An Interview with Sidney Jansma, Jr., Milton H. Kuyers, and Michelle Van Dyke.
In Reformed theology, common grace refers to the special favor of God common to all humankind. But how do you translate this conceptual knowledge into actual understanding and practice in the workplace?
The Acton Institute and the Calvin Center for Innovation in Business at Calvin College explored this question on October 31, 2014, during a cosponsored Symposium on Common Grace. The event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, brought members of the faith, academic, and business communities together to explore and discuss Dutch theologian, journalist, and statesman Abraham Kuyper’s work on common grace and how it applies in everyday business relations. Kuyper saw common grace as a biblical concept whereby God enables all of humanity to fill the earth with the products and processes of cultural activity and that the capacity for cultural formation was not lost in fallen humanity. Sidney Jansma, Jr., Milton H. Kuyers, and Michelle Van Dyke participated in a business leaders’ roundtable discussion during the symposium. The three discussed how their faith has influenced and continues to influence their businesses and how they lead. Leonard Van Drunen, department chair and professor of business at Calvin College, moderated the discussion.
Sidney Jansma, Jr. serves as the president and chief executive officer of Wolverine Gas and Oil Corporation, a Grand Rapids-based energy exploration firm. He began his career in 1959 in the domestic energy sector working for his father’s private oil company. He serves as a member of the board of directors of Cityhub.com, Inc. and as a director of the Independent Petroleum Association of America and of the American Petroleum Institute.
Milton H. Kuyers serves as chief executive officer and chairman of GMK Companies. His recent business experience includes participating as part owner and executive officer of a number of privately held companies. He serves on the board of Calvin College and of Westra Construction. He has also directed U.S. Office Products Company since June 1995 and H.H. West Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of U.S. Office Products.
Michelle Van Dyke has been the president at Fifth Third Mortgage Company since September 19, 2014. Before this position, she was regional president and affiliate president of Fifth Third Bank. Previously, she worked for Old Kent Financial Corp., which was acquired by Fifth Third in 2001. She serves as a trustee of Davenport University and is also on the board of directors for Business Leaders for Michigan. In 2007, 2012, and 2013 Michelle was named one of American Banker’s “25 Most Powerful Women in Banking.”
The following is an edited version of the October 31 roundtable.
R&L: How do you see business, your business, and business people being used by God to restrain sinfulness or to protect people from sin’s effects?
Michelle: I would say, first of all, by common grace we have a conscience, and we’re able to differentiate between right and wrong. And in various structures within our society, we see that. If you think about the family, even non-believing parents nurture their children. We see that in businesses, where even non-believing leaders nurture employees. They develop them. They help their businesses grow. They manage the risk of the business. If I look at my career in banking, 29 years, I would tell you now more than ever we are risk managers. We manage credit risk, reputational risk, and operational risk. We see sinfulness every day around us manifesting itself in those kinds of risks. People who take advantage of us and don’t pay their loans back. We see it. All you have to do is point to information security in today’s world and look at the security breaches in our largest retailers and our largest financial institutions to see the magnitude of that sinfulness and the risks that really brings us to in our businesses.
One of the things that has interested me is looking at the organizational culture not only of Fifth Third Bank but of other organizations. I look at organizations that are very rooted in the past, kind of stodgy thinking in terms of “don’t rock the boat.” Don’t be the first one to come up with a new idea. Don’t be the bearer of bad news. Don’t share information with others. Don’t be associated with failure. If you have people in your organization who are thinking that way, you have a culture ripe for issues and for risks.
I think leaders (and their talents) who are being used by God are forward-thinking leaders, the ones who do share information; they treat everyone with respect and are a potential source of insight. They encourage people to suggest new ways of doing things. They initiate changes. They’re willing to take responsibility. When you have leaders like that in an organization, they can help you manage. They, as you say, restrain that sinfulness in the organization. So for me, business leaders try to lead this way, to be transparent, to be authentic, to have the courage to raise issues. When you have leaders that will do that, you get better outcomes for all of your constituents, for your shareholders, your customers, employees, for the communities where we do business. And I would just sum it up that way. I think it’s really important for us, as business leaders, to manage those kinds of risks by being transparent and authentic.
Milt: Some years ago I worked for a man who was a non-believer. We faced a major crisis in that company that threatened its very existence. We found out that one series of sprinkler heads we had manufactured, fire protection sprinkler heads, would not necessarily go off under actual fire conditions. We had some testing done, and we found out that two out of ten would not go off. We had two options. We could take a chance that no fires would ever occur in the facilities—primarily onelevel nursing homes—that had these sprinkler heads installed. Second option was we could to tell the world, recall, and replace all of those sprinkler heads that were problematic. The recall would bankrupt the company because of the enormous liability for the cost of the recall and their replacements. My boss, the owner of the company, and I made the decision to tell the world.
Sid: Well, as I thought about this question I first got going in my mind about how complex this is, but it hit me that it’s actually pretty simple. And for me the simplicity was gracious; businesses do things in their normal course of business that actually, by God’s grace, protect our culture from sinfulness. So here are three things.
The first thing is we, as business people, have to emphasize relationships. We, as business people, have to address competition. The third one that hit me was we, as business people, need to talk about metrics. So those three things, how do they play out? Well, in relationships, I, as a leader, articulate values for my company, but I also solicit values from everyone with whom I work. I have to live those values. I have to empower my peers to live those values. The biggest thing for me, as a leader, is to empower the people with whom I work to do good jobs and to have the values come through their lives. We can restrain sin (in the relationship side) by having good procedures in our company; procedures that people will follow. Now, we’ve all been in a lot of places where we read these procedures and think, “This is crazy.” But I’ll just say this: In my company we have an employee manual that has a lot of good things in it, but that employee manual tells an employee that they’re very valued and, “Here are some things that are important for you to know and for the management to know.” So that first issue is relationship. And in relationships, then, we can constrain evil.
The second issue is competition. I look at competition as another group of people looking at the same facts that I’m looking at and coming up with a better solution. Maybe cheaper or whatever. And so in business you have competition, and the competition itself constrains evil in our culture, doesn’t it? I mean, if I’m doing something that has a certain functionality in business and I’m wrong, you may come up with a better idea and boot me out of the business. So I see competition as a really great way of restraining bad actors. We can all name times when none of these apply. The thing about nature is there are humans out there who will try to twist every good thing we’ve got. But competition is a good thing.
The third thing that I saw was metrics. We, in business, all have to watch our numbers. But the numbers themselves are a way of being accountable. And you and I are accountable to whomever by looking at our numbers. The bank looks at my numbers, and that’s how I’m accountable to them. In a way the metrics are like a little light shining in the darkness and showing what’s happening.
How do you promote the use of God-given creative and cooperative abilities? How do you identify new opportunities to meet your stakeholders’ needs?
Milt: In all of our companies we use listening sessions to include individuals and small groups. As some of you know, I’ve been involved in a number of turnaround businesses and, especially in a distressed business, this has been the most important thing we have ever done in any of our businesses. We listen to individual people talk about what they believe the problems are and how we ought to solve those problems. In a distressed company, the entire workforce is often unmotivated. We change that through this focus on listening. You wouldn’t believe what happens when you use all of God’s image-bearers to solve problems. We bring all employees into “the know.” We’re completely transparent as to what’s going on in a business. “We are in trouble,” let’s say. “And if we all work together, we should all have a job in the future.” We give them ownership in the process of change. “We want to listen to you because we believe that you know what the problems are and, more importantly, you may already know the solutions to those problems. We want to hear them all.” And we respond positively to every suggestion. We make rules based on the listening sessions. Sometimes stupid ideas are built on by other people and become the best ideas that we’ve ever pursued. We record each idea, we evaluate them, and then we respond individually to each person who has given a suggestion. We purposely give individuals both private and public acknowledgment of their good work. Daily, if there are reasons to do it. You can compliment publicly, but you never, never discipline publicly.
In our world we learn a lot by listening. Sometimes we listen with our eyes. Other times we listen with our ears. The sense that I’ve honed and developed best during these past 50 years that I’ve spent in the business world has been listening with my heart. I’ve listened to all of the employees, both Christians and non-Christians, of the companies with which I have been involved. As I view each one as an image bearer of God, I use my heart, I use my eyes, and I use my ears. Christians and non-Christians together often listen to the cries of people around the world and then pursue opportunities to be involved both personally and financially and making a difference in people’s lives. And in my life, it has been primarily in the area of the creation of sustainable jobs.
Sid: I try to listen to where I can bring God into the picture. But what I’ve learned is that’s such a tender thing because people will not listen. It doesn’t matter what you say if people don’t hear you. When I was a young business person, just out of school, starting to go, I bought a little cross and stuck it on my lapel. I used to wear suits all the time. I don’t anymore. And what I discovered with the cross is it pigeonholed me. People, if they were Christians, that were willing to talk. But other people would stay away from it. And I realized that after about a year, and I thought, “Well, I’m going to do something...” So I actually designed an ichthus, which is the symbol for the Christians and the catacombs of Rome, and it looks like a fish. I would get asked if I liked to go fishing. And that was a lovely opportunity. But what I’m trying to say is that as a believer, we have the ability in secular business to witness for the Lord in many ways, the way we have integrity. Focus on the little ways. If we’re in a meeting and we’re struggling with an answer, I’ll say, “Well, you know, if God wrote it on the wall for me, I think all of us would follow it, wouldn’t we? But He hasn’t, so it’s your problem to solve.”
Michelle: There’s a common theme here about listening. And I think that’s probably the one word I would take away from all of this—listen. We call ourselves the curious bank. And to be curious is to ask questions. We ask a lot of questions. We ask a lot of questions of employees in listening sessions and just hearing what they have to say. How do we make things better? What gets in your way? How could I be a better leader? We ask questions of our customers. And our mission statement reads this way: To listen to customers and inspire them with smart financial solutions that continually improve their lives and the well-being of our communities. So we expect that our employees will be better listeners, that we’ll bring better ideas, that we’ll bring better commitment, better solutions to our customers.
We asked during the financial crisis, what is the issue with people who are in foreclosure? We don’t want to own somebody’s home. We want to keep them in their home. What can we do to help? And we came to the conclusion that it’s all around employment. When people have jobs, they’re able to stay in their homes. When they don’t have jobs, it really puts the pressure on them, and we end up foreclosing on the homes. But we do not want to own people’s homes. So what did we do? We partnered with a company called NextJobs that helps people who are unemployed find jobs, but we make those connections. We help them with job searches, with counseling sessions. We pay for those so that people can find employment. Just a couple of statistics: Thirty-five percent of our borrowers who entered the job coaching program found employment. Seventy eight percent of them that found employment actually became current on their home payments or housing payments and kept their homes. And so we see those kinds of real-world impacts because we were curious, because we asked a question that seemed at the time not logical for a banker to ask. But part of curiosity is that innovation. It’s about asking those questions. The world is constantly changing, so we’ve got to keep asking those kinds of questions. How do we get better? How can we do things differently to be able to make that kind of an impact? And I would say the best leaders of the best companies are the ones who look for those innovative ways to improve their work, improve their organization. The best leaders seek and accept challenges. They don’t sit back and wait to be challenged. And I think that that’s really a key.
I would just finish by saying one thing. When I first got this question, and I looked at the words “cooperatively and creatively working together,” I thought, “What do those two things have to do with each other?” And then as I sat back and thought about it, when you work cooperatively, that’s really assumed in most organizations. But creativity on its own can run amok. You’ve really got to have that kind of collaboration within the company so that you get diversity of thought, that you get different ideas. Not to try to stifle any kind of creativity, but really to bring more ideas to the table.
