An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XVIII - Christians Calling Other Christians Not-Christian

Growing up I didn't think too much about other Christians and what they believed, or whether they were "real" Christians. I was raised in the Catholic Church, which definitely teaches that it's the "One True Church", but it wasn't something that came up in everyday conversation. In my teens I became aware of the Protestant Churches in my neighborhood and attended their services out of curiosity. This disturbed my parents, but I didn't detect anything very much different. It wasn't until I got involved in The Way that I was exposed to the idea that some Christians didn't think some other Christians were...Christians.

I'm not talking about one Christian judging another Christian's behavior as unchristian, but the characterization of another Christian denomination as being fundamentally outside what the Bible would define as Christian. Not just labeling fringe denominations as cults, but other "regular" denominations. This a doctrinal thing, not behavior. 

I've written much about The Way's cultishness, but their attitudes about how one would define a "true" Christian was right in line with conservative Protestant thinking. The thinking that fueled the engine of the European religious wars of the 1600 and 1700's had definitely not completely gone away. Catholics viewed Protestants as deluded schismatics and Protestants viewed Catholics as Mary worshipping Papists. In the nineties my ex-wife and I were home schooling our children and purchased some textbooks from a Christian book publisher. I clearly remember the description in a history textbook of Catholics as a "false religion". 

I mostly hear these accusations of Christians not being real Christians mostly in a political context. Supporters of both major presidential parties are sure that no real Christian could truly support the other candidate. Abortion is a major theme in this flinging of heretical epithets, but even something as ordinary as clapping back at hecklers becomes "evidence" that a candidate hates Christians. In the political realm it's not so much suspect doctrine that gets one viewed as outside the pale, but the assumption that God is without a doubt on one side. 

This is not something new. The New Testament Epistles are full of references to "false teachers" who are accused of leading people astray and even being diabolic influences. Who are these allegedly false teachers? They weren't pagan priests or Jewish rabbis, they were other Christian leaders! Of course, since history is written by the victors, we don't see much of what the other factions of Christians in the First Century had to say, but you can bet that they were writing the same things about the eventual authors of the epistles that the epistle writers were saying about them. Even beyond the era when The Bible was written there was a constant battle among different factions of Christians to decide what the truth was. There was a constantly evolving opinion about various topics about which the Bible was unclear. Why? Because the Bible was unclear.

And other than politicians disingenuously promoting themselves as the only Christian alternative, the reason that regular Christians can confidently conclude that what they believe is the truth while other people are deluded fools or shills for Satan is that the Bible is (1) Unclear (2) Internally contradictory and (3) Not a concise doctrinal statement. The Bible is not a manifesto laying out a clear statement of beliefs and clarifying all manner of moral and practical conundrums, it is a loose collection of biographies (which contradict each other) and letters addressing behavioral problems in specific places. This leaves a lot of room for interpretation. In order to make sense out of it a Christian is required to cherry pick, ignore the contradictions and parts that they don't like and interpret the ambiguous sections in a way that props up their own morality. Then decide that any other view is not just wrong, but inspired by The Devil. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XVIII

One of the things that The Way drilled into us was the expectation that we would be persecuted. While the upwelling of anti-cult animus starting in 1978 following the People's Temple Massacre surely drove some people away, it also mobilized a lot of people against groups like The Way, groups which weren't as extreme as Jim Jones' bunch, but which nonetheless were enough outside the mainstream to make the mainstream nervous. The Way played up this very real opposition to its operations and framed it as equivalent to the persecution suffered by Jesus, his apostles and the early Christians. In New York I was aware of anti-Way sentiment as part of the fear about cult involvement, but in a city that large it kind of got lost in the background noise of life. In a city of 5,000 we stood out as if we had a spotlight trained upon us all day, every day. Because that where I was sent—Sidney, Nebraska, a city, if you could call it that, of around 5,000 people. 

The Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador program was in its tenth year in 1980. After a decade or more of slow growth from the mid-fifties to the late sixties, Wierwille made a move that would change the course of The Way. He travelled to San Francisco and found several leaders of the nascent "Jesus People" movement that had sprung up there. He convinced some of them to follow him back to New Knoxville and learn his version of Biblical research. They became the seed from which the fast growing "Way Tree" would spring, teaching Wierwille's Power for Abundant Living (PFAL) class to their followers, who tended to be young—college or even high school students mostly. Centers of Way activity sprung up mostly organically as people "witnessed" to their family and friends. Associated "ministries" were especially active in the San Francisco and Long Island areas. In addition to this type of growth several Way followers in the Wichita Kansas area participated in a test program—leaving their home areas and attempting to start Way "twig" fellowships and run PFAL classes in new areas. This pilot program  was so successful that at a Way gathering in August 1971, Wierwille asked for volunteers to participate in the new WOW outreach program. For many years this was one of the main sources of new Way members. 

The main goal of a "family" of WOWs was to "witness" to new people in their assigned city, run PFAL classes and ultimately, if there wasn't already a Way presence, to plant a brand new Way twig fellowship there. You were to arrive at your assigned city with $300, find housing and a part-time job and then get to work "witnessing", which you were to spend 8 hours a day, six days a week doing. Witnessing was, in effect, your unpaid, full-time job. As I revealed in Part XVII, the bus we were travelling on broke down in central Iowa. By the time we made our way out to Sidney, which as only 60 miles east of the Wyoming border, we were almost a week late.  We were raring to go, but what we didn't know was that Sidney knew that we were coming and they weren't happy about it. 

Start from the beginning: Part I

So, You Want to Join a Cult - Part XXVII - No Kool-Aid Necessary

One of the things that people misunderstand about cults is that what makes a cult cultish isn't what they believe, it's what they do. 

You want to believe that the earth was populated by aliens from the planet Xrts'dic 3 billion years ago, or that you get reincarnated as a rabbits? So what?, as long as those beliefs aren't hurting anyone.  Most Christians believe a number of things in common, despite differences in church governance and ritual. One of those things is that God exists as something called The Trinity, which oversimplified means that God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit are all God, not three separate gods and that neither is superior to or pre-existed the other. The doctrinal nuances and niceties are over most people's heads and what people actually believe would probably be considered heretical. 

The Way International didn't believe that God was a Trinity, but that Jesus was simply a man. For many mainstream Christians this was enough to label them a cult. Just as those same Christians labelled Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses as cults due to their non-mainstream view of God and Jesus. I'm not going to discuss the details of why The Way International believed that Jesus wasn't God, because I don't think it is relevant to their categorization as a cult. My own view is that the writers of the Gospels and Epistles, far from being inspired by God to put together a coherent narrative, were all fallible human beings who had different ideas about the nature of God and Jesus. Their disagreement needed to be explained somehow—early Orthodox-Catholic Christians harmonized the contradictions by coming up with The Trinity; Unitarians, ignoring or explaining away verses they didn't like, came up with their own doctrine. 

No, what makes a cult is something that has little to do with the minutia of doctrine. Is there a charismatic leader who is deferred to? Does it claim to have special knowledge that no one else has access to? Does it work to cut you off from previous ties? Does it attempt to regiment and control aspects of your life? By no means does it have to be as extreme as the People's Temple in Guyana. It doesn't have to require you to dress in yellow robes like the Hare Krishna group. You aren't necessarily locked away in a "compound" like David Koresh's Branch Davidians. Usually the signs are a lot more subtle. 

When I was first involved in The Way while living in New York the cultish nature wasn't as apparent. The Long Island fellowships had grown quickly and organically and for a long time were functionally independent. When I was in the WOW Ambassador program I rationalized the level of control being because I was in a structured program, it wasn't until I moved to Lincoln that I saw that living a normal life, i.e. job, education, relationships, etc, was going to be hampered by involvement with The Way. 

Start from the beginning: Part I

Workin' Man - Part XVIII - Cornhusker Twilight

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

Before I get into my final phase at the Cornhusker store, I neglected to mention an incident that took place during my first few years. One of the corporate directors took me aside one afternoon and informed me that he saw a pharmacy employee take a soda from the cooler and go into the pharmacy without paying for it. He asked me to accompany him while he confronted the individual. When she came to the pharmacy door she explained that she paid for it at the register inside the pharmacy and showed us the receipt. As I was explaining how she should pay before leaving the sales floor in order to avoid any misperceptions, Jeff, the pharmacist, started yelling at us. He maintained that pharmacy employees were "better" than the rest of the employees and how dare we accuse her! He then attempted to slam the door in our faces, but was prevented by me inserting my foot in the doorway. Jeff complained to Brian, the Store Director, not only saying that I (the corporate director was somehow absent from his complaint) accused his employee without cause, but that I kicked the door in! I gave Brian my side of the story. He didn't follow up, but I found out much later that he believed that I really did kick in the door. Ironically, the pharmacy employee in question was fired about a month later because it was discovered that she lied on her application about an arrest for drug possession. Jeff later walked out in the middle of a shift, leaving the pharmacy unlocked and unattended. It later came out that he was regularly verbally abusive to all his employees and pushed his religious views on them and on customers. 

Well, anyway, Bill was gone, Matt K was in. At first he seemed like another "nice guy", but a workaholic. For the first month or so he worked seven days a week, 7:00am until at least 7:00pm (half day on Sunday though). I made him mad when I asked him if everything was alright at home! I was disabused of my perception of Matt as a pushover when he fired a few people within his first few weeks. Despite his friendly demeanor, he had no patience for people not doing their jobs or thumbing their noses at company policy. However, he had such an easygoing manner that when he fired people he made it sound as if it was the best thing to ever happen to them. 

The first employee that Matt fired was the overnight doughnut fryer. We'll call him Lou. He was frying doughnuts one night when he slipped and ended up with his arm shoulder deep in the hot fryer oil, burning him pretty badly. Company policy was that every accident had to be reported, but company policy also required that everyone who was in an accident get a drug test. Lou, who knew that he would fail a drug test, didn't call the manager in charge, but called his sister to come get him and take him to the emergency room, hoping to avoid that drug test. Shay, the Night Manager happened to be walking by the Bakery when she heard someone whimpering. Lou was on the floor, in a fetal position, on the phone with his sister. Shay let Brandi, his sister, take him to the ER, but now the accident was on the record and Lou had to get a drug test. Which he failed. When he came back to the store, healed enough to go back to work, Matt called him up to his office. Lou refused. The next thing we knew Matt's extremely pale complexion turned beet red and he stormed out of the office to confront Lou. Deb, the front end manager turned to me and said "I guess that's what he looks like when he's mad". 

My only complaint about Matt was that his communication style was very indirect. I had gotten used to Bill, whose style was such that there was no mistaking what he meant in any situation. Matt was more the hinting type. In the year that I worked with him I can't recall him ever directly telling me what to do, but after a while I learned to crack the "Matt Code". Sometimes I would just decide that if he couldn't be direct I wasn't going to try to decipher his intentions. My last Christmas Eve at Cornhusker a few of us decided to play our own Christmas music, rather than the Muzak, over the stores public address system. One of the CDs was Twisted Sister's Christmas CD. Matt would repeatedly skip the CD to the next one, but would not ask us to stop playing it, so every time he turned it off, I would work my way up front and turn it back on. This went on all day and he never said anything. 

One of Matt's first changes was to give me my own office, instead of having me continue to share an office with the Grocery Manager. He had the maintenance guy convert a storage closet into my office! 

It was during this time period when the corporate office decided to change the responsibilities of the Assistant Store Directors (ASDs). Up until then the ASD position was largely undefined. We were like the Vice President of the United States with very little written down about what we were supposed to be doing other than run the store when the Store Director was absent. What an ASD actually did depended on the individual ASD, the needs of the store, and the expectations of the Store Director. Going forward the ASD was to be delegated direct authority over what the grocery business called "Center Store": the Grocery, Frozen, Dairy, Spirits and General Merchandise departments. The Store Director still was responsible for the whole store, but the ASD's responsibility for Center Store was formalized. This changed my focus somewhat, since previously I had acted as a sort of manager-without-portfolio, spending my time cruising the store, looking for problems and troubleshooting. I could still do that, but I now had to think about annual performance reviews for the Center Store Managers, and keeping an eye on gross profit and labor hours much more than previously. 

ASDs, in addition to being Center Store Managers, were also the designated Safety Coordinators at their respective stores. This involved running a Safety Committee meeting each month where we would review any accidents to determine whether there was a safety issue that could be addressed or if the employee was simply negligent. We also looked at ongoing safety concerns and made recommendations for correcting them. ASDs were also responsible, as part of being Safety Coordinator, for training employees on the use of forklifts and pallet jacks. Ironic considering my several forklift accidents over the years! 

As anyone who shops in a grocery store knows, periodically "everything gets moved around". Not really, but the goal of a store reset is to optimize product placement, which does include moving a lot of things around. Sometimes it's spurred by a remodel, sometimes an attempt to change the shopping flow. When I first started with the company each Store Director was asked to send a couple of people to the store being reset. Usually it was someone who no one would miss for the day—a grocery clerk or a janitor. Around this time a new corporate position had been created: Category Management Director. The Category Management Director's responsibility was, among other things, to plan and oversee resets. Scott, the new Director, got permission to make all the ASDs the permanent reset crew. Although none of really wanted to be out of the store for a week doing manual labor, it made sense. The ASDs were familiar with all aspects of center store, and were experienced enough to require little direct supervision. You could give any of us a planogram (a visual representation of what a section should look like) and we would get the job done without further explanation. I lost track of how many of these I did over the years; it was hard work, but a camaraderie developed among all the ASDs (especially the "ASD meetings" that took place in a nearby pub after the day was done). I can't move on from this section about resets without talking about the "gondola train". For some reason a row of shelving in a grocery store is called a gondola. Sometime a whole row has to be moved. Rather than disassembling and subsequently reassembling them, the gondola train was utilized. This handy tool consisted of a device that was similar to a jack on wheels. We'd place it under the load-bearing part of a section and jack it up slightly. Jacks were placed every 4 to 8 feet. Once all the jacks were in place we would simply push the whole aisle into position, one person every 8 feet. It's grocery poetry in motion!

Despite mandating a no nepotism policy, nepotism was tolerated when you were high enough in the organization. After all, it was a family-owned company! Jane Raybould, the Vice President of Buildings and Facilities, on paper answered to Tom Schulte, the Vice President of Operations, when in reality she reported to her brother Pat, the CEO. Tom also brought in his brother Tim to run the Floral and Front End Departments. There was a story about Tim, which I long thought apocryphal—supposedly Tim didn't understand the concept of nesting folders, or even folders on a desktop computer. Every file was saved right on his desktop screen until he ran out of room and called IT because he thought he couldn't save any more files. A few years later I met the one who was his administrative assistant at the time and was assured that it was true. Tim also overdid forwarding of emails. In general everyone at the corporate office was email crazy. A corporate office director would be in the store and notice an issue with the Floral department and send an email to the Floral Manager and copy the Store Director and Tim. Tim would then forward the email that he was copied on, that clearly shows that the Floral manager and Store Director were copied on it, to the Floral manager and Store Director. As a bonus, he'd copy the forward to the company president and operations VP, who both would forward it to me. As a prank I set up an email rule whereby every email that I received, including automated alerts about our orders, was forwarded to Tim. I could definitely be a jerk sometimes. 

As Floral Director Tim set pricing and merchandising for the Floral departments. What he didn't understand was that Cornhusker, located as it was in a lower income neighborhood, didn't have many customers who were willing to pay a high price for flowers or plants. He would not allow us to mark them down, but directed us to throw them out after a certain date. In order to make a point, Dorothee, the Floral Manager and I bought a grow lamp and put it in my office and started putting all the plants that we "threw away" in there. By the time I left it was like a jungle!  

One of the responsibilities that I took upon myself was doing the sales projections. Since the amount of money that each department, and the whole store, could spend on labor was based on a percentage of sales, this was a critical task. I suspect that many of the stores' projections were based on guesswork, but they definitely weren't in the stores I worked in. I created an Excel spreadsheet where I would create a store sales projection based partly on the sales from the same week the previous year. I would then adjust that number based on the percentage up or down that the store was trending over the previous four weeks. To project the sales for each individual department I would look at what percentage of total store sales the department sales represented the previous year and multiply the total store sales by that percentage; I would adjust those numbers up or down based on a four week trend. I would further take into account things like weather, ads, or changes in competition to come up with my final figures. All of this was embedded in various interlocking formulas.

Determining the amount of hours each department could schedule required some additional math. I would start with the already projected sales and multiply by the budgeted labor percentage—this would give me the dollars that could be spent. I would subtract the manager's salary and then divide the remainder by the average wage in that department, giving me the number of hours that could be scheduled in order to come in under budget. During holiday weeks I went a step further and projected sales for each day. Most of the time these projections were spot on. I remember one year a department manager was excusing his excessive number of "outs", claiming that he didn't know how busy it would be. When we compared the projected sales to the actual sales, they were almost exactly the same. I guess he did know how busy it would be! 

Ron S was a Store Director who was getting close to retirement. They "promoted" him to a corporate office position to make room for someone that had been recruited from outside the company. He had various tasks that he conducted on behalf of the various corporate directors. One week his mission was to come around and teach all the ASDs how to do sales projections. Years before some long forgotten programmer had created a feature to our primitive database that was supposed facilitate coming up with projections. The total store sales projection had to be hand entered every week. The budgeted percentage of sales for each department as well as their labor budget was entered at the beginning of each quarter. From this scant information the budgeted hours per department was calculated. It was definitely a blunt instrument and did not take into account what my Excel sheet did. On the afternoon when it was my turn for Ron to "teach" me, he walked me through the process as if it were software that could launch NASA rockets. I was already aware of this program and very aware of its shortcomings, especially the fact that not all departments were included and you couldn't add any, not to mention no way to adjust average wage. So I thanked Ron, told him that I was aware of how it worked and that I had a better method that I was using. Ron looked at me as if I had drowned his puppy and told me that he used it for years, and that if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for me. Rather than argue with him further I simply went in and changed the total sales prediction each week, since I knew he'd be checking, and continued to use my spreadsheet for the actual projections. I had similar interactions with Ron over the years, I'll be revisiting him in the next article. But it's now time to move on. 

After six years at the 27th and Cornhusker Super Saver I was being transferred to the 27th and Pine Lake Super Saver. 

Managers Part XVIII - Leverage

When I first wrote this series in 2018 I realized that I had titled this post, but never wrote it. Since I initially numbered it 15 and subsequently numbered another post as 15, I called it 15a. Well, in the reposts, I did it again and didn't insert it after XV! I'm going to insert it now and call it Part XVIII and renumber subsequent articles accordingly. 

What is leverage? Basically it's the ability that you have as a manager to influence your employees. It's how you get them to do things. It's also the amount of work that you can accomplish by convincing multiple employees to do things in quantities that you could not do if working by yourself. Let's look at the how first.

Way back in Part II - Sources of Power I discussed the sources of power that a manager had. "Authority" would probably be a better word, instead of power. They are:

1. Legitimate Power: The ability to influence other due to one's position, office or formal authority
2. Reward Power: The ability to influence others by giving or withholding rewards such as pay, promotions, time off, etc.
3. Coercive Power: The ability to influence others through punishment
4. Expert Power: The ability to influence others through special knowledge or skills
5. Referent Power: Power that comes from personal characteristics that people value, respect or admire

The blunt instrument, the source of authority that usually goes unsaid, but is a huge part of #3—the ability to influence others through punishment—is always in any manager's tool box. 

Most amateur managers know that they have the power to fire their employees. This is the most basic, crude and rudimentary leverage that you have. Most employees understand this instinctively and will follow a manager's direction, even when they don't want to, they disagree with it, or they just think it's stupid, because they know that refusal to obey the boss's will can result in an opportunity to find a new job. The problem with this, from a manager's point of view, is that even though you will get compliance, you won't get enthusiasm and you certainly won't get independent action or innovation. 

To refer back to an another article in this series, Part X, you will have employees forever stuck at Levels 1 and 2. Some managers are satisfied with this, and are happy with just basic, mindless obedience. They'll never get their people to Level 3, let alone 4 or 5, and may have to settle for Level 1 (Wait until being told before doing anything).

I got my real-life lesson in leverage when I was an Assistant Store Manager. I had been schooled in the wisdom of the Five Levels, of monkeys and left- and right-leaning trapezoids, but hadn't really learned how to properly leverage my employees. As an Assistant Store Manager, I had a lot of responsibility. I often describe the unofficial job description as "All the stuff that doesn't fall into anyone else's job responsibility". All that responsibility, however, didn't come with any matching authority, not any official authority anyway. I threw my weight around, waved my title in people's faces, (Source of Power #1) but no one was impressed. I wasn't making any serious attempt to gain leverage by winning these people over, and I lacked the foundational piece of leverage: the ability to fire someone, and everyone knew it. (I also lacked #2, Reward Power: The ability to influence others by giving or withholding rewards such as pay, promotions, time off, etc.; and #4 Expert Power: The ability to influence others through special knowledge or skills and #5, Referent Power: Power that comes from personal characteristics that people value, respect or admire; I was squandering due to my heavy-handed approach). 

I hadn't made an effort to convince people to do what I wanted them to do, and they knew I had no real authority (my Store Manager at the time was a "nice guy" who undermined me quite often, so I had no reflected authority from his support). It was after a few incidents where run-ins with employees that resulted in a reprimand from my boss that I began to employ the lessons that I had learned years before and little by little began to gain leverage, not from blunt force, but from precision use of tried and tested management techniques. I have to admit that I was given a new lease on management life when my nice guy boss was replaced by a guy who more of a bull in a China shop than I was. This enabled me to start fresh and stop my attempt to bludgeon people into obedience.

I remember an episode of Happy Days, where Fonzi was attempting to school Ritchie on how to be a tough guy. Fonzi was showing him how he, Fonzi, never actually had to fight because people were afraid of him. Ritchie tried to apply these lessons, but he was perplexed that no one was afraid of him. This caused Fonzi to amend his lessons with the observation that he (Ritchie) would have had to actually been in a fight and won for people to think he was a tough guy. It's similar to this in the management world. In order for employees to believe that you will fire them if necessary, you have to actually fire someone when necessary. 

Later on in this series I address the changes that took place post Covid. Managers' unwillingness to hold employees to company standards, including firing bad employees has had many repercussions. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XIX

Manager Part XI - Training

How do you get your subordinates out of Levels 1 and 2 and become more self directed?

(Refer to Part X)

As a manager you can't just show up to work and expect that your subordinates will automatically aspire to Level 4 or 5 independence. You have to actually train them! And once you've trained them, you have to follow up in order to assure yourself that your subordinates really know what they're doing. Just telling a subordinate that you expect them to work independently and make their own decisions doesn't mean that they will. (And we're talking here about ability and understanding, insubordination is a completely different subject). And even after a subordinate has been instructed in the expectations of the job, doesn't mean that they have been trained. And even after you are sure that they fully understand all aspects of the job and have the ability to carry them out, being fully trained means that they are actually doing it. If you don't follow up and ensure that the work is being done you run the risk of your subordinate deciding on his own what his job should be, and that might be very different than what you expect!

Back when I managed grocery stores we had a position called Grocery Clerk. This was an entry-level position and was almost always filled by high school kids who had never held a job before. The clerks had two main jobs: retrieve carts from the parking lot and "pull cardboard". They had other duties as well, but those are the two main ones. Pulling cardboard involved methodically going through an aisle, section by section, and removing any cardboard boxes that were less than half full and then "facing", pulling all the product forward on the shelf. (This was what was called a "warehouse" store, most product was put on the shelf in the case that in came in, with the front and top cut off.) The purpose of this was to keep the shelves orderly and make it easy for the customers to see the products. Something called a "cardboard bin", a wheeled, plastic container, 4'x4'x4' was utilized to throw the cardboard in. This was mind-numbingly, boring work, but it had to be done. It was also extremely simple to master, but it was almost never done correctly.

The problem was training. What should have been done was that each new grocery clerk be teamed up with a manager for half of a shift, released for a few hours to work on his own, and then back with the manager for follow up. For the first few weeks the clerk's work should have been checked by a manager until it was assured that proper training had taken place. What did happen was that the new clerk was teamed up with an "experienced" clerk who probably was doing things incorrectly himself, ensuring that the cycle of incompetence would continue. Look in on most grocery clerks allegedly pulling cardboard and you'll see two of them strolling down an aisle, chatting (grocery clerks are almost never supposed to be working two-by-two, pulling cardboard is a one-person job), pulling the occasional box off the shelf, without a cardboard bin, then strolling to the back room to throw out the small amount of cardboard that they can hold in their arms. And there is rarely, if ever, a manager checking up on them.

A few years ago I conducted an experiment. I watched as a grocery clerk exited an aisle that he had supposedly just got done pulling cardboard in. (He had a cardboard bin). I entered the same aisle and pulled cardboard and faced the correct way. I piled all the cardboard on the floor in front of each section and then called him back to show him what he had missed. He was not happy, but he did learn what was expected of him.

The nature of the training is critically important to the ultimate achievement of higher level competence. During my final 10 years before retirement I worked for the state revenue department. My training was a bewildering hodgepodge of regulations, definitions, and statutes in a Power Point presentation. During training my mind raced, trying to keep track of all the information that was being shot at me. Most of it made no sense to me, since it was completely without context. What I wasn't being presented with was the practical information that I needed in order to do my job. After training was over and began my assigned tasks another new trainee and I figured out the actual requirements of the job by trial and error. We learned to focus on what we really needed to do the job and pretty much ignore the rest. Over the years I heard from other new hires how confusing and useless the training was. 

Eventually I was promoted to a position where I was responsible for training the new people. With my manager's permission I completely revamped the training program so that it focussed on how to do the job, with the regulations, definitions and other details presented as an adjunct to the practical instruction. I revised a checklist so that a new hire could methodically carry out their assigned tasks. The new training program was practical rather than theoretical and was key to getting employees to the goal of working independently. 

Sometimes the lesson managers get from the Five Levels of Management Freedom is that everybody should be at Level 4 or 5 and that they are just supposed to sit back and watch everyone work. (Presumably with their feet up on their desks). That is the wrong lesson! Subordinates at Levels 4 and 5 doesn't free managers from work, it frees them from other people's work so they can concentrate on managerial work. 

Getting everyone to at least Level 3 and ideally Levels 4 and 5 is the goal; but how do you accomplish that goal? Not by wishful thinking or by simply telling people to manage themselves, but by putting in the hard work of training subordinates to be not just "hard workers", but independent thinkers and problem solvers.

Training can be very time-consuming, but the result is worth the time.

Start with Part I

Go to: Part XII

An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XVII - Christianity as a Cultural Identity

With the recent focus on the (White) Christian Nationalist Movement and its connection to right wing politics, one could be forgiven for thinking that this was a recent development. Christians completely ignoring the Gospel message in favor of an us vs. them mindset? We need to get back to Christians acting Christian...right? Not so fast. 

Even going back to the days of Constantine the Great, people have always identified as Christians without having even a passing familiarity with The Bible. 

There's little objective information about Christianity in its first hundred years, but by the time Christianity became a recognized religion and later the official religion, it's evident that people were Christians because that's what everyone else in their culture was. Christian identity was inseparable from Roman identity. This tendency became more pronounced as the Arab Muslim Caliphate became a threat to the Empire's existence. Even within Christendom, the Western Europeans identified as Catholics and the Byzantines identified as Orthodox, both as intrinsic parts of who they were. 

Christianity splintered in the 1500's with the Protestant Reformation as different varieties of Christianity multiplied. But for the most part, individuals' religion was determined by their rulers and there were Catholic nations, Lutheran nations, Calvinist nations, all warring among themselves for various reasons. As time went by there was more choice among various denominations, but for the most part the umbrella identity of "Christian" persisted. I'm not suggesting there weren't sincere Christians throughout all of these eras, or that no one studied the text of the Bible or lived lives according the teachings of Jesus, but that being a Christian wasn't something that you decided to become, but something that you were.

People my age remember that one of the bloodiest religious conflicts of our lives was not in Israel or the Middle East, and didn't involve radical Muslims, but was the Catholic-Protestant Troubles in Northern Ireland. For many reasons economic and political divisions broke along religious lines. The poorer Northern Irish, who favored union with the Republic of Ireland in the south tended to be Catholic, while those who wanted to remain part of the U.K. and were of higher economic status, tended to be  Protestant. There's a lot of reasons for why this split developed, but people didn't spend a lot of time thinking about which version of Christianity they followed, it was just who they were. 

Even in my own youth, my neighborhood was made up of mostly Catholics, children or grandchildren of immigrants from Catholic countries. There wasn't violence or strife between Catholics and the few Protestants, but it was almost unthinkable that one would convert from one to another. Being Catholic was what you were. My own generation was a bit more fluid. The so-called Jesus Movement was making inroads, and young people were more willing than previous generations to explore other traditions or join new religious groups. When I decided to ditch Catholicism and join The Way, (which was, as far as they knew, Christian) my parents' reaction was similar to how I imagine it would have been if I had announced that I had embraced Satanism. Milder, but still disapproving, were their reactions when my brother married an Episcopalian or when my niece was married in a non-church ceremony. In all of these cases, most people, no matter what denomination they identified as, would be hard pressed to articulate how their religion was substantially different that the other guys' faith. 

My point in bringing up these examples, is that identifying as Christian without any connection to actual Christian theology or principles is nothing new, it has a long history. Today's White Christian Nationalists are part of a long history of weaponizing religion and using it to "other" those they don't like. They have allies in Congress and in the courts. The Supreme Court majority has deferred to Christians in First Amendment cases and their doctrine of shaping opinions based on whether similar laws existed historically should scare anyone who believes that government should be neutral with respect to religion. 

Start at The Beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XVIII