender,  find out if they intend to quote,  follow up with the procurement department that the tender box is open after due date, then follow up that the tender board meeting is called on time and that your item is not left out of the tender board agenda and that when you come to the tender board you present the tender analysis  in a way that allows the board to make a decision on that day .When they finish you wait for the letter of authority to be able to engage the guy and then you call the guy in time for you to start the project and consistently follow up the project to be  finished on time. All those other things other than the specifications are boring and are not necessarily taught in engineering. It is this something within you that make you to hate failure, that will help you pull through the project successfully and on time. This is the something in you we call achievement motivation and unfortunately it cannot be taught; it is something that you have within you. There are enough people you can choose to blame for your failure if you do not have this drive. But this self-motivation makes you hold yourself accountable to get excellence results for any task you undertake.

 

Day 4

 

Colossians 3:17

17 And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.NIV

Fortunately for you as a Christian, desire for God’s glory should be your motivation .Look at Colossians 3:17

 

Whatever you do, do it as unto the Lord.

Doing something for God should surely motivate us to do our best. So what happens? If we are born again, and truly understand God’s word, we have achievement motivation just by being Christians. We used to hear in my village-when you are sent to go and buy something, somebody says “Run, like a boy sent by his father.” Of course that was showing Kikuyu Male chauvinism. The idea is if you are sent by your mother, you can walk but if you are sent by your father you must run. Forgive me for the saying, it is not me who came up with it; it is traditional Kikuyus.

Everybody in your village who sees you going for the errand can tell you have been sent by your father. Remember when you are doing that project as an engineer, you are not doing it for your boss, you are not doing it for the company; you are doing it for your Heavenly Father.

Some of the tasks you have to do  you may not have the highest capacity for them but it is important to understand that because of your high achievement motivation, the project will be finished on time even you are not as good an engineer as the other one who has no achievement motivation. You will be driven to consult where your capacity is inadequate but you feel self-driven to achieve the best.

Thus you can see that when we are recruiting for an engineer, you will come with your first class honours and we will not look at it if we sense you have no drive to achieve. With the experience of over thirty years in performance management, I can tell you that the fact that you got first class honors is not the full determinant of how well you will perform in your career.  What we are after is productivity and you’ll not be productive just because you got first class honors. You must have both the first class honors and a drive to achieve.

Day 5

 

Proverbs 10:4

Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth

 

Without this drive to achieve that makes you hate laziness and poor results you will not utilize your capacity to the full. Your productivity depends on how well you utilize the capacity you have. But biblical Christians must have this drive, for the fear of the Lord causes you not to play around with your job but instead to want to finish it within the time you have promised to finish it.

 

You could rate some people’s capacity at 100 percent even when they have only 20 per cent drive to achieve. Thus, a productivity of twenty percent out of the hundred per cent capacity is what you are really going to get out of them. This leads to only twenty percent performance level.

 

If my capacity is as low as 60% but my drive is 100%, my productivity will be sixty% because you will have a hundred percent of my sixty % capacity while the other one will give twenty percent of a 100 % capacity. There is nobody with drive who cannot become productive and therefore become a good example. Christians who might not have high capacity are expected to still have a drive.

 

With such a drive you will become the example that will help you to influence your work environment for Christ. The fact that you say that you are saved is not enough. If you are the one that is not productive, every manager will want to avoid you and the first time there are redundancies, you will be the first one to be chucked out.

 

Thus there is no way you will influence your environment for Christ if you are not a productive worker. Becoming an example means that others can copy you because they admire your actions.

 

Day 6

 

Romans 12:18

If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone

 

Relationships skills

 

The last of the 3 performance determinants is “relationship skills”. Even if you have capacity and you have self-drive to achieve, without relational skills you will not perform well in the longer term. Most of those people, who have the first two, are the ones who go stepping on others as they go up. We know them in industry; even in classrooms they are known. Even as university students, they have such a big drive to achieve that, if that drive is not tempered with relational skills, they end up in trouble with lecturers, librarians and fellow students

 

I have met them, people who are highly valued as they join a project but by the end of the project, the team will be in shambles, for they can’t work well in teams. They think of themselves too highly to value other team members. They think of what will be the results but they don’t think of others involved in getting the results. That kind of person cannot achieve much in the long term. His actions in getting the first quick win will become the precursor for all future failures. Anybody who enters into the team hears of your   fame that you cannot work with so and so, so and so and soon avoids you. Everybody then avoids you. So, any time you are given work with such a person, you will look for how to avoid him, isn’t it? 

 

 

Day 7

Hebrews 12:14

Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord

 

People think that ,one who is very gifted yet with bad interpersonal skills , wants to work alone, so they leave him to see if he can accomplish much on his own. Everyone drops their work, to watch him. He is the type that cannot have any patience, so when you don’t do any task as he expects, he does it. So at the end of the period, he is doing his work, other peoples work and the final project is not what it should have been because it was meant to be done by many people. When you do not have that ability to relate well with others, there will be a problem with your performance.

 

Again let me tell you when you are a Christian you are supposed to have a basic advantage on this. Why? Because born again believers are supposed to love others, just because they are God’s creation, isn’t it? So you should be able to withstand other team members’ provocation, and to have patience with them. You are supposed to be a people person. So, just because you are born again, it should predispose you towards understanding others and wanting to work with them. This attitude gives you good relational skill