Working with God, not just for Him
Most leaders I meet work for something. For a mission. For their people. For their family. And the faith-driven ones, almost without exception, tell me they work for God.
That is a good place to stand. It is not the only one.
There is a qualitative difference between working for God and working with Him, and it shows up in the smallest moments of a working week. Not in the prayer before the board meeting. In the middle of the board meeting.
What "for" looks like
Working for God usually sounds like this: you make the plan, you build the strategy, you pick the hire, and then you ask God to bless it. The prayer sits on either end of the decision. It rarely sits inside it.
There is nothing wrong with that. It is honest, and it is how most of us were taught. But it quietly assumes that the strategy is your department and the blessing is His.
What "with" looks like
Working with God moves the conversation into the decision itself. You are not asking Him to sign off on a plan you already made. You are asking what He actually wants to do through your leadership, in this situation, today.
That is a harder question, because the answer is sometimes no.
It is also a more useful one. A leader who can genuinely ask it has a source of perspective that no advisory board, no consultant, and no framework can give them.
Why this matters for a plateau
Leaders do not plateau for lack of effort. In twenty years of this work I have almost never met a stuck leader who was not trying hard.
They plateau for lack of perspective. They are solving the problem from inside the same frame that produced it, with more energy each time. Working with God is, among other things, a way out of that frame.
Where to start
You do not need a new devotional practice for this. Start smaller than that.
Pick one decision this week that you would normally handle entirely on your own competence. A hire. A price. A conversation you have been putting off. Before you decide it, ask a different question than usual: not bless this, but what do You want to do here?
Then sit with the answer long enough to hear something you were not expecting.
That is the whole method, in miniature. Everything else is practice.