Crowd Control

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One of my newly acquired artery-clogging habits is a weekly (sometimes bi-weekly) excursion to a restaurant called Raising Cane’s. They have the best chicken fingers, EVER! Just when I had almost cast out the Chick-Fil A demon, along comes Raising Canes. The sweet tea! O, the sweet tea!

While Raising Cane’s is relatively new on the west coast, it has been in business for 25 years. And like most other businesses, navigating the pandemic has been challenging—especially given the difficulty of finding people to work. I recently read that there are almost 12 million vacant jobs in America, and more than 4 million people quit their jobs in August. Observers disagree on the causes, but the labor shortage is being felt across all industries. Cargo ships are sitting undocked at ports, flights are being cancelled, and stores are curtailing their hours. However, Raising Cane’s has adopted a novel approach to its labor shortfall. They now require corporate staff work in their restaurants. So if you ever find your way to one of their locations, a senior vice president may be frying your chicken, ringing up your order at the cash register, or working in the drive-thru window.

I don’t know who came up with that idea, but I absolutely love it. I love it because it demonstrates true leadership. If you are a leader, you should be prepared (and expected) to work in every facet of whatever organization you lead. But I also love it because if anyone has a vested interest in making sure that Cane’s stays in business, surely the the senior executives do—if for no other reason that it affects their personal bottom line. In addition to their salaries, most senior executive receive bonus compensation based on the performance of the company. Bad year, bad bonus. Good year, good bonus. Great year, great bonus. How well I remember those bonus checks during my brief stint in corporate America. Sometimes my bonus would be twice or three times more than my salary. The point is, executives have a huge stake in the outcome—so it almost goes without saying that they are working hard.

I think one of the reasons that so many of us make bad decisions and fail to progress is because we involve people in our lives who have no stake in the outcome we are seeking. If an outcome of any decision does not affect you personally, our advice is often weak advice and our guidance poor. We can eliminate quite a bit of confusion in our lives and increase our chances for success if we become much more selective about who we allow in our circle.

Jesus illustrated this idea in one of the miracles that he performed. He was asked to heal the daughter of a man named Jairus, who was an influential religious leader. While Jesus was en route, she died. In spite of this news, Jesus assured Jairus that his daughter would live again, and shared this bold announcement when they arrived at his home. When the crowd that had gathered heard Jesus’s forecast, the scriptures say that he was “laughed to scorn.” Interestingly, Jesus did not respond to the vast throng of critics, skeptics. and naysayers. According to Mark 5:40 this was Jesus response:

The crowd laughed at him. But he made them all leave, and he took the girl’s father and mother and his three disciples into the room where the girl was lying.

HE MADE THEM ALL LEAVE. In other words, anyone who did not have a stake in the outcome was NOT allowed in the environment. The closer Jesus got to performing the miracle, the smaller the circle became. Jesus understood that controlling your environment is a prerequisite to receiving a miracle.

Perhaps you can’t receive a miracle because you have the wrong people in the environment. People who have no stake in the outcome that you desire! Maybe you need to make some people leave. The King James Version of the Bible puts a harder edge on what Jesus did. It says that Jesus “put them all out.”

That is a practice we may need to adopt. Some people in our circle should be unfriended. Their calls should go unanswered. Their emails should go unreturned. And their advice should go unsought.

Life is too short, and the miracle waiting for you is too great to allow fear and foolishness carriers to contaminate your atmosphere, and poison your environment.

You need people around you who believe in you.

You need people around you who believe in the outcome you are pursuing.

And you need people around you who have faith in the God can help you achieve the outcome you desire.

Let’s exercise some crowd control!!