Getting Practical on Developing Culture (Part 1)
Culture is difficult to define but easy to feel…and it’s hard to overestimate the role culture plays in your team’s health and efficiency.
A healthy culture can help turbocharge your vision and make progress toward the calling that God has for your church. But, an unhealthy team culture will actually erode your vision and derail your strategy.
We invited Paul Alexander, the executive pastor at Sun Valley Church in Phoenix, AZ and a consultant on our team, to join us for this new series: Getting Practical on Developing Culture.
In this episode, we talk about actually defining your culture—getting those “unspoken rules” written down and implemented into your team. Because you either define your culture, or it gets defined for you.
- Values vs. Culture Shaping Behaviors
- An Exercise to Define Your Culture Shaping Behaviors
- Interviewing, Hiring, and Training for Your Culture
Culture eats strategy for breakfast. [episode 469] #unstuckchurch Share on X Leaders get the behaviors they model and what they tolerate. [episode 469] #unstuckchurch Share on X Culture isn't a morale issue, its a performance issue. [episode 469] #unstuckchurch Share on X
This Episode Is Brought to You By Tyndale House.
If Jesus walked into your church right now, would people recognize him? We’ve created a personalized Savior who exists primarily to meet our needs, bless our lives, and guarantee our spots in heaven.
But here’s the problem. That Jesus would be unrecognizable.
In the book The Missing Messiah, bestselling authors Kyle Idleman and Mark More will help your church rediscover the Jesus based on Scripture, not on culture. Plus, check out the six-session companion study guide with free access to streaming videos.
Learn more at missingmessiah.com.
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Transcript
Sean:
Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean, managing director here at the Unstuck Group, and today we’re starting a brand new set of conversations called Getting Practical on Developing Culture. I’m here with Paul Alexander. Paul is the executive pastor at Sun Valley Community Church in the beautiful Phoenix area, and an Unstuck consultant. Paul and the team at Sun Valley have built one of the most intentional staff culture systems that I’ve seen in a church. It’s more than just a statement of what they value. It’s an actual system. They incorporate it in training, hiring, in their reviews, and more. The system is so good, honestly, Paul, you helped us design a resource around it that we’d like to share with our listeners called “The Culture Development Playbook.” It’s located in our resource hub and it walks you through really what Sun Valley did. So Paul, thanks for taking the time to do this with me.
Paul:
Thank you, Sean. Glad to be back on the podcast with you. Looking forward to the conversation we’re gonna have as we begin this new series on building a healthy staff culture in your church. I’m glad we could put that resource out there for churches. I think it’s gonna be real practical and help churches take real ground in this.
Sean:
Yeah, I completely agree. I wanna start the whole series here by wrestling just a little bit with what culture actually is. I think for a lot of leaders, culture feels kind of mysterious, maybe a little bit nebulous. Everybody generally agrees that it matters, but almost nobody can actually tell you this is what it is. So Paul, you and I have a good friend named Lance Witt. Lance wrote a great book called High Impact Teams. If you haven’t read it before, I’d highly encourage you to read it. There’s a section on culture that I think explains culture really well. Let me just share a short piece of it.
“It has been said that culture is the unspoken rules of how things get done. Once you’ve been an insider for a while, you will figure out how things get done in your ministry. You understand how decisions are made, you understand the quirks of the senior leader, you understand how conflict is dealt with, you understand how meetings are done, and you quickly come to understand what things you shouldn’t say in a meeting. Whether the culture is dysfunctional or not, once you’ve been in the organization for a while, it becomes normal for you. It’s sort of like a fish in the river. He doesn’t notice the water. It completely surrounds him, and it’s just the environment he swims in. For team health and effectiveness, and for the sake of new people joining the team, someone must speak the unspoken rules.”
I love that part of the book. Paul, we actually ran a short poll of our podcast listeners prior to starting this series. I think what we found in the poll really illustrates why we need to talk about this. In the poll, we asked listeners how many would say that their church had done the work of defining the behaviors that shaped their culture. That’s a concept we’re gonna talk more about today. Two-thirds of the respondents said they had not defined their behaviors. So we’re gonna spend some time there. I really wanna dig into why that’s important today. Another question we asked the listeners was if the culture factored into how they hire new staff and how they review their staff. Only 22% of the respondents said that it did currently. The last question was whether they were intentional about teaching their culture beyond just their staff team, but actually to their volunteers as well.
Here’s what we found there. No one. So 0% responded that they had done that. That’s where we’re going with this series. Back to Lance’s quote from the book, we wanna help you speak those unspoken rules, then write them down, train your team on them, and then build them into your systems and eventually in your congregation, because as we’re gonna talk about today, you define your culture or your culture is going to get defined for you.
Before we get started in all that, let me stop and say thanks to our podcast sponsor, Tyndale House. Tyndale House is releasing a brand new book called The Missing Messiah by bestselling authors Kyle Idleman and Mark Moore. This book and the supporting study guide and videos will really help your church rediscover Jesus based on Scripture not just on culture. You can learn more about that book at missingmessiah.com.
All right, Paul, I wanna start with the reality that I think most pastors face. Almost everyone would agree culture matters. But if we sat and we asked them to name their culture right now, the actual behaviors that define how their team works, I think a lot of them would just really feel stuck in that conversation. Most of them would probably feel like that’s a leadership failure on their part. I think it’s just what Lance was describing in his book. You’re just in the water right now, and it’s kind of hard for you to describe something that you’re swimming in. Before Sun Valley had any of this defined, you were leading a staff team like everybody else who’s listening today. So take us back there to the beginning. What was going on that made you think we need to sit down, do this work and really name these behaviors?
Paul:
Yeah, it’s a good question, Sean. When I joined the team at Sun Valley over 15 years ago, we were still meeting in one location and that location was built on 10 acres, one entrance, one exit. We were bouncing around between 2,500 and 3,000 people coming on the weekend services at that time. We were growing fast. At the rate we were growing, we knew that location was gonna be in a turnaway situation in just a couple of years. If we kept growing at that rate, we were gonna be full. We were gonna be maxed out at capacity just under 4,000 people. That’s what that campus can physically do in five services over two days. Being on 10 acres with one entrance and one exit, we couldn’t build a bigger auditorium. We couldn’t add more parking. So even though we were nearing capacity, we had a deep conviction to help more people meet Jesus.
Being full and essentially being done, and having a lid put on growth or imposed on you, it just wasn’t an acceptable answer for us. We’re like, “This is wrong. We have to continue to help new people meet Jesus.” We wanted to be faithful to the Great Commission the Lord gave us. We really felt deeply about that. We had already helped plant about 20 churches at that time over Sun Valley’s years of existence, but we felt we had a culture worth replicating. We had personal ownership in helping reach new people, not just supporting others as they reached new people. So we decided at that time multisite was gonna be our future strategy to deliver growth. Probably another conversation happens another time, but we went multi-site because we had to. If we were gonna continue to obey Jesus and the Great Commission he’d given us, we had to do that to reach new people.
If we knew we were gonna replicate our culture at new locations, we were gonna have to move from what we had at the time, which was this oral culture. Everybody just talked about our culture. Everybody just worked with one another in one location. If we all wanted to make a decision, we went to Subway and had sandwiches and made a decision about the future of the church. We can’t do that anymore. So we had to move from an oral culture to a written culture, and we had to do the difficult, time-consuming work to actually articulate what we felt made our culture unique. So we had a healthy culture, Sean. It wasn’t like a cultural failure or a cultural crisis that forced us to do this work. It was a growth crisis that forced us to do that.
Sean:
Yeah. Paul, I think there have been a lot of churches recently, of course, that are growing fast. They’re growing like crazy right now. So they’re probably feeling the exact same thing that you just described. Growth is driving the need, really the necessity to define that. On the other side of that, I think there are other kinds of churches too that maybe just haven’t done the work.
What I’m hearing a lot of times from pastors is that there are symptoms of an unclear culture that get misidentified. They don’t get called out necessarily as a culture problem. They usually show up as something else. Within the team, the symptoms look more like a strategy that keeps stalling out and nobody can really put their finger on why that is. A lot of times we see staff turnover, where you’re losing people that you wanna keep, and then you have a few people on the team who are draining the energy on the rest of the team that are still there. Sometimes we hear stories about what I just call sideways energy in the form of a meeting after the meeting that certain individuals are having, or end arounds around the decision maker, or sometimes passive-aggressive emails. Not that anybody would send those, but it has happened before.
I think a lot of times those issues get misdiagnosed as something maybe easier to fix, and we hear this oftentimes from churches, maybe we just need a better ministry plan or strategic plan in place, or we need to hire or we need to restructure our team. So churches call us, and they ask for help with their organizational structure. Honestly, I think structure is part of the problem. But you can rebuild your org chart, and you can still end up in the same place a year later because the org chart wasn’t necessarily the thing that’s generating the behavior that you’re seeing.
So for me, here’s the reminder that I just want all pastors to hang onto as they’re leading their teams and they’re navigating this process of defining culture. Leaders get the behaviors that they model and the behaviors they tolerate. What you do and what you let happen often decides who your team is becoming, which means you’re already forming culture within your team. The question really is whether you’re doing it on purpose or you’re doing it by accident. Paul, I think that’s what’s hardest about all of this. It isn’t always that pastors are doing something wrong necessarily. Sometimes it’s that they didn’t do anything, and doing nothing still produced a result for them. So the idea of culture is not necessarily a mystery to most leaders. They know it matters. Why do you think it is, just in your experience in working with church teams, that culture still doesn’t get worked on?
Paul:
When I was growing up, I grew up on the East Coast up in Northern Virginia, and we had this really big garden. And when I say big garden, I mean we had a big garden. We had corn, peppers, potatoes, cucumbers, all of it. Mom would can green beans and tomatoes for the winter, the whole thing. It was my job and my brother’s job to weed the garden, which I absolutely loathed. We had to work hard to have a great garden, but you know what we had to do to get weeds in our garden? Absolutely nothing.
Sean:
Yeah, right.
Paul:
Nothing always produces something. Nothing always leads you somewhere. You’re usually leading yourself somewhere by neglect or without intention. Every person listening to this conversation right now, you’re actually building a culture. You’re building a culture in your personal life, in your most important relationships, you’re building a culture in your home, and you’re building a culture in your workplace. In our case, Sean, we’re talking about the local church. That culture’s either being built by intention or by neglect and both will produce results, but if you want great results, you actually have to choose those. There has to be some intention behind that.
As I’m listening to you talk, Sean, I think some of what you’re alluding to is a concept that Peter Drucker really explicitly called out. For the listeners who don’t know, Peter Drucker’s commonly known as the father of modern management, him and Tom Patterson, who started the Patterson Center where the marketplace got the strategic operating process from the companies used for strategic planning and management. And then of course, Bob Buford, but they were all buddies. Bob was a successful businessman, philanthropist. He was one of the founders of Leadership Network back in the 80s. The three of those guys were really good friends, and what most people don’t know, they had a huge behind-the-scenes impact on the modern church growth movement and the megachurch and multisite ideas.
But Peter’s famously quoted as saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. In other words, no matter how talented you are, and there’s some really talented leaders listening to this conversation, no matter how well-funded you are, and some churches are incredibly well-funded. I’ve run into churches that actually have endowments and they’re trying to figure out how do we spend money? I wish that was my problem. But no matter how great your strategy is or how clear your structure is, which you alluded to, the gravitational pull of your staff culture is so powerful that it will curse you if it’s not right. It’ll be like having your house infested with termites. Your church will erode from the inside out, and it’ll start on your staff.
I think church leaders neglect intentionally working on their culture because Sunday comes every seven days. It’s an incredibly short work cycle for the kind of work that it is. When you’re working in a job so much like that, it just takes an incredible amount of difficulty to actually get out of that and work on your job instead of work in your job. That just takes intentionality and space, and there’s a grind to it that most leaders simply don’t have the bandwidth or the perceived bandwidth or discipline to get out of and do the hard work it takes to be intentional about building their culture.
Sean:
That’s a great point, Paul. With all of those things that feel so urgent this week, it’s easy to just file culture under, well, that’s something I’ll work on next week and then the week after that.
Paul:
100%.
Sean:
The next week, and now we’re 52 weeks later, and we really haven’t worked on it. I wanna get to solutions here pretty quickly, but there’s one other issue that came to mind for me. I think what I’ve seen is a lot of leaders file culture under something that sounds more like how people feel about working here, more like team morale, or we’ll do staff appreciation and that’s culture.
But culture isn’t a morale issue. It’s a performance issue. If you have a healthy culture in place, that’s gonna help you reduce turnover, which means less rehiring and more retaining great staff leaders. Who doesn’t wanna do that? It raises job satisfaction so your best people tend to stick around longer, and it helps you attract the right people in the first place, which makes your hiring a little easier. It cuts down on some of that sideways energy that I talked about before, which, if we’re honest, is something that no leader wants to be spending time on. We do not have time for that in the whirlwind of ministry. The opposite of that, an unhealthy culture doesn’t just make work less fun. It really degrades your vision and your strategy as a church. You can have a great plan on paper, but a poor culture, back to what you just said with Drucker’s quote, Paul, can keep you from making progress for the future. So that’s why it’s so important.
Okay. I think we’ve made the case for it so far, so let’s get to solutions. Paul, let’s start to talk through what a church can actually do about this. Let’s think about this next week. At Unstuck, we help churches define their culture. We don’t ask them coming in just for a list of values. We ask them for a list of behaviors. We call them culture-shaping behaviors. You call yours at Sun Valley Leadership Distinctives. It’s the same idea, right? So will you start there for people, Paul? What’s the actual difference between these behaviors and what values are, and why does that matter so much for church leaders?
Paul:
Yeah. Let me unpack a little bit of our journey that might help some leaders think about getting their arms around where they’re at and where they wanna go. Back when I joined the team at Sun Valley, we had a great 28-word mission statement that nobody knew. And some organizational values that were written in a drawer somewhere. Man, they were good in concept. They were biblically accurate. There was nothing inherently wrong with them. They weren’t preventing us from going where the Lord wanted us to go. It’s just no one knew them, and they didn’t catalyze any desired behavior. They didn’t impact what we wanted our staff to believe, how we wanted them to think, what we wanted them to feel, and ultimately how we wanted them to behave. I was thinking about this in preparation for our conversation. I remember back in the ’90s and early 2000s, I’m dating myself here, organizational values were a big time, top-of-mind conversation, right?
Sean:
Yep.
Paul:
There was even a company called Successories where you could order office artwork. I looked online, and it still exists today.
Sean:
Oh, nice.
Paul:
Yeah. I don’t know how, but it does. So people are still buying this. You can order office artwork to hang in your corporate office of a picture of a bunch of guys rowing. It’s called Crew. There’s a movie you can watch about this. It’s a real sport, and in big letters, it has the word teamwork. And under it in smaller letters, it has the definition of teamwork. It’s this really nice, cute, pithy, apple pie feel-good statement. That’s what comes to mind when I think about organizational values. They’re not bad. They’re just not personal. They don’t authentically describe the personality of your team. They’re super aspirational. They’re ambiguous. They probably mean different things to different people. And ultimately, they don’t catalyze the behavior that you’re uniquely looking for on your team and in your context. That’s what you were getting at there. Now think with me for a minute, okay? When you think of the company Tesla, who comes to mind, right?
Sean:
Elon.
Paul:
Elon Musk, right?
Sean:
Yeah.
Paul:
Like him or don’t like him, the dude’s taken some ground. He’s built something. He may have left a wake of dead bodies along the way, but he’s built something, right? When you think about Meta, or for our older listeners, Facebook, who comes to mind?
Sean:
Zuckerberg.
Paul:
Right on. When you think of Amazon, I don’t know who the new CEO is, but who comes to mind for me is Jeff Bezos.
Sean:
Unfortunately, I know this, Paul, because I watch too much Squawk Box on MSNBC. Or CNBC, sorry. But it’s Andy Jassy right now.
Paul:
There you go.
Sean:
There is useless information for our listeners.
Paul:
Yep, that’ll help everybody take ground right now. But what I’m getting at is every organization, over time, takes on the personality, the values, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors of the leader. This is true in your marriage. This is true in your parenting. This is true if you’re running a company. And this is true if you’re spiritually called to lead in a church context. It’s just true. Again, think with me for a minute. If you take this principle and you transfer it from the marketplace to what you and I do, this is called discipleship. Paul said it this way, “Follow me as I follow Jesus.” The book of Proverbs states it this way, “He who walks with the wise will be wise. He who walks with fools will suffer harm.” In other words, you become who you hang out with. Every relationship, group, organization, or church has a culture. They have an accepted way of behaving. If you don’t behave that way in that group, you don’t get to be a part of that group anymore. Seth Godin said it this way, “People like us do things like this.”
Sean:
I love that.
Paul:
As listeners begin to wrestle with these ideas today and in this series to come, I think you’ve got to get to a point where you can actually clearly articulate this stuff so that it informs the kind of people you invite to your team. You’ve got to get it clear enough to where you can actually train it to the people on your team. It’s got to be able to be reproduced across locations or in a single site church across various ministry teams. It can be coached, and it can actually be genuinely, authentically evaluated. If you don’t get it that granular, you haven’t gotten it far enough.
Sean:
That’s really good. To carry on the differentiation, the way I think about it, a value is a noun. I’m not an English major, Paul, not even close to it, but I know nouns and verbs. So a value is a noun. Something like the word integrity or excellence, maybe community, that’s a word we use a lot in the church. Nobody would disagree that those are things that a church team should value, right? Which I think is actually kind of the problem. If nobody can disagree with it, nobody has to change anything about what they do. You could put excellence up on the wall, and every person on your team will read it with a completely different idea of what that means, and no one’s wrong.
A behavior, though, is something that you can see somebody do or you can see somebody not do if they’re not doing it. You can model a behavior for somebody. You can catch somebody doing it and celebrate that in a staff meeting. You can call it out when it’s missing when you’re not seeing it. You can also put it in a job description, like you were talking about, and ask about it in an interview or talk about it in your one-on-one meeting. Try doing that with a noun. Try sitting down with a staff member and giving them feedback on excellence, right? It’s too subjective to be helpful. We could just sit and argue about what that actually means. So here’s the thing to remember: you can coach a behavior; you can’t coach a value. You can coach a behavior, you can’t coach a value. So Paul, how did you at Sun Valley go through the process of defining your behaviors and what you call those leadership distinctives for your team?
Paul:
Yeah, right on. This is gonna sound extremely elementary, but apparently I’m not that sophisticated as well.
Sean:
That’s good though.
Paul:
We just started where we started. The reality is you gotta accept where you are to move forward to where you feel like you need to be. So you gotta come to some level of acceptance of where you are and have an elementary conversation about where you’re going. We began with a real simple exercise, honestly. Our executive team, at the time, made two very simple lists. On one list, we wrote down a list of behaviors that when we see staff doing these things, it makes us smile and think, oh my gosh, they get it. Give that guy a raise. They’re freaking awesome. On the other list, we wrote down examples of things team members do, and it’s like a big fat facepalm emoji. We think to ourselves, why are they even on the team? Why haven’t we fired them already? Because they obviously don’t behave the way we behave.
From these two really long lists, and they were long lists, we would pray and come back and work on it and argue, and we would pray and come back and argue, and we’d go pray some more and go back and argue. I’m not exaggerating; this was a series of conversations. It wasn’t a conversation. We need the Holy Spirit’s help because we’re not some business trying to make shareholders happy. We’re the body of Christ. We have a spiritual calling on our lives, and we wanted what we landed on to be really honest about who we were and who we were convicted about being. So it genuinely took time.
We got to the point where we could actually write key behaviors and clarifying statements about those behaviors down so that we were actually defining what we mean by when we say, for example, a church may say excellence is a value of theirs, perhaps. I’d encourage them to get a little bit more explicit and clear than that, but they may. So you need a clarifying statement, what does that mean? Because it means 15 things to 15 different people.
We could actually get to the point where we did the red, yellow, green on each of them and clearly state if it were green, why is it green and what do we need to do to keep it that way? Or if it’s yellow, what needs to change in the next six months to move it in the right direction? Or if it’s red, what do we just need to be honest about? This is important. What do we need to be honest about if it’s not what we want it to be? There has not been anybody else leading there but us. So there’s really no one to put at the feet of anybody else where we’re at but us. So we had to just be honest about it and honestly just repent and admit to the team that we haven’t addressed this very well and then start making real changes in the next 90 days to move it in the right direction.
Sean:
That’s good. I love that ownership and modeling that for your team. That’s excellent. Paul, I wanna double down on something that you said, because this has been really important to me and something I’ve noticed many times. A lot of times it’s easier to clarify what those behaviors are when one gets violated.
Paul:
Oh, yeah.
Sean:
It’s easier for us to sit down and say, “That’s not how we do it here,” rather than, “That is how we do it here,” which is interesting. Somebody does something in a meeting, or maybe they handle conflict in a certain way, or they make a decision without communicating to you, and you just have that feeling, “That’s not how we do it here at Sun Valley.” That reaction, I think, is your culture revealing itself. If you’re a leader trying to get started on this, that is a great place to begin. Think back over the last year. When did somebody do something that your gut said, “That’s not us.” Why was that? What was that—we talked about this earlier—unspoken rule that now needs to be spoken by you. That is a great place to begin. In Lance’s analogy from his book, that’s the water we talked about earlier, and that’s you starting to notice the water around you.
Paul:
As you’re saying that, the thing that comes to my mind is it’s a lot like parenting. I think leadership’s a lot like parenting, Sean, because oftentimes as a dad, I’ve got four kids; I’m just thinking about my dad history here for a second. There have been times where if one of the kids does something that’s outside the boundaries of how Alexanders behave or what we expect our kids to behave like, I’ll get upset about that. I’ll be like, “Dude, we don’t do that. Go do your chores, brother.”
Sean:
Exactly.
Paul:
“Listen to your mom. She’s talking to you. Actually, give her your attention. She deserves that.” I think a lot of times, we can get very corrective in parenting and even punitive. And yet we know the most highly motivating approach to parenting is actually incentivizing it, being positive, spotting the good stuff, reinforcing all the great stuff. So when something feels off internally, like, ooh, that’s probably a cultural violation, okay, now when I approach that, how do I approach that in such a way that’s gonna move the ball forward in a positive manner, as opposed to in a critical spirit?
Sean:
That’s a great analogy. It’s so true. All right. Let’s talk really practically here, because I wanna leave leaders with an idea of what they can do about this this week. Paul, what does the process look like for sitting down and starting to just really define these behaviors? You’ve talked about that a bit already, but how do we encourage leaders to start to chart this out?
Paul:
Yeah. Okay. This is actually some really fun work that we get to do with churches when they’re going through the staffing and structure phase of the engagement with us at the Unstuck Group. For example, we facilitate a conversation with the senior staff where we will create a long list of behaviors that should be considered, and we’ll have team members share their ideas and statements that start with “they.”
For example, they finish what they start, or they lead by example. They do the things we ask other people to do. It always ends up being an incredibly powerful time for the team because we ask them to give specific examples of these culture-shaping behaviors in action, and the team ends up affirming and building one another up in really cool ways. There are some really cool stories where they call each other out on, like, “I see this in you, and I wish our whole staff was like that.” It’s just really powerful when you get to facilitate those conversations. It’s not just the discipline of working through an exercise like this that can help you gain clarity.
There’s actual power to having someone from the outside of the church, like the Unstuck Group, facilitate it because it forces the team to a level of clarity and an articulation that they wouldn’t naturally come to on their own if someone from the outside weren’t in the room helping them do that and challenge these ideas without bias, because they can talk about things and they all know what they mean, but as an outsider in the room, I’m like, “Hold on, you gotta help me understand what you mean when you say that,” which then forces them to drill down another layer and get even more clear. You need this to be accessible to your staff, to new hires, to your volunteers, to your church body, and we’ll talk about that in the episodes to come.
Finally, we evaluate how we actually are doing this as a team and living these behaviors out. We score them red, yellow, green. We get specific about all of them, and we come up with real plans to move them all forward. At times, Sean, there are moments where senior staff do need to actually just talk to the staff team and say, “We’ve blown it here. We’re not doing a great job, and forgive us, and we’re gonna change this thing. And you know what? You’re on the team, so you get to help us change it.”
Sean:
Yeah. That’s good. Paul, most churches stop with doing the work together. They write those things down, they feel good about it, and then it just goes in the drawer, or it goes in a folder on a drive somewhere, right? Then they don’t think about it. They go back to the whirlwind of ministry. You guys didn’t stop there, though. You built an actual training around your distinctives. Will you talk us through that? Once you had them defined, how did you teach them to your team?
Paul:
We’ve all been at a staff offsite where we’ve had a great conversation, and then six months later, you’re like, “Whatever happened to that great conversation? I thought we were gonna do something with that, right?” By the way, when that happens, your leadership gets eroded when there’s great conversations, but there’s inaction. When you say you’re gonna do something to move the ball forward and you don’t actually do it; college coaches lose their job over that kind of stuff.
It’s not just enough to talk about this stuff and write it down. You gotta actually do something with it. So you gotta do the work to push it past a cool conversation. Having your senior pastor inspire the staff in a training, that’s wonderful and inspiring, but it’s still not enough. That’s just a rollout. It’s inspirational, but it’s not all of it. Let me give you a real quick overview of what we do, and we’ll dig into these things as we go in this series.
Number one, we interview and hire to our culture at Sun Valley. Let me put my Sun Valley hat on for a second. At Sun Valley, we are actually interviewing for our culture, and we’re hiring to our culture, not just into our culture. Two different things. There used to be a time where I could be involved in every hire at Sun Valley. Obviously that’s changed with the scale of things today, but I still have an hour-long phone interview with every director-level hire about our culture, and our executive staff or campus pastors handle those same conversations with hires below the director level at their campuses and on their teams.
We’ll dig into this more, like I said, but we’ll actually go through each of our staff leadership distinctives on that call. Somewhere along in that conversation, I always give real concrete examples about our culture, and I’ll say somewhere to the candidate, in fact, there’s probably someone listening to this call right now who’s been on this phone call with me. Look, I’ll say, if this isn’t who you are, Sean, if you and I were talking about joining the team here, and I went through this, I’d say, Sean, I’ve never had this conversation with anybody, and someone said, wow, that place sounds like it sucks to work at. No one’s ever said that after having this conversation. But I’ll say, be careful what you ask for, because you might get it. If this really isn’t genuinely who you are, this isn’t genuinely how you behave, you’re gonna hate working here, man. And we’re gonna hate working with you.
Because we really deeply care about people meeting Jesus, and I’ll use one of our distinctives. If you don’t personally have stories about inviting your friends and your neighbors to Jesus and to Sun Valley, and you don’t get the opportunity to baptize people because you’ve led them to Jesus, after about six months or eight months, our staff’s gonna look at you and think, dude, I don’t think he cares about what we care about. The right people always lean into that conversation, right? And then the right people also always lean away. Both of those are really good answers, by the way. So we interview and hire to our culture.
Number two, if you were to join our team, the first week of your employment, you go through a crash course of our team culture. You watch a five to 10-minute video of me training all of our cultural distinctives, and you’d have a participant guide that you’d be filling out and going through. You’d meet with your supervisor, and they’d have their leader guide, and you guys would have a more intimate conversation about those videos and all that content. Then you’d go through staff orientation with Chad, our lead pastor, and myself, and we spend a half day together. We go through all kinds of stuff about why we do ministry the way we do it, our story. We spend a lot of time on our culture. They get to hear it and ask questions and have a conversation with Chad and me, even though they may work at another campus. I may not even see them, except for a couple of all-staff gatherings every single year.
Now that you’re on the team, if you’re a director-level staff member or above, you’ve got a responsibility, welcome to the team. Part of your job description is you have to lead a leadership cohort every single year. And guess what content you’re gonna use for that? It’s this content that you’ve just watched with your supervisor, those five- to 10-minute-long videos on each of our distinctives. This forces our staff to become experts in our culture. It forces our staff to spend time with high-capacity volunteer leaders. It pushes our culture down. We drag the magnet through the sand and always end up building out a top 25. We wish we could hire a list of volunteers who have gone through that as well. In addition to celebrating and inspiring this throughout the year with our staff and at all staff gatherings, we’re actually embedding this organizationally into the normal everyday life of our staff. It’s not just a mission statement and a bunch of pithy statements on a piece of paper in a drawer somewhere. This is how we function as a team.
Sean:
I love it. Everything that you just described, and it was a great overview of what you guys do, is included in “The Culture Development Playbook” that we referenced at the beginning of this podcast. We’ll have ways for listeners to download that and get access to it too. It’s actually what we’re gonna dive into more in depth as we go through the series: how that plays out and how church leaders can adapt some of those ideas for their church too. So really looking forward to these next four weeks of conversation.
This is the part that I really want people to hear. As you’ve just described all of that, defining that list of behaviors was maybe a day of work. You said, Paul, you guys had some meetings, you went back, prayed about it, came back. That’s a day, couple days, several meetings that you have. Teaching these behaviors is something that you’re still doing years later, right? So just making a list doesn’t change the behavior. Repetition changes the behavior. People have to believe it. They have to see it. They have to hear stories about it. They have to watch their leaders live it, like you talked about earlier, before they’re really gonna own it. That is so critical. If you stop at, we made our list and it’s on Google Drive and people have access to it, that’s not gonna change your culture. All right, Paul, let’s wrap up for this week. We’ve got a lot more to go into as we go through the series, but this has been a great start just to define what culture is and introduce this topic to our listeners. What’s one thing that you hope pastors would take away from today’s conversation?
Paul:
Yeah, I’d probably come back to the Scriptures. Gosh, we’re pastors, guys. At the end of the day, kind of the root of this whole thing, the two themes that the Bible hangs upon, salvation and stewardship. I’m talking to a bunch of professional Christians; you guys all know that. But outside of the Holy Spirit and the Scriptures, the greatest gift the Lord’s given you as a leader in a church is your staff team. By intention or neglect, you already have a culture on your staff team.
The really good news is it’s within your power, and frankly, it’s within the scope of your responsibility to actually do something about it and get intentional about moving the ball in the right direction and building a culture that people wanna be a part of and that’s worth replicating. This is stuff that most Fortune 500 companies aren’t this intentional about. You don’t need Fortune 500 resources to be world-class in this area. You can actually do this. You can intentionally build a culture that sets your staff free to thrive and take the kingdom ground they’re called to take. Yeah, I think that’s where my heart goes on this. I believe in these guys listening to this and these gals listening to this. I think you guys can actually really do this, and I think you must do this.
Sean:
That’s a great reminder. Everybody listening in their church, they already have a culture. Your team there, you’re already operating on a set of rules that it’s possible nobody ever took the time to write down or gave clear direction on, right? So this isn’t necessarily about building something from scratch. You have to be clear about what already exists in your church. Decide what you wanna keep and be honest about what you might have just been tolerating all along. The great thing about this, you don’t need a budget to start this really, really important conversation with your team. You need a day with your leadership team. You need a few meetings where you can go back and pray afterwards. That’s really where you start.
If today put some words to something that you’ve been feeling on your team, start with that Culture Development Playbook. It’s built on the process that Paul and the team at Sun Valley actually use at their church. It’s gonna walk through exactly how to define your culture-shaping behaviors, and you can get it on the Resource Hub or we’ll link to it in the show notes as well. If developing your culture-shaping behaviors is something bigger than you feel like you can tackle on your own, this is exactly the type of thing that we’re helping churches with every week, and we’d love to help you as well. You can start a conversation with us about that if you just go to theunstuckgroup.com. Next week, Paul and I are back with episode two of this series, so subscribe so that you don’t miss it, and we will see you then.
It's not just enough to talk about this stuff and write it down. You gotta actually do something with it. [episode 469] #unstuckchurch Share on X
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