Every bishop has a day job: how the priesthood works

The Church has no professional ministry at the congregational level. Wikipedia's article on the office of bishop puts it in one sentence: all local positions "operate as a lay ministry". A bishop, the equivalent of a pastor for a ward of 150 to 500 members, is recommended by the stake president, called in writing by the First Presidency, presented to the congregation for a sustaining vote, and then serves "without pay for four to seven years" while keeping his job. He has two counselors, also unpaid. Beneath him every function, teaching, the youth program, music, the welfare visits, the clerking of finances, is a "calling": a duty "issued to a member by priesthood leaders", sustained by vote, held for a time and then released. Most members receive no compensation for any of it, and the ones who hold the heaviest callings are usually the ones with the heaviest jobs.

Male members are ordained into one of two orders. The Aaronic Priesthood, called the lesser, holds the offices of deacon, teacher, priest and bishop; the Melchizedek Priesthood, the higher, holds elder, high priest, patriarch, seventy and apostle. Ordination is routine rather than selective: Wikipedia notes that boys are ordained "as a matter of course" once they reach the qualifying year, "so long as they meet requirements of worthiness". On December 14, 2018, the First Presidency moved ordination from individual birthdays to age groups. From January 2019 young men "will be eligible for ordination to the appropriate priesthood office in January of the year they turn 12, 14, and 16". The Deseret News noted that boys had been ordained deacons at 12 since 1908, and that the First Presidency said age requirements "are not doctrinally mandated".

Since October 6, 2012, men may begin full-time missions at 18, and Wikipedia notes that prospective male missionaries "are usually ordained to the office of an elder" before leaving. A 19-year-old missionary in Brazil or Korea has therefore already held several offices and performed baptisms and confirmations.

For 126 years the priesthood was not open to all men. In early 1852 Brigham Young announced that "men of black African descent could no longer be ordained to the priesthood", a reversal of practice under Joseph Smith, when, the Church's 2013 essay notes, "a few black men were ordained to the priesthood", among them Elijah Abel, who also took part in temple ceremonies at Kirtland, Ohio. The restriction extended to temple ordinances. On June 8, 1978, the First Presidency under Spencer W. Kimball announced a revelation: "the long-promised day has come", and "all worthy male members of the church may be ordained to the priesthood without regard for race or color". The text is printed in the Doctrine and Covenants as Official Declaration 2. In December 2013 the Church published the essay "Race and the Priesthood", which "disavows the theories advanced in the past that black skin is a sign of divine disfavor or curse" and rejects the idea that any race is inferior to another. Wikipedia cites a 2016 survey in which over 60 percent of members still described the pre-1978 restriction as God's will. Those are the dates; the arguments about them belong elsewhere.

Women are not ordained to priesthood offices. The Church's newsroom page on women states that men "serve in priesthood offices that enable them to officiate in religious ordinances", while women serve as missionaries, teachers, counselors and leaders of the organizations they run, and sit on leadership councils with, in the Church's words, decision-making authority. The largest of those organizations predates most American corporations: the Relief Society, founded March 17, 1842, in Nauvoo, Illinois, with Emma Smith as its first president, counts 7.1 million members in 170 countries by the newsroom's figure. Women also run the Primary, for children, and the Young Women organization, and have served missions from age 19 since 2012 and from 18 since 2025. Sheri Dew is the example on this site: second counselor in the Relief Society general presidency from April 1997 to April 2002, the first unmarried woman in the post, and then president and chief executive of Deseret Book from March 2002, the first woman to run it. Wikipedia notes that some early members regarded the temple endowment as conferring a form of priesthood authority on women, and quotes Eliza R. Snow in 1884 on sisters' right to administer to other women in those ordinances; the modern Church does not ordain them.

Every bishop has a day job.

The management case is easiest to make from the biographies. Romney was bishop of the Belmont, Massachusetts ward from 1981 to 1986, then Boston stake president from 1986 to 1994 over more than a dozen wards; Wikipedia records that he credited those years with "direct exposure to people struggling financially and empathy for those with family problems". Bill Marriott, three years into his run as chief executive of Marriott, became bishop of the Chevy Chase ward in the summer of 1975 and served about two years. His 2019 biographer, Dale Van Atta, quotes him: "The church job gave me more empathy. I became a better listener because of it." Clayton Christensen served as a bishop in Massachusetts and as an Area Seventy from 2002 to 2009 while teaching at Harvard Business School. Jon Huntsman Sr. presided over the Washington D.C. mission from 1980 to 1983, the years in which he founded Huntsman Chemical (1982), and was an Area Seventy from 1996 to 2011. Robert C. Gay left a managing director's seat at Bain Capital to preside over the Ghana Accra mission from 2004 to 2007, covering Ghana, Sierra Leone and Liberia, then co-founded Huntsman Gay Global Capital; he became a General Authority in March 2012. Stephen Covey was the first president of the Irish Mission from July 1962, 27 years before The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Add it up and a Latter-day Saint executive in his fifties may have run, unpaid, an organization of several hundred people with a budget, a welfare caseload, a youth program and a volunteer workforce that cannot be fired, on top of a career. The skills members name are the soft ones, listening and delegating above all, and the quotations above bear that out. Whether it makes them better managers than a comparable executive with a decade on a hospital board is not something any source here measures. The scale, though, is unusual, and it starts at 12.