Defining your culture shaping behaviors is a quick project. Embedding them into your team is a multi-year commitment, and that’s the part that actually determines whether any of this changes how your team operates.
What tends to happen is we come out of this meeting and go back to the whirlwind of the rest of ministry. And the easier thing to do is put this list of behaviors on the wall or a desk calendar, and then go back to what we’ve always done.
In this episode, Paul and I talk about what it takes to keep your culture alive.
And, they’ll spend time talking about this idea: you will get what you tolerate. If you tolerate the status quo, you’ll keep getting the status quo.
- Modeling Culture Shaping Behaviors
- Evaluating Yourself on a Regular Rhythm
- What To Do When a Leader Violates a Behavior
There’s a lot of power in just strategic obedience in a desired direction over a long period of time. There’s fruitfulness that comes from faithfulness. [episode 470] #unstuckchurch Share on X Nothing erodes culture and trust faster than a ‘do as I say but not as I do’ posture. [episode 470] #unstuckchurch Share on X Don’t push culture-shaping behaviors faster than your team can tolerate. But, don’t tolerate leaving the culture where it is. [episode 470] #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 this is week two of our series called Getting Practical on Developing Culture. I’m here again with Paul Alexander. Paul is the XP at Sun Valley Community Church in the beautiful Phoenix area, and an Unstuck consultant on our team. Paul, great to have you back.
Paul:
Yeah, Sean, glad to be back with you. Glad to continue the conversation we began last week.
Sean:
Would you start us off by catching us up on what we covered last week?
Paul:
Yeah, right on. So, for our listeners, you owe it yourself to go back and listen if you didn’t get last week, and I’m probably gonna say it every single week because it’s true. This is gonna really help you. But culture, we started last week talking about, it’s the unspoken rules of how things actually get done at your church. And good news, every church already has one. You already have a culture, whether you’ve named it or not, whether it’s being built by intention or neglect, it already exists. What makes it actionable, however, is moving it from an idea of it being these nebulous values to actual measurable behaviors, because you can coach a behavior, and our values are demonstrated. So we walked through the process of defining four to six culture-shaping behaviors with your senior team in the room, and I shared how we built a training around ours at Sun Valley to actually change the behaviors of our staff and put this into the day-to-day workings of what we do.
Sean:
That’s a great recap. Shouldn’t take the place of listening to that episode because this series, more than any I think that we’ve done, maybe ever, each week really builds on each other. So if you go into this week and you haven’t listened to that last week’s episode, it’s kind of like jumping into the middle of your favorite TV show and not having watched the beginning, you’re gonna be lost in knowing what’s going on. So don’t do that, okay? Here’s where we’re going today, though. Let’s say that you did the work that we recommended last week, which by the way, that would be a remarkable turnaround in the church world. So if you did that, kudos to you. But you got your leadership team together in the room, you worked through a long list of behaviors, you landed four to six of those, and somebody right now is working on wordsmithing them so they really feel like you.
That, I think, can add a dose of energy to your leadership team. It’s exciting to make that kind of progress. The next challenge, though, is how do you embed these behaviors in your staff team so that 10 months from now, people know them, people are leading from them, and they’re making what I would say is a measurable impact in your team. Because sometimes what tends to happen is we come out of this meeting, we go back to the whirlwind of ministry like Paul and I have been talking about, and the easier thing to do is put this list of behaviors on the wall or put it in a nice desk calendar. I’m using that, but I don’t even know if people use desk calendars anymore, Paul. I don’t have one.
Paul:
You don’t have a desk calendar, Sean?
Sean:
I don’t.
Paul:
Yeah, I bet you could get one at successories.com.
Sean:
But believe so, yeah. Hey, another reason to listen to last week if you don’t know what successories.com is. But we do that and then we go back to what we’ve always done, right? And that’s easier because again, we’re in the whirlwind of ministry. So today is actually about the hard work that we’ve got left to do. Defining your behaviors is that one-day or a couple of-meeting project. Actually embedding them in your team, I think that’s more like a multi-year commitment and that’s the part that actually determines whether any of this changes how your team operates. So we’re gonna talk about what it takes to keep these alive within your team, how you model and reinforce them because what’s true is what gets recognized with your team is going to get repeated. That’s what people are gonna see as success.
And then how you can check yourselves against these behaviors on a regular rhythm. Paul, you talked a little bit about that last week. And we’re gonna spend more time talking about that idea because I think the most important thing that I wanna come back to this whole series is that statement we talked about last week, you will get what you tolerate. And if you tolerate the status quo, you’ll keep getting the status quo.
So before we get into all of that though, let me pause and say thanks to our podcast sponsor, Tyndale House. They are releasing a brand new book called The Missing Messiah by bestselling authors Kyle Idleman and Mark Moore. This book and all of the supporting resources that go with it, like their study guide and the videos will help your church rediscover Jesus based on Scripture, not based on culture. So you can learn more about the book at missingmessiah.com.
Paul, let’s start with what actually happens after we introduce these behaviors to the team. I know you’ve gone through this and you’ve lived on the other side of it at Sun Valley. So what actually happens between you defining these behaviors for your team and then really living them out?
Paul:
Yeah, that’s a good question. So after we did the hard work that you described of nailing down what are our culture-shaping behaviors really gonna be, we call them leadership distinctives at Sun Valley, we began rolling those things out to our staff team at our all-staff gatherings. So we would tackle them one by one over a course of a couple of months at our monthly all-staff gatherings, and the goal was to train and inspire our team, right? And we did that. And we started celebrating a team member every single month at one of our staff gatherings that we felt embodied one of those leadership distinctives—someone who we thought if everybody on staff at Sun Valley lived out this distinctive the way this person does, Sun Valley would be more like what it should look like, right?
So now this is important for me to call out. If you remember what I said in last week’s episode, we already had a healthy culture. I said we felt like we had a culture worth replicating. The catalyst for us addressing this when we did was due to growth and going multisite. We had to figure out how to replicate our culture at multiple locations. And we knew that to do that, we had to move from being an oral culture to a written culture. So again, we were not addressing a cultural crisis or trying to fix our culture. It was already healthy.
So for church leaders listening to this and you’re like, you wanna address this in your context because you don’t feel that you have a healthy culture right now, just because you get clarity about the new cultural destination you’re moving towards, and just because you roll it out to your staff and maybe you train it at a staff gathering the way we did, and maybe even you’re really super winsome and your team actually likes you and they wanna follow you. And you’re a really great communicator, you know, that doesn’t necessarily mean everybody’s going to go with you on this journey. They may even subversively work against you.
Clarity is a gift you can give your staff, and that’s what you’re doing when you begin to roll this out to everybody. But just like really clear vision is both a catalyst to have people both jump on and off the ship, it’s both an attractant and a deterrent; clarity around your culture does the exact same thing. People are gonna be like, “Yes, this is what I’ve been waiting for. I wanna be a part of this.” And you’re gonna have some who are gonna say, “No, this isn’t what I want. This isn’t where I wanna go.” And it’s important as a leader that you look at both of those answers and you realize those are both really good answers. Because clarity is gonna help you get the right people on the team and frankly, move the right people off the team and allow them to self-select out when they’re like, “This isn’t where I wanna go.” Or then when they behave, we’ll get this further down the road, tip the hat to the future conversation. When they behave in such a way to violate your team culture, they’re communicating to you that they don’t wanna be on this team. They don’t wanna behave how this team behaves.
So back to this, when we rolled this out to our team, we had people saying, “Yeah, this is it. You’re putting into words what we’ve been feeling and what we’ve been thinking and how we’ve been behaving as a team.” It was affirming and freeing and catalytic. It’s been said that words build worlds, right? You’re a communications guy back in the day, so you get this. When your words build worlds that are different than what your team’s currently living in, some of your staff are gonna resonate with it and lean in, and some of your staff are gonna resist it and lean away. And both of those are okay.
Sean:
Paul, I wanna build on the topic of clarity that you just started us on. It’s so important. But I think the trap that I’ve seen sometimes is that leaders will see clarity as the finish line. It’s really critical that we do it, and it’s so important that it feels like we did that, okay, we’re done. And so that means some churches only get that far, and then they struggle with how do we really activate our team around these? And there’s a few warning signs I wanna give leaders just to look for to see, is this happening within my team?
First, have you stopped talking about the behaviors? You know, did you start at some point and then you really haven’t come back to them? Have they fallen off the agenda? Do you get focused on another initiative that’s stolen the margin to keep reminding your team of these? Another would be, are people still behaving the way that they behaved before you introduced these behaviors? Has there been any noticeable change now that you’ve clarified what a great culture fit looks like for your team? And then the third thing, have you picked up on a sense from your team that the list doesn’t really matter to them? That usually comes out of a lack of follow-through on our part as leaders. If you don’t follow through, you’ve taught your staff that leadership can name a standard out loud and then not hold anyone to it, and they might be tempted to apply that same lesson to everything else that you say, which would be really dangerous.
So the principle to remember in all of this, you’re always training your team. Every conversation and meeting and one-on-one that you have, you’re not just doing it on purpose all of the time. Sometimes it’s not intentional, but you are training. And every time somebody does something that’s off culture and nothing happens, you’re teaching your team there. Every time somebody does something well and nobody says a word about it, you’re teaching your team there. Every time a leader breaks the behavior you defined and everybody in the room notices it, but nobody says anything about it, that’s also a teaching moment. Your staff is learning the culture that you’re setting constantly. They’re not just reading the one-page document that you put together. They’re reading what you do and what you respond to, which is why I wanna go back to what we’ve talked about before, what gets recognized gets repeated. And the opposite of that matters just as much, what gets ignored also gets repeated. It’s just repeated by people who now think that that’s allowed, right?
So Paul, you’re an XP. I think you see a lot of this first. You see the daily behavior of your team. Where do you notice those gaps? What are some of the early warning signs that the distinctives that you guys have named aren’t really sticking?
Paul:
Yeah, Sean. So first of all, if you’re the senior leader or you’re on the senior staff of a church, I’d say trust your gut. Because the culture always starts in the heart of the leader and those closest to them. So when something feels off, it probably is. So then that’s when you need to dig in and figure out what it is. So when something’s off, the place it’s most likely to show up first, it’s in the way the staff think, it’s in the way the staff feel, how they behave, how they treat each other, interact with one another. And it may show up as simple as making an excuse for another team member, like, oh, he or she, they’re just having a bad day or they’re just going through a tough season. So somehow because of that, they’re allowed to act in a way that subtly violates our culture, right? You know, so we just give them a little bit of allowance. And by giving a little bit of allowance, we’re affirming their behavior even if it’s bad.
So I’ve seen teams that manage around certain team members. They get to the point where they just don’t wanna deal with that person anymore, so they come up with workarounds around them. I’ve seen teams that instead of engaging in healthy conflict and addressing cultural violations, they even go so far as to staff around certain people. Like maybe there’s this legacy staff person that’s been there for a really long time and we love them and they’re related to the senior pastor or somehow, you know, there’s some legacy reason they’re still there, and they’re hurting our culture, but we actually staff around them. Like, oh, we’ll make them the care pastor.
Sean:
Right. Yes.
Paul:
You know? “Let’s not give them any real leadership responsibility. Let’s just pay them to go care for people because none of our other staff care for people.” So anyways, I know that was a little snarky, but you know.
Sean:
That is a little snarky, Paul.
Paul:
Yeah. You get what I’m saying. I have feelings about that stuff. But when leaders allow that kind of stuff to happen, and it shows up in lots of other ways as well, they don’t realize that a team member who’s behaving badly, when they allow that, they actually lose credibility because they’re allowing this to happen. And everybody sees the leader allowing it to happen. And so they’re like, “Oh, the leader’s actually not serious about the culture.” Because if they were, they would deal with this. And trust in the leader gets eroded. Trust in the leadership, the senior leadership team gets eroded, and ultimately trust in the culture gets eroded. So they start acting and talking about the leader. They wonder, do they see what we see? Why are they letting this person mess it up for the rest of us? Why aren’t they protecting the team or protecting the culture? So this does matter, and it shows up in oftentimes subtle relational ways, usually some enablement, some toxic stuff, and that gets allowed and then grows up and turns pretty funky.
Sean:
Yeah. Back to this idea, you get what you tolerate, right? Not what you say, not what you wrote down on the sheet. You get what you tolerate. And I don’t think most leaders listening to this podcast tolerate bad behavior. I don’t think that’s the problem. You know, when somebody blows up in a meeting and they lose it, it’s obvious. Everybody knows that needs to be dealt with. I think the problem that we’re describing right now is when somebody doesn’t embrace the behaviors of the culture, they might not choose to believe the best in others. You know, they might not be willing to rely on teammates for help. Maybe they don’t step in and help others when they need it. So for us as leaders, we could be tempted to let that go because it’s not an egregious lack of character. And what happens is that becomes the standard, not because we communicated it clearly to the team but because we tolerated it.
I think this is what is challenging for us, Paul, as leaders in the church, is we can see those things and our fear is that in addressing those things, it’s gonna lead to somebody leaving the team. And then other people who aren’t aware of what was happening behind the scenes are gonna have questions for us that maybe we can answer or we can’t answer. There’s somebody that’s not a part of the team anymore, and in church, it feels like family just left because these are the people we worship with and we pray with and we’ve been in the hospital with and those types of things. But culture is so important that we have to be willing to say we won’t tolerate this. And if you won’t change your behavior to adapt to our culture, maybe that means that this isn’t the right fit for you.
Do you feel that tension too at Sun Valley?
Paul:
Yeah, 100%, Sean. So I would frame it up this way. If you have team members who don’t think, feel, act, and behave the way you expect your culture to be lived out, and they’re behaving in a way that’s outside the boundaries of your culture, they’re violating your culture, they’re telling you they don’t wanna be on your team. So listen to them. Give them what they want. I’m not firing people. I’m not ex-ing them from the team because I don’t like them or they’re bad people. Very rarely do we lose a team member because they’re a bad person. They have bad character. That’s the exception rather than the rule. It’s when people violate our culture, they are saying, “I just don’t wanna be here. I don’t wanna behave like this. I don’t wanna think the way you think, feel the way you feel. I don’t wanna make decisions through the filter you guys make decisions from.” So it’s okay. Give them what they want.
Sean:
That’s good. And I think that’s helpful. It’s important for leaders because that fear is real of losing people on the team, but your distinction there is very helpful. All right. Let’s transition into what to start to do about this. And I wanna start where I think this has to start, which is with the leaders themselves. With you as a leader, if you’re responsible for this and listening right now, before you hold anybody else accountable to these behaviors, your senior leadership team has to go first. Paul’s talked a bit about how they do this at Sun Valley, and that means sitting down and assessing yourselves. Start with the honest question, how am I doing with each of these? Where am I strong? Where am I the gap? It sounds kinda like a soft exercise, but I would argue that this is the thing that gives you the credibility to have conversations with the rest of your team afterwards.
So Paul, you’ve done this at Sun Valley already. What did this exercise do for you guys?
Paul:
Yeah, we’ve actually been doing this for years, Sean. And by the way, there’s a lot of power in just strategic obedience in a desired direction over a long period of time. There’s fruitfulness that comes from faithfulness. And so we have a normal rhythm of evaluating our culture. We do this every other year as a part of our normal strategic planning process. So for instance, each campus team will go through an exercise of identifying their own team. So it’s an introspective exercise of, you know, red, yellow, green, on each of our cultural distinctives, and they flesh out why they landed there, talk about action they need to take over the course of the next year to adjust it and change it. So it’s a really normal conversation for us. It’s just commonplace, normal vernacular, normal way of thinking for us.
But those kinds of routine baked in conversations are important because they help build personal ownership for the culture, and they empower the team to take real action to move the ball forward on their campus, or within the scope of the ministry that they’ve been entrusted with. When you normalize these kinds of conversations, it just standardizes this kind of stuff, man. It becomes the rule instead of the exception.
But what I hear you getting at is this idea of credibility, and perhaps nothing erodes culture and trust faster than a do as I say, but not as I do posture. So it’s true in leading a church; it’s also true in a company, a family, a sports team, or any relationship that when there’s someone in a position of authority who says, “This is how we’re all going to behave,” and then they do something or say something that’s incongruent with that, it breaks trust. And at best, people begin to follow you just because you’re paying them to, or you have a title. It’s like a positional form of leadership, the lowest level of leadership that people will follow you just because they have to, right? This is the dad saying, “Do it because I said so.”
Sean:
Yeah.
Paul:
Super incredibly low-level and frankly, immature brand of leadership.
Sean:
Oh, totally. And that’s when you’re too tired to explain it, right? Just do it because I said so. I’m out of gas.
Paul:
I’m all out of my words. Just take the trash out, brother, you know?
Sean:
Yeah. Yep.
Paul:
So what I’m hopeful for, for our listeners today, Sean, is that people would actually wanna follow them, that they’d be proud to follow them, not just because of where they’re going, but because of who they are. That’s why I believe the culture of a team ultimately begins in the heart of the leader and the convictions by which they live. Like, are they a person that’s genuinely worth following? Not just gifted, but who they are? And so if you want the culture to get better on your team, the best place to start is the heart of the leader and the senior leadership team.
Sean:
Paul, I’ve seen leadership teams where the whole top of the org chart goes first on this. They lead the way, right? And they’re willing to say to their team, “Here’s where I’m working harder and living this out right now.” And what they do when they do that is they make the behaviors real for the rest of the team and created an environment where everybody can be honest about the questions that they have as they live out those distinctives, as you guys call them. I’ve also seen the opposite happen where I’ve seen leaders who genuinely think they’re exempt from the behavior, and that doesn’t just weaken this culture a little bit. It basically cancels it out. You can’t create a culture of something that you’re not willing to do as well. So the step isn’t just developing a system, it’s the leadership team getting honest and assessing this themselves first, which is why it’s so important.
The other action is that you need to teach all of this and tell stories about it in your staff meetings. I think that’s a really practical step people can take. Again, what gets celebrated gets repeated, right? So celebrate where you see staff embodying your culture shaping behaviors. Tell those stories, make a big deal out of it. It is a big deal. We should make a big deal out of it. That will do so much to reinforce your culture. So Paul, you have a process for introducing and onboarding these distinctives to your staff. You talked about that a little bit last week. Can you walk us through more what that looks like?
Paul:
Yeah. Well, the first exposure is really in the interview process. And we unashamedly have a really long interview process. It’s a lot of conversations. It’s a lot of interviews with a lot of people. And we’re interviewing specifically for different things in each of those conversations. One of those is just about our leadership culture. And it’s not just a telling thing; it’s also them making a conscious choice that they wanna embrace it and jump into it and be a part of it. So we’re not just trying to educate them. We’re trying to give them a sneak peek behind the curtain so they understand what they’re getting themselves into.
Man, how messed up would it be? Someone moves their family here from wherever, and they get here, and they realize, oh, they were actually serious about this stuff. This wasn’t just stuff written on paper on a plaque or whatever, sitting in some drawer somewhere. And now they’re like, I’m not sure I’m really for this. Man, how terrible for them, right? And frankly, for us. So we try to take that out of the equation as much as we can in the process. So they’re introduced to it in the interview process. I feel like it’s really respectful to them.
And then their first week, two weeks of employment, they get this crash course on our culture. It’s me; I shot all this stuff in our studio. And so every employee, no matter what location they’re on, what team they’re serving on, they’re watching these videos and following through with a participant guide, having conversations with their supervisor who has a leader guide. And then new staff orientation, Chad, our lead pastor and I will spend a half day with all our new team members.
We do that once a quarter in so much as is needed, no more than once a quarter, just because of our time constraints. But they get onboarded pretty quickly as far as general understanding about our culture. And then they’re gonna feel it by the way we lead and the way we talk and the way we make decisions and the way we’ll fight them into the process of it all.
Sean:
That’s good. Another step that I think churches really need to take is to get these behaviors into one-on-one conversations that they’re having with their team. Because these culture conversations really belong in those regular performance conversations as well. I think that gets missed so many times. The same meeting where you talk about goals and how they’re doing in their role, you also talk about culture fit, not a different meeting or not skipping it altogether. And when culture turns into its own dedicated meeting, it becomes more of a program. When it’s part of a normal conversation, it’s just how we do things here, right? Which makes it feel a whole lot more natural. So this, again, I know something you guys do at Sun Valley. Can you talk us through how the one-on-one conversations, the reviews, how this plays out specifically for you?
Paul:
Yeah, for sure. So lots of people do reviews lots of different ways, and there’s people out there who are genuine pros at this stuff, right? This is just how we’ve chosen to do it in our context. Our annual reviews focus on three big areas, Sean. One is job competency. It’s all related to their job description. Can they actually functionally do their job well?
Sean:
Yeah.
Paul:
Two is goals, and those are very measurable. You either didn’t do them or you did do them, one or the other. And then three is culture. And we score all three of those categories. And so our eight leadership distinctives, and I’m not sure I would prescribe eight. I think if you could do four to six, it would probably be better. We just couldn’t argue our way past eight. So that’s where we landed.
And so we get evaluated on all that. When I’m doing reviews of our executive staff, I’m talking about their job competency, I’m talking about their goals, and we’re talking about our team culture. And it’s possible that someone may not get a raise one year at Sun Valley because they may be super competent at their job and kicking butt on their goals, like, really taking ground. But culturally, they may be a disaster. And so that’s why this stuff’s written down. So it’s not some passing conversation, but it’s embedded into what we do.
And we’ve done this on purpose because I don’t wanna be that place where we’ve had a great retreat that one time where we had a great conversation about culture and then no one did anything with it, or we just rolled it out and had some inspirational talks at all staffs. I don’t want it to be in a drawer somewhere. I want it to be, I don’t like this word, but I don’t have another word for it. I want it to be institutionalized into the way we behave and operate day in and day out as a staff.
Sean:
That’s good. All right. Let’s think super practically here. If you’re listening right now and you’re thinking we defined these and we kind of forgot about them, or if you haven’t defined them yet, but you already can tell that this is going to be the hard part, here are four quick things that come to mind that you can do right away. First, before anything else, your senior leadership team has to assess themselves. We talked about this a little bit already. Each person on their own, sit down with your behaviors and rate them. Then sit down together and talk about it. Discuss it as a team. That’s one meeting that you’re gonna have. And I do that before you do anything else, because if your leaders aren’t living these out, I don’t think anything else that you do after that’s gonna matter.
The second thing is put one behavior in your next staff meeting. Just pick a behavior, have somebody teach it for five minutes or so, 10 minutes, and tell a story about a person on the team who’s lived that out this last week. Call them out and celebrate them. Then do it again the next week on a different behavior and rotate through those. And I think you can start over when you get to the end. Just keep going through those, especially early on as you’re reinforcing these. That is a small, really easy habit. I’d argue it might be one of the highest return steps that we’ve talked about in this episode. And it only takes about 10 minutes in a meeting that you’re already planning on having, right?
Third thing that comes to mind, add one question to your next round of one-on-ones. Paul just talked about this. Something like this. Which of our behaviors do you feel strongest in right now and which one are you working on? But you’ll learn a lot in those conversations, including whether your team can actually name these behaviors or not, which will be really important. And then one more thing. If you’ve got somebody you’ve been letting slide on this, I’m sure you know who it is. Set a time to have a conversation with them this month. Don’t let it go any longer. It’s time to start coaching them and to see if they’re ready to take action.
Paul, I had four really quick practical steps. Anything you’d add to that or anything you’d tell a leader not to do at this stage?
Paul:
Yeah. So what comes to my mind is this. I think I’d encourage everybody to remember that a lot of what leadership actually really is comes down to disappointing people at a rate that they can actually tolerate. So spiritually speaking, if you’re genuinely following Jesus, that means you’re always gonna be going somewhere you’ve never been before because he’s the one leading, you’re the one following. And this is why Jesus says, if you wanna… He says things like, “You wanna follow me? You wanna gain your life? You have to lose it,” right? There’s simply no way to get around the fact that leadership involves loss. So the pace that we choose to move on all this really matters. I think everything you’re saying, Sean, is just right on. It’s super practical. It’s tangible. Leaders can go do this this week.
But I think astute leaders are gonna be considerate of pace, because the goal is we wanna bring people with us, right? So I’d encourage leaders who are listening to this, they’re excited about it. Maybe the conversation’s resonating. The Holy Spirit maybe is showing you a few things, you’re writing some notes down, and you’re ready to go charge hell with a squirt gun and get this done like right now.
Dude, take a breath. Your goal is to bring people with you. If you’re not, you’re just not leading, you’re just bulldozing. So the culture you have wasn’t built in a moment, man. Even if it’s bad right now and you don’t like it, it’s possible that someone else has been working on making it bad for a really long time. So it’s not gonna change overnight. It’s okay. It may be that you’re a new leader in a new place and you’ve inherited a culture that you didn’t build and you don’t like it and you wanna change it. And maybe the reason why you were brought in was to change it. Pace yourself because you wanna bring people with you. It may be that the Holy Spirit’s showing you and you’re waking up and realizing, “Oh my goodness, I’ve allowed some cultural creep to happen under my leadership, and now it’s got us to a place we don’t wanna be.” Pace yourself because you wanna bring people with you, right?
So don’t push it faster than the team can tolerate. But to your point, Sean, don’t tolerate leaving it where it is.
Sean:
Right.
Paul:
Pick a couple of things you’re just gonna choose not to tolerate anymore, even if it means apologizing to the team. I’ve said this a couple times, taking ownership for allowing it to become what it is and simply committing to changing it. People will be more endeared to you by you being humble and honest and real like that. And then ask for their help because they have a lot of power in changing the culture because they’re the ones living it and helping build it as well. And simply just don’t tolerate it anymore. And remember, it’s likely that not everybody’s gonna come along with you on the journey, and that’s okay.
Sean:
Paul, that’s a great reminder. And before we wrap up this conversation, I just wanna say, go back to that idea that you get what you tolerate. There’s a question that came to mind that I challenge leaders to think about this week because that question starts with something that I think you can control right now. You have control over that today. The question isn’t, do we have a culture? You do for sure. The better question is, what have I been letting slide and what has that been teaching my team? That is so important because that’s something that you have control over right now. Changing your culture, like you said, Paul, it’s not gonna happen overnight. Deciding what you tolerate, that can happen overnight. And you’re the only one who can set the standard for your team for the future.
So if you want the process behind all of this, start with the “Culture Development Playbook” that we’ve talked about with this series. It’s in our resource hub, and it’s built on what Paul and the team at Sun Valley actually did to install this in their team. It walks through how you define your culture shaping behaviors, how you keep them alive. We’ll link to that in the show notes as well.
And if you’re looking at your team right now and you’re sensing this issue runs deeper than even just behaviors, that it’s more about how your staff is structured and who’s in the right seats in addition to those behaviors, that’s the kind of work that we’re doing every week with churches. So if you’re interested in exploring more about what that could look like for your church, start a conversation with us today at theunstuckgroup.com.
Next week, Paul and I are talking about what happens when you build your culture into who you hire and how you formally evaluate them. We’ve touched on that already, but we’re gonna go in depth because once your behaviors are defined, you can interview for them, you can onboard for them, you can review against them, and that changes who ends up on your team. So make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss an episode, and we’ll see you back here next week.
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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