discord: noun = strife conflict, friction, hostility, antagonism, antipathy, enmity, bad feeling, ill feeling, bad blood, argument, quarreling, squabbling, bickering, wrangling, feuding, contention, disagreement, dissension, dispute, difference of opinion, disunity, division, opposition; infighting.
Does this sound like where you work? Does this sound like your family? Does this sound like your ministry? If it does, you’re probably are more to blame than you think. Bear with me, I’ll explain in a minute.
To me, discord is to an organization what cancer is to the human body. It starts as a small, almost unnoticed blight and, if left unchecked for long enough, will eventually kill the body.
In the Bible, there is a list of seven things that God says he hates. Guess what is right up there with murder; Discord.
As leaders, there are two ways we can be to blame for this. The most obvious way is to be the one spreading the strife. Through gossip, trash-talking, berating employees, being argumentative when it is not necessary. I could go on, but, when we are guilty of this, we know full well, what we are doing and why we are doing it.
The second way the blame for discord falls on us as leaders is when we allow it to happen around us.
You have had someone say this to you before: Now, I don’t mean to say anything bad about so and so but…….” Or, how about this one: “Now, between you and me…..”
My guess is, most of the time when a conversation starts this way, most of us can’t wait to hear the rest of the sentence. The fact is, this is where we as leaders need to shut it down. When you listen to gossip and discord you are just as guilty and just as big a part of the problem as the one speaking it.
Next time anyone begins a conversation that way I dare you to either shut them down or, better yet, say something like this: “Hang on a minute, let’s get so and so on the phone so he can hear what you are saying about him.”
You can bet that at the very least, that conversation is over and at the most, that person will never come to you with gossip again.
Proverbs says where there is no kindling the fire goes out. So, save yourself some grief, save your organization some tension, and shut down discord before it has a chance to destroy you.
