Who are you expecting?

I've read the story of John sending his disciples to Jesus at least a dozen time before, but I saw something to day that I never had before: John's disciples reported back to him the news of all these events taking place. He sent two of them to the Master to ask the question, "Are you the One we've been expecting, or are we still waiting?"

The men showed up before Jesus and said, "John the Baptizer sent us to ask you, 'Are you the One we've been expecting, or are we still waiting?'"

In the next two or three hours Jesus healed many from diseases, distress, and evil spirits. To many of the blind he gave the gift of sight. Then he gave his answer: "Go back and tell John what you have just seen and heard: The blind see, The lame walk, Lepers are cleansed, The deaf hear, The dead are raised, The wretched of the earth have God's salvation hospitality extended to them. "Is this what you were expecting? Then count yourselves fortunate!" Luke 7:18-23 The Message

First, its interesting to note that they had already told John about the miracles that Jesus was doing but he sent them out anyway to ask Jesus "Are you the One we've been expecting, or are we still waiting?"

Jesus doesn't answer their question directly, he just begins to minister to the people, which I've always interpreted as Jesus saying look at the works I am doing, they are my witness and testimony that I am who I say I am. I still absolutely agree with this, but now I see that Jesus was cutting to the real question in John's heart - was Jesus was the Messiah that John was looking for? Maybe John expected him, as others did, to raise and army, drive out Rome, and create a earthly Kingdom; freeing John from prison in the process. Only Jesus and John know for sure. But what we do know is that Jesus demonstrated with power the Messiah that he was and left it up to John and his disciples is this was the Messiah that they were waiting on or not.

How many times have we missed what God was doing because it wasn't what we were looking for?

The Big 40

So I'm talking to a good friend of mine, Fitz, who runs his own small service company. He was telling me about how his right hand guy, Ed, has been taking a lot of extra time off lately for some family issues and now he wants to get him back to working a good 50 hours/week again. Fritz wasn't so much upset about the time off; I mean sometimes life happens, as he wanted to get Ed "productive" again. Translation: productivity and/or a successful week are measured by and are the direct result of hours worked. To which I responded that I would actually like to see both of them working 30 or less hours a week with 50 hours of output. It was right about then that his mind tilted like an old pinball machine. There were lights, funny noises, and lots of smoke from his ears; all in all it was pretty cool to watch.

Now to be completely fair, it’s not all his fault he thinks this way. It’s one of those things that our parents pounded into us as kids:
* “you have to work hard to get ahead”
* “wash behind your ears”
* “never change your underwear when you’re on a hitting streak”, etc.

But really, why? Why 40? Why not 50? Why not 25- 30? Come to think of it why are we even concerned with how many hours we work each week?

It seems to me that measuring the success/productivity of your week by how many hours you worked is about as arbitrary as measuring the length of your living room in oranges. A measurement of any kind is only valuable if it gives us useful information and telling Home Depot that your living room is 250 oranges by 375 oranges isn’t likely to be very useful in getting you the right amount of carpet you need.

What would happen if we didn’t even track how many hours a week we worked and only tracked productivity? What if when you hired someone for a position that instead of hiring them for a set number of hours and then giving them work to fill those hours you hired them for a specific set of tasks (aka productivity), for a specific amount of money and they could go home whenever they got the job done?

I can already hear the screaming “I’m not paying 40 hours for someone who is only working 30!” But isn’t that what you’re already doing? The work still only really takes 30 hours, they are just taking 40 to get it done. The other 10 hours are getting wasted on facebook and reading my blog. Why not just admit it and give them the other 10 hours they are already taking anyway? Try it for 30-60 days and watch retention, loyalty, and employee moral go through the roof without costing you a single penny more. In fact I’d wager that if you did this with the right employee (do you want any other kind?) that you could actually increase their daily/weekly responsibilities and they would still wind up not working 40 hours most weeks – all the while exceeding your expectations.

So then why don’t we run our businesses and organizations this way? I believe there are two very simple answers. The first is that we don’t know how and therefore it would be harder. We are so stuck in using hours as a means to measure productivity that we don’t know how to evaluate someone purely on the job that they do. It’s much easier to track if they got in on time and didn’t leave early. Sure we still look at their work and want them to be productive, but what we really look at is if they are here for their 40 hours and look like they are working while they are here. It would also force all of us to get better at knowing what to say no to and to manage our tasks more efficiently (hopefully more to come on that in my next entry). The second reason is that when people start going home for the weekend at 10 am on Thursday, with everything done correctly, we would realize how much wasted time is actually going on.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for working hard, but I’m more for working smart. Are there going to be days that Fritz is going to have to work more than 30 hours? Absolutely; anyone that leads in an organization is going to have some long weeks, especially in the beginning. That’s not the point; the point is working long hours just to work long hours. Of course there is an exception to this rule, there will be some people that will probably always work a set number of hours based on what they do, but only because their work is not dependent upon them, but on others beyond their and your control: customer service, receptionist, etc. Just don’t measure their productivity/success by the hours they work.

Did you get accomplished what needed to be accomplished to keep your organization operating that week? Did everything get prepared for next week to keep everything going? Did you do what needed to be done to keep your organization moving forward in the weeks after that? Great, then you had a successful and productive week go home!