Culture matters. It’s a powerful force that influences employee behavior, productivity, and overall success.
The importance of organizational culture is understood by Peter Greer, CEO of Hope International: “The culture of our organizations will be the defining factor in their success and longevity. You can have an accidental culture or an intentional culture. … Much as I wanted to create an intentional culture, I continued to wonder, Do I even know the health of our soil? We recognized the importance of culture, but we didn’t know how to accurately gauge it—or move beyond recognition to action. We needed someone to teach us how to cultivate a flourishing workplace.” (From Road to Flourishing, by Al Lopus, Co-Founder and Board Chair of Best Christian Workplaces)
At Best Christian Workplaces, we use the iterative rhythm of Discover, Build, and Grow to describe the work of moving toward a flourishing organizational culture. This process has helped organizations such as Hope International and hundreds of other Ministry Partners for more than 20 years to understand the health of their organizational culture and be intentional about cultivating a flourishing workplace.
In this phase, you assess your organizational culture to clearly understand the workplace culture that is experienced by your staff every day.
The discovery phase can include tools such as the Employee Engagement Survey, which helps you understand your strengths and weaknesses, and any gaps between your desired culture and the actual culture lived out in your workplace. The Employee Engagement Survey is backed by over 20 years of data and research with our FLOURISH Model, which evaluates 8 key factors of a Flourishing Workplace™.
In addition, Discovery Groups can help you dive deeper into receiving feedback from your employees to further understand the culture of your organization.
Another tool that is helpful in understanding your leadership culture is a Leadership 360 assessment. This process identifies a leader's strengths and opportunities for development.
By deciding to assess your culture, you are taking ownership of the “soil” of your organization and being proactive about nurturing the ingredients of your culture. Information that you uncover during the discovery process will guide you to the next step of building an action plan.
As I consider the analogy of organizational health and soil that Peter Greer observes, I see examples every day in my garden in South Florida. The soil here is different from the soil in Michigan, Maine, or California. For a flourishing garden, I need to understand the components of my soil, how to amend my soil for fruitfulness, and what plants will thrive in my climate.
If you walk around your neighborhood and notice a flourishing garden, it didn’t happen by chance. Visible beauty is a great outcome, but it starts with a gardener who understands what is hidden beneath the surface of their soil. This is true in our gardens and also in our organizations. The starting place for a healthy culture is understanding underlying attitudes and behaviors.
The intentional work of building a healthy organizational culture is based on the knowledge that you gain during the discovery phase.
The great thing about partnering with Best Christian Workplaces is that as you invest in the components of a healthy culture, you don’t have to figure it out by yourself. Every day, we work with Ministry Partners to help them steward the information they glean from the discovery phase and apply best practices to their particular challenges.
As you build action plans specific to your organizational culture and leadership style, you have access to all the research of Best Christian Workplaces, which has validated the specific FLOURISH FactorsTM that are components of a healthy organizational culture.
By understanding the components of your organizational culture, your soil, you can build a plan that addresses the particular needs of your workplace. In the same way, as I add nutrients to my garden soil, I am aware of the alkaline nature of the soil in my area. My gardening process addresses the ongoing nature of building healthy soil and selecting plants that will thrive in my environment.
As you are building a healthy workplace, you may discover practices or processes that are not contributing to flourishing. You may need to make difficult decisions to cut some activities to focus on what matters most to your culture, so you can have long-term health. This process parallels the ongoing work of weeding in a healthy garden. Weeds compete with plants for water, sun, and nutrients, and must be continually tamed to allow desired plants to flourish.
Organizations that continually nurture their workplace culture are those that eventually flourish. A commitment to growth over the long term is where the cycle repeats. As you build improvement plans based on what you have discovered, you may grow in specific areas. Then, as you continue to discover what’s below the surface in your culture, you can build additional plans to address needed changes, and growth continues.
Paying attention to the soil is also a continuous activity. I garden in Florida, and my yard was wiped out by a hurricane last year. The impact of the hurricane isn’t just above ground; the intrusion of saltwater changed the composition of the soil. So as I replant my garden, I need to continue to pay attention to my soil and cultivate health over time.
In Ministry Partners who have taken the Discover – Grow – Build cycle seriously over a number of years, we can see gradual improvement to flourishing. Their results over time aren’t because of one quick fix they implemented to improve organizational culture. They have been faithful and intentional about continuing to learn and act over the long haul, so they now see the flourishing results of their investment in workplace culture.
In much the same way as my garden will not flourish overnight, organizational health takes time to flourish.
While healthy culture takes time to cultivate, sometimes it can be disrupted in a single action. My flourishing garden was wiped out by a hurricane, which not only destroyed the plants but also changed the composition of my soil.
I have seen an organization that was flourishing for years experience an unexpected “storm.” A new senior leader was hired who had a completely different leadership style and tried to quickly create a different organizational culture. The clash of cultures has resulted in an unhealthy change. People who had experienced years of flourishing were dismayed at the sudden change.
Certainly, God can redeem mistakes, and improvement is possible even after the disruption of a toxic change. But a shock to the system will take time to overcome, and improvement requires a deliberate commitment to start once again to discover, build, and grow.
As a Christian leader in a ministry or Christian-led business, you are stewarding your organizational culture for Kingdom purposes. Just as God walked in the garden He created, He walks the hallways of your organization, and He longs to see the people He’s entrusted to you flourish.
How well do you understand your organizational culture, the soil you are stewarding? Are you intentional about building a healthy workplace? Are you committed to the long process of organizational health, to continue to discover, build, and grow over the course of your leadership tenure and beyond?
Take the idea of nurturing your organizational culture to the next practical steps:
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