Transcript: Forgiveness in the Workplace: How Leaders Build Trust, Heal Culture, and Strengthen Teams // Tara VanderSande, Best Christian Workplaces

Tara: I’m a firm believer that culture is owned from the top down, but it’s built from the ground up.

Narrator: Hello everybody, welcome back to the Called to Flourish Podcast, where leaders and cultures grow. Today we have a guest on our podcast, Tara VanderSande. Welcome to the podcast, Tara.

Tara: Thanks, Rob. Good to be here.

Robert: It’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast. So, many of you have probably seen her somewhere, whether on a podcast or somewhere at an event, or heard of her, but she is one of our own Best Christian Workplaces Consultant. She is our Senior Engagement and Talent Consultant at Best Christian Workplaces. Tara is amazing. She is an incredible public speaker, an incredibly gifted person in so many ways, but she does partner with churches, schools, mission organizations, working with leadership development, helping to unlock organizational health. Tara has over 20 years of talent development experience. She worked in leadership at Willow Creek Community Church. She is also an adjunct professor at Indiana Wesleyan University, very exciting. Tara is also trained in a variety of assessment tools, and she has a coaching certificate - make sure I get this right, Tara – At-Lay Counseling Leader from the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. Did I get all that right?

Tara: Yep. You did.

Robert: Amazing accolades. But we’re excited to have her on the podcast episode today, talking about a subject that maybe is overlooked at times, but is central, not only to our walk as leaders and Christians, but to the workplace, and that’s the angle that we’re going to be talking about today, and it’s the concept of forgiveness, core to the heart of who God is. Really in many ways it is the lifeblood of relationships and teams, and I think often that we think of forgiveness in our own personal lives and failed to maybe translate into the workplace, teams and cultures, and the impact that living out forgiveness can have in our lives. So, Tara, I’m excited to talk about this, and I think this is going to be so lifegiving to our audience and so many leaders out there. But I’d love to just get your input and just get this started. What got you thinking about forgiveness in terms of something that is more than just a private, personal practice, but something that is so important actually in our workplace cultures? What got you thinking about that and excited about that content and helping leaders in that area?

Tara: There were a couple things that happened over the last couple of years, and one of them has to do with the work that we do at Best Christian Workplaces. We do engagement surveys for organizations, as you mentioned, churches, all kinds of nonprofits, universities, and schools. One of the things that I kept seeing in the data and I kept reading in the written comments was about past offenses, hurts, you know, whether a pastor had said or done something, or somebody felt overlooked, you know, even hearing words like, “you know, this is the way it’s always been”, and it really just got me thinking about how much that gets in the water of an organization’s culture, even if it’s not really tangible. It just seems like there’s a perpetuated story that just seems to kind of take over the culture. And then I read two really excellent books that started shaping some of my thinking. One of those is called The Bait of Satan by John Bevere.

Rob: Yes.

Tara: And the other one, Total Forgiveness, by R.T. Kendall and started thinking, not just my own sense of forgiveness and where am I holding onto offenses, but also thinking about my interactions with people that I work with. So that’s kind of how that got started and then we started talking about what would that look like if we shared more of that in an article.

Rob: Absolutely, and yes, I’m glad you mentioned the article. So, Tara wrote an article on forgiveness that really – I refreshed myself with that article this morning. Go to workplaces.org and you can find that article. It’s essentially called “Forgiveness in the Workplace.” If you search that on our website, you’ll find that article. You’ll want to check that out, written by Tara and it talks a lot about some of the things we’re touching on today. You were mentioning kind of those resources and your experience with the engagement surveys and just kind of seeing some of these underlying issues that can surface. I’m curious, maybe in the church culture context, but any context in the workplace, what begins to happen with churches or teams or the work environment when forgiveness is absent from leadership, I guess, modeling that? Like, what begins to happen underneath, you mentioned, the water, underneath the water? Talk a little bit more about what that can do if that’s lingering, festering?

Tara: Yeah. Well, I’m a firm believer that culture is owned from the top down, but it’s built from the ground up, and so it goes both ways. So, if we look at unforgiveness from a leadership point of view, what it starts to look like is that people are moved into certain positions out of favoritism, and the favoritism is really a byproduct out of mistrust, potentially for someone on staff that might have missed a crucial deadline or might have been under skilled or even made a really poor decision that affected the organization but there isn’t a sense of forgiveness and so there is holding a grudge, just the way that leaders will talk about other people, so you can sense this gravity of “I can’t make a mistake here. It will be always held against me.” When people are afraid of making mistakes, then you don’t have collaboration and you definitely don’t have innovation.

Rob: Right.

Tara: And it really creates a culture of fear. And then when you don’t have trust from the ground up, really what that looks like is the meetings after the meetings, the second guessing, the “I don’t believe what you just told me. There must be something else.” Again, it just is a waste of energy and time, productivity, and in the Christian workplace it ultimately ends up in feelings of isolation. Yeah. To work in a Christian environment and to not feel the presence of Jesus, that’s really, really hard.

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. I like that you mentioned innovation because working in an environment where you’re afraid to make a mistake, it’s really difficult to innovate at all because innovation requires kind of an intrinsic risk that it might not go as planned. It just reminds me. I was thinking about a leader I had years ago, and we were doing this big project, this huge initiative that was impactful across the whole organization, and I was leading it. I asked the question, what if this doesn’t work? Right. What if this doesn’t work? And he said, he said something that sticks with me today, he said, “Well then we’ll try something else, Rob.”

Tara: I love that.

Rob: And I thought, wow! What a liberating sense of innovation of not feeling like something would be held over your head or you wouldn’t be forgiven for something not going perfectly. I loved that.

Tara: And I would even say just the opportunity to grow your own development really means you have to take some risks, being put in a situation for the first time where you have to learn and apply that. One of my early bosses when I was in the for-profit world gave me a lot of challenging assignments and really I was terrified. I didn’t want to fail. I wanted to demonstrate that I was competent, but when things didn’t work out, he always said, “I believe in you. We’ll figure it out. We’ll do it together”, even if it meant being up all night, needing to resolve the issue. But what it did was it helped me grow my confidence that my boss trusted me and also knew that I could make a mistake. But he believed the best in me and that made me want to grow, made me want to flourish, made me want to try harder, made me want to try new things, and go above and beyond.

Rob: Yes.

Tara: So, we are talking about forgiveness, but forgiveness really goes hand in hand with building trust.

Rob: Exactly. That kind of gets me thinking. Like, okay, what would you say to a leader - and this can be so theological too. We hear that term “a license to sin”, right, making a mistake is not exactly a sin in every sense in the workplace, but the idea is if I offer this grace and forgiveness, am I letting things slide as a leader? Am I letting things go? Am I not setting that standard of maybe excellence? I’d love your thoughts on this. Personally, from a theological standpoint, when I go before the Lord and receive His grace and mercy and forgiveness, it doesn’t want me – it doesn’t cause me to want to do more things that are wrong or make a mistake. It actually empowers me to want to do better. Right?

Tara: Yeah. Yeah.

Rob: That’s my thought. What are your thoughts on that? That idea that idea that like, I can’t let this one go or offer grace there?

Tara: Well, I hope this would be true in every workplace, but especially within the Christian workplace. I do believe that we demonstrate mercy by giving benefit of the doubt, and so we are talking about there is the outcome of the job, there is a task that I need to do, something I need to accomplish, and then there is how I do it, you know, the behavior that I use it for.

Let’s go first with the outcome of the job because I think that’s a little bit easier to think about, and when we give benefit of the doubt that means that I’m curious about the why. What might be going on in that person’s life, with their family, that they might have missed a deadline or maybe their quality was poor? Or maybe there was a misunderstanding. That’s giving benefit of the doubt. And then I want to provide an opportunity for coaching, for learning, maybe redirection. Maybe you didn’t know, but there is the phrase, “we give benefit of the doubt, but when there is no more doubt, there is no more benefit.” I think that is where some Christians organizations, they take a really long time because they want to be merciful. They want to have a grace-filled culture, but when a behavior or a skill happens repeatedly, that’s not just a one-time offense. That’s a pattern and a pattern we need to take action on because we need to be good stewards as well.

Again, there are different things when you are thinking about the workplace. It’s more than just a relationship. There is an accountability that we have.

Rob: Yes.

Tara: But I do want to talk quickly about the other part, and that’s the how we do things. We do usually have values within an organization, you know, how we agree to work with one another, how we agree that we will disagree with one another, and do that well. When people get bruised that way, we do want to, as well, give benefit of the doubt, but there’s a sting. It’s different than, you didn’t complete that project the way that I had hoped that you had. It feels personal. That’s really where, especially in the article, I go into the you know, someone did bruise me. Maybe I felt dismissed, maybe I felt ignored, maybe someone shared information about me in the workplace that shouldn’t have been shared. These things happen because we’re humans. So the first step is me. It’s a solo job and that is about forgiveness because forgiveness is done – is my decision and it’s between me and God. I release that person and it does me a world of good. It heals my heart, restores my relationship, but that’s different than reconciliation, and that takes two people. That’s why I started with the workplace skills and outcomes because the one with the behavior sometimes is a little trickier.

Rob: Yes. So you are talking about there is a balance sometimes. It’s, hey, there’s grace that’s needed here. Sometimes this is a pattern, and it’s how you approach that and how you discern that. That’s really good. I’d love for you to maybe share if you’ve got an example. I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but if you’ve got an example of maybe a turning point you’ve seen where maybe leadership, staff, a culture, shifted towards a more slant of grace and forgiveness in this area, where things had gone the other direction too much, and you saw the benefit of that or how it shifted and changed that culture, without, of course, naming any names or anything. You have any examples that you can think of?

Tara: Yeah. You know one that comes to mind was, again, it wasn’t intentional, but what had happened in this one organization was it really became a culture of secrets. The leaders felt that doing things privately were the best way to handle them, but these private conversations felt like secrets to the rest of the staff. Only certain people knew, only certain people were involved, and again over time, the story, the narrative that was shared within the staff is that everything is done kind of behind the curtain. When we did the engagement survey with them, a lot of those words and phrases were seen over and over: What’s behind the curtain? Who was involved? What secrets were shared? It was really hard for the executive team to see that. Again, that’s one of the things with our survey is that you might have a sense of something going on, but then when you read it and it confirms it, it is like, oh! What this leader and his team did though was when they went back to the staff to relay what they had heard and what they saw in the data, he was so humble. Yes, he gave some background, but not in a defensive way. He just said, “I now see the culture that I’ve created. It’s not what I intended.” And he just said, “Will you forgive me?” It wasn’t long but it was enough that the staff leaned in. They felt heard. They felt valued. Now, the leader still had the same temperament, still had the same leadership style, and needed to learn some new techniques to collaborate effectively, but that was really the beginning, where the staff felt like, okay, maybe this is a turning point.

Rob: Wow. Wow. It really jumped out to me how you mentioned this leader identified it and called it, really owned it. Can you kind of get us into maybe the details here? If you are a leader and you’re listening, and you’re like, okay, how do I implement forgiveness and make this a practice in my life? How do I make this something that’s not something that we do every once in a while, but something we integrate on a daily basis, weekly basis, as a leader making it an actual practical habit in our lives? Because I think that’s a key, that it’s not something we just sort of, “Oh, I need to implement some strategies here because something happened”, but it really is a walk.

Tara: Yeah.

Rob: A daily walk of identifying in humility the areas that we need to operate in forgiveness, but sometimes the concept is one thing and the practical, you know, how do we live that out, how do I become more aware of things to do, things to be thinking about on a daily basis that can help me? I want to forgive. I want to be that kind of leader. Do you have maybe just some practical weekly, daily, checkpoints and steps to take as a leader to help with this?

Tara: Yeah. You used a really good word, and that’s really where I’d start, and that’s awareness. R.T. Kendall said that the more that he was thinking about forgiveness and he started interviewing people – this was his average - he was like 8 out of 10 people didn’t even know that they had offended somebody. They had no idea. Most leaders that I work with have a very fast pace in ministry, and so there isn’t a lot of time for self-reflection. Now, I’m not saying that they don’t have times of quietness before the Lord, but in terms of that self-reflection of: How did that meeting feel to everybody? How did that decision get conveyed? And so really people will hold onto an offense, and the leader really has no idea. I would say that’s most of the case.

Building awareness means also finding ways to get feedback. Do you have a small group of people that once a week you can check in and say, “Hey, I felt really passionate about that topic and I just want to know, how did that come across?” “Oh, I did not know I looked angry.” That is just this growing-muscles awareness. It is getting feedback. I like using different tools, but even looking at a 12-month calendar and saying, what is the rhythm that I want to take in feedback? Some may be a person, some may be a survey, some maybe just with a quick email, or maybe for some of these leaders you have different online tools, but I would just make that a discipline and just ask yourself, what do I not know? That’s just so helpful.

I would say as soon as you become aware of something, address it. Address it right away, and if you are unsure how to address it in a healthy way, go ask somebody. Go talk to someone on a pastoral staff. Definitely you can call one of us. We’ve had lots of practice at Best Christian Workplaces. But you want to be able to model how to address offenses or hardships or maybe a significant level of disagreement, because what you don’t want to do is just let that go under the water, because as I mentioned earlier, it will be in the water.

Rob: Yes.

Tara: You know, the longer it goes on, the worse that it gets. And so, I do like thinking of tools, techniques, and rhythms that leaders can put in their lives so they can step into them, or we just forget. Just like we read a really great book and go, “Oh, I agree with that principle”, but if we don’t integrate it into our habits, they’re just not realized. Being aware, getting feedback, having some rhythms for that, confronting things right away, modeling it, getting some training or equipping. I always think anytime you teach something, you get 10 times better at it. I believe the retention rate is 80%. If you read something, you learn it, but if you teach it back, you’ll retain 80% of it. If you want to get good at forgiveness and building trust, you’re going to want to practice it.

Rob: Wow. I want to flip the coin here, because we’re talking about leaders being aware, putting in the practices, the tools, the feedback loops, the channels so that they can walk in awareness on a weekly, daily basis. What are my blind spots? How did I come across in this situation? But what about the person who may be listening and is offended? Maybe a leader, maybe not, not leading a team, just anybody and you’re dealing with harboring offense.

Tara: Yeah.

Rob: You’re holding unforgiveness toward a leader maybe or a coworker. I want to flip the coin over on this one and look at the other side and kind of talk a little bit about how to handle that in the workplace. Right.

Tara: I was going to say, if you’ve lived long enough, you will have been hurt or offended or even betrayed. There is such a continuum when you think about an offense. Yeah, I think for any listener, any viewer, you can identify an individual or a situation where you’re like, “yeah, that person did hurt me physically, emotionally in the workplace.” One of the first things that I go to is just Jesus’ words: Forgive others and your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. We have been given an amazing amount of grace and mercy on a daily basis, and as Christ followers, we do want to resemble Jesus in that way. Now I say that, and I say as a human that’s hard. I’ve had people who have hurt me, betrayed me as well, and the first thing I’d say is holding onto unforgiveness, it feels like we have leverage. I’m holding onto something and I feel like I can hold that over you, because if I let it go, then it means that your offense wasn’t meaningful or maybe it wasn’t valid, but that’s not the case.

Forgiveness is a soul issue. It’s a heart issue. It’s saying: I’m going to release that offense because I trust our Heavenly Father, who is a God of righteousness and justice, and He’s going to take care of that situation. That’s the heart issue part, that posture, and again, the book, Total Forgiveness, is so helpful because he talks about well, how do you know if you’ve really forgiven? Ultimately, if you can get to the place where you can say: I have sought the Lord’s favor for this person, for you and your family to be blessed, and I don’t think of the memory that doesn’t feel like a punch in the gut, there is total forgiveness there.

Now, when you go to the workplace as, again, I told you there are two different types of offenses. There is an agreed-upon accountability that we have about workplace outcomes, and I can feel, what do we call it, offended, or I could feel almost devalued if you are not responding to my emails, if you are not holding up your deadlines. To me, again, that is one of those things that I forgive the individual. I’m not holding onto this narrative that you are a bad person, that you have mal intent. That is the story that I tell myself that actually creates division within the workplace. But as a healthy human, I’m going to go to that individual and say, “This was the agreement that we had. Help me understand. Do we need to get other people involved so that can work that out?”

But then there is the behavior side. Right. Sometimes we do work with people and some of our viewers might work in a non-Christian environment, or at least that’s how it feels. I would say, again, if that feels safe, if that is something that should be addressed, but the forgiveness can always happen. That always, 100%, that is my commitment, that I will forgive and I will release that offense. Now there are natural consequences, right, and there are divine consequences with the choices that we make, but that goes a little bit outside of forgiveness. But I can tell you that those thing do take their course when we let God handle that.

Rob: Yeah. Yeah. I think you kind of mentioned this earlier on in our conversation. This is really the heart of God. When we think about, what are the attributes of a Christian leader, we have a lot of those that we can look at. Some of them, we might look at somebody, they have these practices and they show up in a room and really can work the room and have all of these polished skills. I’m thinking sometimes we might overemphasize some of those qualities because a slick politician can do that too, right, can get really skilled at making everyone feel like a million dollars. It’s the forgiveness, it’s the “I’m willing to release this offense” because Christ first forgave me, and you have to take the hit for the other person. It’s no longer seeking an equal playing field. It’s no longer seeking an eye for an eye, right. It’s, “I’m going to release the hit that I absorbed from you and forgive you.”

Tara: Yeah.

Rob: No longer hold it against you. It doesn’t mean I completely trust you, right, but I’m releasing that resentment in forgiveness.

Tara: That’s the part, Rob.

Rob: To me that is the real Christian walk right there, right.

Tara: Yeah. I’ve had too many interactions with individuals and with groups of staff. We do focus groups sometimes after engagement surveys, and the bitterness and the heartache that is held onto and often the way the enemy does this, we just start ruminating. Right. It becomes a part of our thought life. “I can’t believe that person did that.” “I can’t believe they said that.” We replay it over and over, and honestly, we are just poisoning ourselves. We are flooding our entire system, our physical body and our spiritual body, with negative thinking.

Rob: Yes.

Tara: And so, again, that’s really, again, one of those reasons why I started reading more about it. It’s just how – and I’ll use the word tortured – how tortured so many people are that are bitter.

Rob: Yeah.

Tara: And there is freedom in forgiveness, and that’s what Jesus came to – He came to set the captives free. So because someone harmed me, abused me, betrayed me, why would I want to hurt myself over and over, replaying that? Yes, for some of our viewers, a very hard thing happened, and potentially it was abuse, potentially it was betrayal, and we don’t invalidate that through forgiveness. But what we’re saying is Jesus came to set me free from that so I can have life and lightness. I’m a big believer in inner healing. There is a ministry I’m a part of at my church where we just invite the Holy Spirit into those memories, into those situations, because God is timeless, and just ask Him to heal those hurts. The first step really is making the choice to forgive and then the doors open up for what God will do.

Rob: Yeah. Real quick, I’m going to share a quick little story from a friend of mine. I grew up with this friend. His name is Dean Smith. He’s gone on to launch a really great ministry called Live to Forgive. I grew up with him, went to high school with him, college, all that, and when he was 12 years old, his stepfather murdered his mother with his baseball bat when he was in school. It was a huge thing in our little town, right. The whole town was – and Dean was just the most – is the most energetic, delightful, happy individual, but he spent the next 10 years plotting how he was going to take revenge against the man that murdered his mother, which really, she was everything to him, right. Long story short, he ended up forgiving the man. When the man got out of prison he tried to commit suicide, and Dean connected with him, flew across the country, led him to the Lord, and ultimately, they both came back to the hometown of the church because my friend was adopted and his dad was the pastor at the local church in town. The entire community, some 25 years later, received the man back. His sister came on the stage, forgave the father as well that had done that – the stepdad that had done that. It’s resulted in this incredible movie called Live to Forgive and a forgiveness ministry, but when you watch the movie, and I consider my friend’s story of going through this very challenging, difficult process of forgiving, and it wasn’t easy. It was like a daily process of inviting God in to help when the memories would come back up, “help me to just overcome these things”, until the Lord completely healed him from the inside out.

When you consider a story like that, and everyone has different levels of offense, and then I apply that to work. I think, “Yeah, I was bruised”, right. But if he can forgive through the Lord’s grace and power the man who murdered his mother, how big of a deal is my bruise? You know what I mean? When you put it into context. I don’t know. I just wanted to share that because it is so incredibly powerful. It’s not that the bruises don’t hurt, but forgiveness is the core of our walk in Christ. Without it, as you said, the workplace is not going to thrive. Culture is not going to thrive. I’m very, very encouraged, Tara, by this conversation. Yeah. It’s a heavy subject. I just want to lift up everyone who is listening who is struggling with bitterness, unforgiveness, maybe a leader who needs to ask for forgiveness. I just want to invite the Lord in to just minister to these workplaces, these leaders, these coworkers, these incredible people, and invite the Lord to do a work of healing, because that’s what this is. This is beyond the logistics of work. This is deeply, deeply spiritual and incredibly empowering when we walk in that liberty and forgiveness.

I want to thank you, Tara, for this incredible time together with you, highlighting this subject. It’s so important. I just pray that the leaders and those listening, anybody, realizes the importance of this. Let’s resolve these things in the workplace and let’s walk in liberty together and let’s also see our workplaces and our teams thrive.

With that, if we can, try to transition to something a little bit more lighthearted. I’m going to do some rapid-fire questions so we can learn a little bit more about you. Is that okay?

Tara: Sounds great.

Rob: Okay. Let’s do it. Rapid-fire questions. Okay. Early morning, do you drink tea or coffee?

Tara: Coffee.

Rob: Thank you. Thank you. That’s what I thought, you were a coffee person. Early morning coffee or late afternoon round of golf?

Tara: Oh my. Jesus and coffee. Yeah. I wouldn’t give up either.

Rob: Well, I didn’t say Jesus. I just said coffee.

Tara: That’s what I do in my morning. That is my morning. I have coffee with Jesus.

Rob: Yeah. I understand.

Tara: Every time, I’ve picked that.

Rob: Okay. Maybe both. That’d be a good day, right. That’s a good day.

Tara: Yes.

Rob: Here’s another one. One-on-one conversation or leading a group discussion, what’s your preference?

Tara: I love leading a group discussion. You know, around the halls at Best Christian Workplaces, people say that my word is being curious. I just love hearing what people are thinking and what they would do and their ideas, so I would pick that.

Rob: Okay. Group discussion. And then you’ll appreciate this from where you live. You live in the beautiful – where the ocean is, okay, and the sun is most of the time. What’s your preference, beach sunrise or sunset? You have to pick one.

Tara: Beach sunset. Oh, sunset. Yep. We’re on the Gulf side. We have the most beautiful sunsets ever. When you go to the beach, as the sun hits the water, everybody claps, every single night, no matter what day it is, and it’s just amazing. It’s like people experience the awe of God. Absolutely, the sunset.

Rob: You said everyone claps?

Tara: Yep.

Rob: Wow.

Tara: Every night.

Rob: Oh my goodness. That sounds amazing.

Tara: Yep. Siesta Key Beach.

Rob: We have to have a work retreat there. That would be amazing.

Tara: Yes!

Rob: Okay. Well, I want to invite our listeners, if you’re watching on YouTube, or if you’re listening on a podcast, share this episode with a colleague, a friend, a coworker, somebody you know who would benefit from the content and needs a little bit of encouragement. Whether they’re harboring something or they need to ask for forgiveness, send this episode to them and encourage them today. If you haven’t subscribed to the podcast, be sure to subscribe and catch us on the next episode coming soon. God bless you.

Tara: God bless.