PODCAST | A Grace Filled Work Place (Feat. Tim Kimmel and Michael Tooker)

Resources:

www.Graceatworkbook.com

Christa Neidig:
Welcome to the Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Christa Reinhardt, Manager of Marketing and Business Development here at Vanderbloemen. In today's podcast, I get to talk to co-authors Michael Tooker, Pastor of Central Ministries at Scottsdale Bible Church, and Tim Kimmel, founder and executive director of Grace Based Families. Tim and Michael talk about their new book, Grace At Work, and they share the importance of treating others the way that God treats you. Tim and Michael share tangible grace-based principles that can be used in your workplace. We hope you enjoy the conversation.
Hey everyone, thank you so much for joining us today on the podcast. I am so excited because I get to talk with Tim Kimmel and Michael Tooker. They are co-authors of their new book, Grace at Work, and we get to talk all about it today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Michael Tooker:
Hey, thanks so much for having us, Christa. We're excited to be with you.

Christa Neidig:
Of course. Well, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself to everyone and kind of let us know your connection to each other and why you co-authored this book.

Tim Kimmel:
You go first, Michael.

Michael Tooker:
Okay. I'm Michael Tooker. Tim and I met about almost 20 years ago now, and I can give you the story on that here in a minute. But by way of maybe quick background, I've spent the last nearly 30 years in the marketplace in a variety of positions and then made a major career decision to change, kind of shift horses here about six months ago, and joined the Scottsdale Bible Church as their Pastor of Central Ministries. And so just again, excited to be here with you, and, Tim, why don't you to tell them who you are?

Tim Kimmel:
Well, when I went into ministry, the burden that God put on my heart is that the Christian movement seemed to have a bit of a blind spot when it came to God's active, applied grace lived out day-to-day in relationships. We understood the role that grace plays in getting us out of our sin and into heaven, but we just left it there at the foot of the cross. I hope I'm not talking too much Jesus stuff here, but I just said, no, no, no, it's supposed to wash over us and redefine us and become the defining feature of how we treat each other.
And so that's what I've spent my life doing, is figuring out what does God's grace look like lived out in the real life, in-your-face world of close relationships like marriage and parenting, grandparenting, extended family and church. And then Michael came along, and God used him to say, "What would this look like if we took this into the marketplace?'

Christa Neidig:
That's great. And Michael, I believe you were with the same organization, with Grace Based Families, for about four years, is that right?

Michael Tooker:
Well, that's true. I was there in the middle of my career. I had a bit of a detour, which if now's a good time, I can kind of give you a view of how Tim and I came to meet. 'Cause quite frankly, the way we came to meet ultimately became kind of the reason we wrote this book together. So the way we came together was, I was at the time, this was back in oh early 2000s, like 2002, 3, 4, kind of in that range. Was working at a Fortune 50 company, climbing through the ranks, doing what you're supposed to do, particularly as a young man out of graduate school. Climbing the corporate ladder, accumulating more responsibility, larger staff, bigger paychecks, all that stuff. And I was a non-believer at the time chasing after the trappings of success and the trappings of the world. And was by outward appearances, very successful.
But what was happening kind of behind the scenes in my marriage and just in my life, was things were just starting this slow kind of meltdown. And as I describe it, when Tim and I met, he was teaching a marriage enrichment class, and my wife and I stumbled in on the verge of divorce, marriage was on fire, and it was kind of the dumpster fire, car fire variety of fire. And shortly after meeting Tim, that's when I started learning in this class what is God's grace, and who is God just at all, and what are his desires and expectations for a life well lived as a follower of Christ?
And so I came to Christ about six months after meeting Tim. And what I then realized over the ensuing decade or so was just, man, this God is a powerful God who has just incredible kind of expectations and hopes and desires for our lives. And what I realized was this pursuit of the world, pursuit of success, this chasing of things in the workplace, it was just a grind. Right? And it just kind of wore me out. And as I was chasing these things and getting more success, as it were, what was happening was I was growing distant from my wife. I was growing distant from my friends. I was abandoning my health. I was just kind of singularly focused on myself and my own success.
And the byproduct of that was, as I describe it in the book, my plane just fell from the sky. And what I then subsequently learned was, man, I'm not the only person this has happened to. It's a tragically common story of people doing what they think they're supposed to do in regards to work, and at some point realizing it's bankrupt. And much of it was my own stupid decisions and my own falling prey to those things.
But at the end of the day I realized, man, this notion of God's grace, and the way Tim has unpacked a model of applied grace in relationships, had such a radical ability to transform my marriage, transform my relationship with my kids, my friends. And that's when we started to talk about, "Hey, what would this look like in the workplace?" Because the workplace is another place full of relationships. They're just pressure-cooked relationships and they really need that injection of God's grace. And so that was kind of how we came to know each other, and what was the spark, if you will, to fuel the fire for this book.

Christa Neidig:
That's great. I think this book is really great because you're right. At the very end of that, you mentioned those pressure-cooked relationships and there's nothing like working next to someone 40 hours a week to get to see everything. We talked about this. We had our Christmas party last week at Vanderbloemen, and we have the spouses come. And it was funny, Jess, someone who sits on our sales team sits right next to me. And so she could probably talk to my husband, and both of them know every single stress habit, everything, from watching up close.
And I think you're right. It takes an added level of grace. So I'm excited to talk about this book and this concept of what it looks like to bring grace to the workplace. Do y'all want to dive into that for me?

Tim Kimmel:
Sure. I can summarize this book in one sentence. This book is simply about treating the people you work with the way God treats you. That's all it's about. But that does not come naturally to any of us, any more than it comes naturally to us when it comes to our marriage and our kids. Because we all have self-protective thing about us and our guard's up. We can play the game that people dish out to us, we can throw it right back. But God says, "That's not how I treat you. And I want you to just take this grace that I'm showing to you and I want you to take that to work with you." And this is just about taking Jesus' heart to work with you.
Let me tell you what it's not about. This book is not a book about how to go to work and evangelize everybody, or invite them to your church, or start a Bible study. I suppose there's places for that. This is a book about going to work and loving the people you work with. Here's why we need this, because there's a lot of people we work with that are very hard to love and they don't necessarily love us back. Work can be smash-mouthing, cutthroat, and backstabbing. Some people are just absolute nightmares, and sometimes they're in charge. And yet that's our job.
What we find interesting is that our work arena, how much it has in common with our families, in that first of all, we spend the bulk of our time between those two things, either our family or our work. And other than our spouse, we don't get to choose any of the people in the picture. They just become the people we're stuck with one way or the other. But God says, "This is exactly where I want my heart to shine through you." And so we said, "Well, let's put this act of grace to work in this book and show people how to get a whole lot more from their job than a paycheck."

Christa Neidig:
That's great. So let's kind of backtracking. You talk about loving others the way God loves us. So how do we prioritize our relationship with God? And how does that impact our ability to live these grace-filled lives?

Michael Tooker:
Yeah, I would maybe start with a couple thoughts, and Tim, I know you've got some great thoughts on this as well, is what many people do, particularly let's say a Christian who works in a secular company. They compartmentalize. There's a place for God, and that place for God is Sunday. It's not even all day Sunday necessarily. Let's call it Sunday morning. So there's that place where God is part of their life.

Tim Kimmel:
You got to have room for the NFL in the afternoon.

Michael Tooker:
Well, exactly, yeah.

Christa Neidig:
I'm here in Houston, and a Texans fan.

Michael Tooker:
Absolutely. So I think that's maybe the first thought there, is that the way I would think about your faith and the way Tim and I talk about your faith directly in the book is God is not somebody that you just go worship on Sunday. God should permeate every facet of your life. It should be God and your marriage, God and your children, God and your work, God and your health. So that effectively if you look through every element of your life through the lens of God and his son Jesus, and what he's done for us, it should transform every facet of your life as opposed to just being a compartment of your life.
And so I think that's the big thing. And when you talked about that idea of love, Christa, love's a tricky word to use in the workplace, but Tim and I have. Well, Tim has a great definition for it, and we talk a whole lot about what does it look like to love the people you work with. So Tim, why don't you maybe share that definition of love with the listeners?

Tim Kimmel:
Yeah. Because we use this word so broadly that many times it loses its punch. But it helps if we pin it down. Here's the definition that we put forth in the book that we want to bring to work. Love is the commitment of my will to your needs and best interests regardless of the cost. And that is the cost to me.
So I'm coming to work and here's whatever, my boss, my coworkers, whatever. And God said, "I want you to commit your will to their needs and best interests regardless of the cost to you," because it might cost us putting our pride where it belongs, behind us. And putting our personal agendas and putting our selfish desires where they belong, behind us. And putting God's heart out front.

Michael Tooker:
And that's a really important point that we really unpack in the book, Christa, because if I look at my story, and again, you go back to why did I write this book? I think what many of your listeners right now would say, if they were completely honest with you, they would say, "Hey, I have this low grade or high grade discontent as it relates to my job. I get up every day. I go into work, and I'm trying to get something from my job and it's not delivering. I'm trying to get a sense of purpose, a sense of fulfillment. I'm trying to get wealthy. I'm trying to get a sense of identity and a job and a title," and all these things that we're trying to extract from it. And the problem is that's all self-centered. That's all focused on the commitment of my will to me and my job and how it can deliver to me.
And so the whole crux of this book is that when you start to say my job is not about me and what I can get from it, because that's not what God designed work to be. Instead, it's "Hey, what can I bring to work?" And Tim talked about it's "I can bring the active presence of Christ and his grace working through me to serve other people and to love other people."
Two things happen when you do that. One is everything around you gets better because when you show up to work that way, so when I think about some of my jobs where I've had a staff of a couple hundred people, or a small staff of a dozen or whatever, if I'm serving my staff that way, it's a better culture. It's a better place to work where I'm bringing out the best in everyone around me.
And the second thing is, if I'm bringing out the best in everyone around me, the byproduct is I have a greater sense of purpose. So that thing that the job could never give me was a sense of purpose. It starts to deliver that to me, not because I'm hijacking it from the job, but because I'm serving that company and those people. And as a byproduct, I start to enjoy a sense of, wow, everything around me is better. And that gives me a sense of purpose. And that's a big part of what we unpack in this book is how do you do that.

Christa Neidig:
Yeah. Changing that mindset. I think that's really great. This morning when I was reading and prepping actually for this podcast, I read one of you wrote that somewhere and I came across it and I like stopped and I grabbed my coworker, Kaylee, my coordinator. I was like, "Listen to this." This is so monumental because we do, we quickly make it about ourselves and we think, "What can we get out?" And it's so much more than that. It's what can we put in? And what can others get out of our presence being here?
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In the book you mentioned there's like these six character traits of grace at work. What are those, just kind of in brief summary. I don't want to give away too much from the book, but I think these are really good things to mention.

Tim Kimmel:
Yeah. We look at these things almost like core muscles, like a six pack that really gives you the strength and the resilience to bring God's grace to work. And they are faith, integrity, poise, disciplines, endurance, and courage. And those are all muscles that God wants to reinforce us with. So that when we walk into the workplace where many times there's a lot of compromise being thrown at us. There's situations, there's dialogue, there's conversations, there's gossip, there's all kinds of toxic junk that's going on around us.
And we need to have the kind of strength, the internal strength, that comes from God's power and presence in our life to know how to sift our way through that without being some obnoxious self-righteous nightmare. Because this is not about going and pushing Jesus on anybody.

Christa Neidig:
Right.

Tim Kimmel:
I mean, sometimes leading with your Christianity at work can, I mean, that can be a big turn off that not only every everybody there, but sometimes some of the other Christians. What they need to see is people that come to work and they genuinely care about the company. They genuinely care. They work hard. They're responsible. Their word is good. They're aware of what's going on in the people's lives around them, and they want to be an ally and an asset to the best interest of everybody in their sphere of influence. Well, who's that sound like? By the way, it doesn't necessarily sound like Christa or Tim or Michael, but it sounds exactly like how Jesus was.

Christa Neidig:
Yes.

Tim Kimmel:
When he was just going around fishing, or just walking around with people, people just crowded to him because he cared about the people that he was in contact with. Well, why should we be anything less? The work he did for us on the cross, we have a chance now to go and be that light and that 00:17:2 in the midst of a work arena.

Christa Neidig:
Yeah, I think you're hinting on this, but my next question was how Christians should prioritize work within the scope of their life?

Michael Tooker:
Well, I mean there's a lot to that, Christa, but I think for one, God called us to work. I mean that was part of his original design was, in the garden he didn't create man along with the sofa and an Xbox. He created man, and then he appointed them work to do, and he asked us to find joy in that work. So I think part of it is we as Christians, we should relish in the fact that we've been created by our creator to work. That's part of his design for us, and to find joy in that work. And really it's not his creation that was wrong. It was the fall that distorted that. And I think that's where, as believers, we have to appreciate that so much of our views of work get torqued because of the fall and because of culture, and what does the world around us, what does music say, what does movies say? What do TVs and Netflix and all these streaming services and what does culture say about work?
And there's so many different views. I mean there's the view of you should be the workaholic and you should work. That should be your singular pursuit, and the byproduct should be wealth and prosperity and extravagance. Or then there's the other side of it which is, well, I shouldn't work. I should find a way to retire and have an easy life at a young age.
And so all those views are wrong. But what I would hope for all of your listeners and all of our readers of this book, is when they put the book down, one of the things that they would say and feel really convicted of is, when my company looks around and says, "Who are the top workers at our company?", they should look at you as a Christian and say, "That's one of our best workers. And why would we consider them to be one of our best workers? It's because of the way they're there to serve others and they're people of deep character and they're there to serve other people and they do their jobs with excellence and they find joy in their work."
That's what we would want people around us to say. But I think a lot of Christians have to just hold up the mirror and do an honest reflection and say, "Is that how my workplace views me?" And I don't think a lot of Christians would be viewed that way in their workplace. And so that is part of what we're trying to say, is you should be a standout employee at your company. If you're a Christian and if you're bringing God's active grace to work, you should be shining in that workplace like no one else.

Christa Neidig:
I like that. I think that's really great. Someone pointed out to me the other day, which I had not really thought of, was that work is biblical, and work came before the fall, which means it's good. There was good and perfect work before the fall. We tend to only think of work after the fall, but it is good and it's very biblical. I want to talk a little bit more tangibles as far as fostering a grace- filled workplace or creating that. How can leaders, and how can managers. Create that kind of workspace?

Tim Kimmel:
That's a great question. You're talking about the crux of the book. The centerpiece of it is we unpack for everybody a way to create a culture of grace where you work, an atmosphere of grace. Now, I might be just a low person on the food chain, on the payroll food chain, and so I'm not in a position of influence and boss and all that stuff. But in my little world I can do it. But if I am a supervisor, or I am a manager, or I'm a VP, or I own the company, just think how much you can do. Well, we show that what that's like.
We basically take grace at four levels. We unpack how we can be used by God to use our words and actions to address the three driving inner needs that everybody that we work with have inside them. Every one of us, everybody listening has a need to know that they're secure. They need to know they're significant. They need to know they're strong or sufficient for the moment they're in. Well, we can use our words and actions, and we show you in the book exactly how that plays out in grace.
The second thing, and this really brings the best out of people, is you set your fellow workers' hearts free. And there's four wonderful freedom to God gives you and me in his grace that when we turn around and be vessels for that to others, it changes everything. And that is giving people the freedom to be different. By the way, give me synonyms for that. Weird, bizarre, strange, goofy, quirky. We don't make issues that way. Given the freedom to be different. Vulnerable. There's a lot of fragile people. The freedom to be candid. They can tell you what's on their heart, even if it's stuff that's hard to hear. And the freedom to be imperfect. They're going to make some mistakes, but we're going to get through that.
The third level has to do with those six character traits you talked about and how we bring this strength to work with us. And then the fourth way grace plays itself out is where we're aiming our lives as individuals and how that impacts everybody around them if we're a follower of Jesus. If we're follower of the world, then we should be aiming our life as success. Well, if you're aiming your life at success, you're aiming very low. Jesus offers something better in the Bible, and that's what we call true greatness and Jesus would've defined true greatness. You can take the verses he gave. You can come up with something.
It's a passionate love for him that shows itself an unquenchable love and concern for the people around you. There's four wonderful qualities of it. Look at this. Humility, gratefulness, generosity, and a servant spirit. Now you take those four things to work with you, and I guarantee you something. Not only are you going to make that work environment so much better for everybody else, but you're going to be noticed by the people that decide who's going to run the show. And the people that I want making the big decisions at work are people that are humble, that they're grateful, they're generous hearted and they're very servant-hearted. Those are the people I want. I can put the reputation of our business in their hands, my fellow workers in their hands. I could put the assets of the business in their hands and know I've got a good person.
So there's far more in this for the individual that reads the book and practices this than even the people on the receiving end of it.

Michael Tooker:
And Christa, just to put an exclamation point on all those things that Tim just shared. You asked the question about culture, and culture, I mean, you can talk about there's a lot of ingredients in culture. But as opposed to it being things like the color of the paint, the furniture, the whatever, it's really the culture of a company is the sum total of all the interactions between the people of that company. And what Tim just described is, imagine if you came to work. If I come to work as a leader of 200 people and I'm dealing with everyone around me in that way. Or I come to work as just an individual contributor who's a frontline service worker, let's say, and I treat the people around me in that way. Don't you think the culture of the company is going to be better?
And so part of what we highlight for our readers of the book is that this is all about kind of relational capital and how do we deal with each other in the workplace? And God's grace should be that active ingredient, that catalyst, that changes how we deal with everyone in the workplace. But that's ultimately what a culture is, the sum total of all those relationships and all those interactions between people. And so that's our hope for our readers is that they take those four different levels and say, "Okay, that's the blueprint for how I should treat the people around me."

Tim Kimmel:
And can I say, Christa, that this raises the stock value of a corporate setting big time. Because right now there's a lot of people, they use this terminology, the Great Resignation. That a lot of people are quitting and all. And then now there's a new response to the Great Resignation and that's the Great Firing. Okay, you don't really like working here, then fine, you're gone. Well, this is bad for everybody.
When you create a culture of grace, you are raising the relational stock value of your company where the people working there are far more inclined to want to keep working there, and to work harder, to work better. It's better for your customers. It's better for your reputation. Everybody wins with this. And this book unpacks for people. This is kind of the first time it's been able to be unpacked in such a way that says, "This is what Jesus' heart looks like."
In other words, what if Jesus actually worked for Vanderbloemen, or what if he worked for, pick the name that he worked for. AT&T, or he worked for Google, or he worked, name it. What if he worked there? Do you think those would be better places for all the other people working there? And the answer is, of course it would. Now here's the good news. He's saying to us, "Hey, I don't need to work there because you do and I'm in you. Just take me with you and watch what happens."

Christa Neidig:
That's good. Going even further, I think, down this road. We talked about how grace is, I think the way you phrased it was like the outward focus on meeting other people's needs regardless of the cost to yourself, regardless of that selfishness aspect. What does that look like in a workplace?

Tim Kimmel:
Can I give you another definition of grace, then Michael can respond to that? We like to say that grace is giving somebody something they desperately need but don't necessarily deserve. Now we all need that. And when we come to work and we're actually on a receiving end of that by somebody else, that has a huge impact on us. And Michael can elaborate on what that looks like.

Michael Tooker:
Yeah, I mean, Christa, the really important point that Tim and I make in the book that I want to make now is workplaces are hard, gritty, messy, tough places. We all know that, right, because we all are in them. And whether it's a big company, small company, individual proprietorship, or publicly traded, it makes no difference. It's a collection of humans that come together. And whenever you get humans together, it gets messy.
And so I like to think about it as you don't need as much grace when everything's running perfectly well between people. If the company's making a lot of money and they're landing new clients and everybody's happy and there's no missed orders or whatever, everyone's happy and there's not a lot of relational tension. But grace, where you really need it is when things start to get choppy and dicey.
And one of the points we make in our book is that, look, grace is not soft. It's not pushover. It's not permissive or licentious. Grace, actually it's very hard-nosed thing because where grace has to show up, when you think about all those things that Tim described, those 17 different facets of it. If I think about the highlight reel of my career of all the dysfunctionality that unfolded in front of me. What did I do to the guy who literally in a meeting with four people all of a sudden started screaming at one of my employees and just ripping him a new one, so to speak? Well, it was like, "Hold on, time out. We don't talk to each other that way. We're going to stop this meeting right now and we're going to have a conversation about what's going on between the two of you? Because that can't be permissible for us to talk to each other this way."
Or if I have to terminate people. One of the most powerful moments in my career was when I had to terminate a Marine and as I'm walking them out to the parking lot, he said, "Hey, you know what? This is a bad day for me. I got to go home and tell my wife that I don't have a job and I don't know how I'm going to do that. But what I know is of all the people in the company, I'm glad, Michael, that you were the one to have this conversation with me and you were the one to walk me to my car because I know you care for me." And so part of what this notion of grace is, is like we got to do hard stuff. And oftentimes the world, they push those hard things away and don't do them. They brush them under the rug. Or they do them so poorly they inflict just had a massive amount of damage on people in their midst.
So as believers, we have to be the ones to wade into the hardest situations. And the way we weigh in is just like Christ would weigh in. We do the hard work, but we do it well. We do it with grace and we recognize that there but for the grace of God go I. So if I'm confronting somebody who's awful, well that could be me tomorrow. So I do that in such a way that they experience the love of Christ, that I'm kind, I'm merciful. But I'm firm and I'm direct, and I deal with those difficult things that other people are unwilling to deal with.

Christa Neidig:
This is so great. Michael and Tim, thank you so much for spending time not only to write this book that I think is going to be so monumental in workplaces, but also just to have this conversation with me. Where can listeners get their hands on this book?

Tim Kimmel:
There's two ways. They can go to graceatworkbook.com and they can order it there. And by the way, this is an interesting book because we're not used to selling it by the case, but now companies are buying it, and churches are buying it, and staffs and so forth. The other way is go to Amazon and they get the Kindle version, the audio version or the printed version. So graceatworkbook.com, or Amazon.

Christa Neidig:
That's great. Thank you so much. And we'll make sure to link both of those on the show notes for you. Thanks again, guys. I really appreciate this conversation.

Michael Tooker:
Well, hey Christa, thank you for having us, and thanks for allowing us to be guests. But also thanks to Vanderbloemen for the great work that you do. We're also clients of yours, so thank you for the work that your company does.

Christa Neidig:
Thanks for listening to the Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast. At Vanderbloemen, we help Christian organizations build their best teams through hiring, succession, compensation, and diversity consulting services. Visit our website, vanderbloemen.com, to learn more. And subscribe to our Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts to keep up with our newest episodes. Thanks for listening.