Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast
“Building a Legacy: Workplace Culture and Fundraising in Higher Education“
June 24, 2024
Mark Maxwell
Intro: How do you keep focused on continuous improvement when you lead a flourishing workplace organization? Well, today on the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, we'll talk with Prairie College president, Mark Maxwell, on how to build a strong employee-engagement culture and keep flourishing over the long term.
Welcome: Welcome to the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, your home for open, honest, and insightful conversations to help develop your leadership, your team, and build a flourishing workplace culture.
Al Lopus: Hello, I'm Al Lopus, the co-founder of the Best Christian Workplaces and author of the book Road to Flourishing: Eight Keys to Boost Employee Engagement and Well-Being. And I'm passionate about helping Christian leaders like you create engaged, flourishing workplaces.
I’m delighted to welcome Mark Maxwell to the podcast today. Mark’s the president of Prairie College in Three Hills, Alberta.
Throughout our conversation, you'll hear Mark talk about the foundation of their cultural turnaround, the key to prayer and communication rhythms for harmony, attitudes that resolve conflict, how a flourishing culture leads to fundraising success, and his own spiritual disciplines.
I think you're going to love this interview with Mark. But before we dive in, welcome to this episode, brought to you by the Best Christian Workplaces’ Leadership 360 and our executive coaching program. Ready to transform your leadership? Well, our stakeholder-based coaching process is designed to help you lead with confidence and clarity. Visit workplaces.org/coaching to learn more about how you can become an effective, even more effective leader. Don't wait. Start your journey towards an even more exceptional leadership journey.
And hello to our new listeners. Thanks for joining us.
But let me tell you a little bit more about Mark Maxwell. Mark has been the president of Prairie College for 14 years. He's a dual U.S./Canadian citizen, was born to missionary parents in Nigeria, West Africa. He earned a BA in business administration at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC, and an MBA in finance at Baylor University. Mark went on to further training specific to the investment industry by completing the CFA. He now holds investment industry license as well.
As a young man, Mark had a dream to use business to support Christian ministries. In pursuit of that vision, Mark finished his university studies and spent 20 years in investment banking, brokerage, and portfolio management. In the process, he and his wife, Elaine, had the opportunity to help build three investment-management companies, travel widely, and cheer for many of their heroes—the people who work in ministries that they had the privilege to partner with. That experience of building companies and membership on various boards has given Mark and Elaine broad exposure to management and organizational governance so that both are now able to contribute actively at Prairie. He also has long ties to Prairie College. His grandfather was the co-founder in 1922.
So, here’s my conversation with Mark Maxwell.
Mark, it’s great to have you back on the podcast. I’m looking forward to our conversation today.
Mark Maxwell: Thank you, Al. It’s a delight to be with you again. I look forward to every time I get a chance to talk to you, so thank you for making time to put me on your show.
Al: Well, this is great. Thank you for taking your time.
And hey, you were wrapping up your academic year at Prairie College, and we wanted to make sure that things got wrapped up before we had this conversation. So let's focus on how Prairie is becoming a flourishing workplace, in our conversation, with your faculty and staff. But first of all, let's start with the impact of Prairie’s ministry. I have friends that have graduated from Prairie. They have great things to say about their experience. So tell us about a student or a group of students who exemplify the mission of Prairie College, maybe a short story of your impact. Tell us something.
Mark: Sure. We say that we're preparing people to meet the greatest needs of the world, and we try to do this from the back roads of Alberta, which is kind of a long place, a long way from the center of the world. Who would I think of? I would think of two people, both women. One is a lady named Charlotte, whom I love dearly because she's my daughter. She came into nursing here. This was a few years ago, like three or four, maybe five years ago. She finished her two-year nursing program.
Now, every one of our programs, we try to have an international trip attached, too. So in some way, we want to get every program overseas, get them dusty with another culture, see how their discipline can work in another culture.
Charlotte and the nursing team went to Columbia, not to the main city, but they went down to Leticia, which is way, way, way, way, way, way down, and then beyond that, farther down the southern tail of Columbia. There's a little tip that goes all the way down to the Amazon River. My wife went with her, and they survived three weeks in the Amazon jungle and came back. I met them for a week in Central America for a week together, where they could just recover and I could have some time away and the like. They get back, and they're telling me about their trip and how tough it was. And I was like, “Whoa! We can't do this.” The sleeping conditions were terrible. The mosquitoes and the bugs were... The water quality was unbelievable. The showers, there weren't. The Amazon River, muddy, and all this kind of stuff. And they're describing all this, and I’m going, “We can't do this. We can't send our students into these places, can we?” And Charlotte's looking at me, like, “Well, Dad, that's what we do.” I said, “Are you telling me you would go again? That we should do this?” And her answer is, “Dad, I made a difference.” Community health in the southern tip of Columbia, oh, man. Okay. That's missional.
The other one is from this year. A digital-media student, lady who loves her camera and loves taking pictures and telling stories with images, finished her program. She was thriving in the program. And their trip was to Vietnam. So what they do is they pack up as a group, you know? And so this was a class of 12 or so students. With an instructor or two, they went over there, and they basically see the streets of whatever country they go to, and they get some pictures. And I heard her come back, just thriving on the experience of going across culture and still seeing her tool, her camera, as a way of telling the story of what making a difference either for those people or making a difference to our understanding of those people here.
Those are a couple of illustrations of what we do. I could probably tell you a story of one or two pastors who went into pulpits and blew it, but I won't do that.
Al: Yeah. Okay, that's time for another podcast.
Mark: There we go.
Al: Yeah, but yeah. That's great, Mark.
Well, tell us a little bit about Prairie and kind of your size and scope at this stage.
Mark: Sure. We are on the prairies of Alberta, as our name suggests. It was started 102 years ago by my grandfather, Prairie Bible Institute. We have since named it Prairie College. Our head count, when my wife and I arrived 14 years ago, it was 250, and we're now at about 480 students. About half of those are online students or some other non-resident type, meaning we have a prison training program that has about 50 students in it. We are a classic Bible college that is accredited and is building a Bible university. So we're adding university programs as is appropriate. But our distinctive, Al, is every four-year degree, every four-year major has embedded in that four years seven courses in which they study the entire canon of the Scripture. So we call it seven-course coverage of the canon: four Old Testament, three New Testament courses. We ripped that formula kind of from Dallas Theological Seminary and made it our own, and then embedded it, and we've since moved it into our constitution. So if someone wants to marginalize our Bible, they would have to change our constitution to get it down to six, five, four, three. I often say better schools than us do a survey of the Bible, or survey of the Old Testament, survey of the New Testament. We're not so good. We take four Old Testament courses, three New Testament courses, and I think that's the most important thing we do for a person and their career.
Al: A solid foundation. I like that, Mark. Yeah, absolutely.
Well, we could talk a long way about your years and how things have changed at Prairie. But one of the ways they've changed is your certified Best Christian Workplaces’ experience and improving scores. And, gosh, you’ve been doing this since 2015, after you came on board. So some of your top scores are fantastic teams and healthy communication of our eight drivers of flourishing workplace culture. And these are sector-leading scores when it comes to Christian higher education, those that we work with. So how do you get to such strong teams? How do you get to such strong and healthy communication? And what are some of those practices that your leadership team uses that our listeners might be able to learn from? You know, what would you say to another leader who might even be struggling in developing teamwork and having healthy communication?
Mark: We were failing. We were losing $1 million a year on about $7.5 million in revenue when Elaine and I arrived. By the way, Elaine, my wife, is the one who makes our good and important decisions, and she was the one who said we should go out here and look after Prairie, and so I did. I obeyed her, and I showed up for a weekly prayer time, and there were between eight and 12 showing up on a weekly basis. At that time, we had a payroll of about 186, and I'm kind of going, “There's someone missing. I think we need to have more people show up.” So I began just to increase the importance of or raise the awareness of our weekly prayer time. I moved it to a more convenient time. I made it so it was friendly. And we had a brief five-minute devotional on a 30-minute prayer time, so it's not long. It's not overwhelming. And then I passed around the five-minute devotional to different people. So if they weren't going to come, I'd get them once a year anyway for the devotional. Different things like that.
But I think our big turn was prayer. Prayer led us from complaining to gratitude. Prayer united us once a week around our issues. Prayer invited God to have an active part in our routine. And I think, I'm not alone now, we now have nearly 100% of our full-time people showing up every week. And we've cut our payroll in half, and things like that. But we would have 60 or 65 people every week.
But I don't want it to be required. That's too low a bar; that's too low a motivation. “Well, I have to go.” No, no. “I want to go” is a better bar. And so we try to keep it light, quick. We share the document where people put in their prayer requests, so no one has the burden of having to write it. If you want something prayed about, you get on to the shared document, add it. It's in your own words. And then we gather around. We've even got half of our room that does not want to be praying out loud. So they pray silently. The other half does, so they sit in tables and pray together.
So I think prayer is the key that drove us to team unity, that drove us to harmony around our common mission. It gave us clarity on our mission. Out of it, God showed us things that we could do.
The second thing that I would mention, Al, is our monthly team meeting. We call it family meeting because we’re trying to be transparent in it. It's the first Wednesday morning of every month, and it's one hour. Occasionally, we go a little over time, but not often. And we try to do a survey of the school to give everybody an update.
We will talk in there about our enrollment. What are the numbers looking like? We'll talk about our revenue, both tuition fees and donations. If we have a big donation, we will talk about that big donation. Now, the risk in talking about it is everybody starts to spend it, or they think, “I can have it.” No. Actually, when you've got it built around your mission, people understand, “Wow, that means we can, and therefore, we will.”
And so we talk about all of the silent, untouchable subjects. If someone's being let go, and it's awkward and all that, then I'll make a judgment call on whether or not we should talk about it. And if we don't, it's probably just a case of waiting until that person has had enough time to disseminate their information themselves. We do believe in letting people go. I think that's an important part of who we are.
In our previous conversation, so we won't unpack it here, we talked about those four Cs. We still use it: character, competence, chemistry, three legs of a stool with a cushion on top being calling. And we define calling as loving our work, loving our people, and loving people we work for. So all of those are talked about in our monthly meeting.
I think those are probably two things, prayer time and family time.
Al: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So teams, drawn together by prayer. You know, I was reflecting before our podcast how I was doing a “sermonette,” if you will, on Sunday with our community, and the topic was spiritual renewal, but I was reflecting, “Doesn't renewal start with prayer?”
Mark: Al, let me go there for a second. I think, one, you're right. And number two, let me say this: prayer is an awkward thing. Like, if you’re going to be running a school, a university, like, come on. Are we actually going to stop to pray? And how antithetical to our academic atmosphere is that? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. People, people gather for prayer, call for prayer. Ask people if they will join you for prayer, and do it all together. I actually think that's the way we build our successful corporations, and the academic community will find this very hard, but there are ways to do this, and it will do every campus good.
Al: Yeah. I was just thinking, Mark, and to our listeners, you know, as you're reflecting on this, especially in Christian higher ed, oftentimes, you'll get faculty and staff together twice a year, the beginning of each semester. And, what you're saying, Mark, is that you're bringing everybody together weekly for prayer. And then for more of the business side and the communication of how things are going, then on a monthly basis, where everybody's getting together in a monthly family meeting, as you're calling it. And so you're getting the spiritual connection on a weekly basis in prayer, and then on a monthly basis, not twice a year, as many. And so—
Mark: No. We actually, because we want it to be so much a part of everybody's story at Prairie, we do two days in a year, one each semester, that's a full cancellation of everything. Students and everybody, we gather for a day of prayer. But once gathering your staff and faculty once a year or twice a year for a day of prayer is a bit like doing a survey of the Bible, one class and think you've got it done. No, no. It just needs to be so much a part of our routine that it becomes the most important thing that we do.
We also have executive committee every two weeks, so we don't meet weekly. And I've listened to college presidents who, you know, they have their routine. It's a stand-up meeting, and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. Yeah, that's not what we do. What we do won't necessarily work for anybody else, but it is how we can get it done. And then we do, I do a lot, we all do a lot of open doors and walkarounds.
Al: That. You can't beat that. That's great. Yeah. So twice a month you have kind of a leadership cabinet meeting with your team. Yeah. So, yeah, great routines, but again, focused on a spiritual foundation, focused on prayer.
Mark: And, our executive team, the beginning is a song. So we read a song. We throw it open for whatever jumps off the page at you. What comments would you have? And then, we have a time of prayer. So that's 20 to 30 minutes of every executive committee meeting.
Al: Well, Mark, so, when a workplace has been flourishing for several years, and years has, and the transformation story, again, as we've covered in previous podcasts, I was just looking at 2000—was it 5 or 7?—report, before you got there, and just the toxic nature of the culture, but that's turned around. You've been flourishing for several years. Aren't you tempted to just coast a little bit, rather than continuing? Yeah.
Mark: You know, Al, when we get our new number, each time I try to figure out some unveiling thing. This time I wrote a poem, as you know. You're welcome to post that poem because it identifies the three things. And I used the Dr. Seuss thing, one thing, two thing, three, and I know he had only two, but I went one better. But thing one was prayer; thing two was Bible, going to that full coverage of the canon; and the thing three was harmony, living together well. That's probably, thing three, is the thing that we continuously work on, living together in harmony.
Now, to me I like the word harmony rather than unity, and I know that's just a semantic thing. But unity means we all agree; harmony means we actually complement each other in our answers, and then we don't win. Seldom does one person win all the time. In fact, I have to be careful to make sure I don't win regularly. So I will have an opinion. Mine will be wrong. The group will want to go the other way. And I need to demonstrate that that’s good. We have made a better decision. I have not driven off a cliff this time, and you've kept me from doing that.
So harmony is probably the thing that we keep talking about. When we're interviewing someone new for coming, warm body, not good enough. Will they fit, will they build into our group? Will they complement our strengths? Will they add to our build? And will they do it in a nice way with good chemistry?
Here's another one that hit me. I was on a call a week ago, and I threw this line out, and someone said, “Oh, that's repeatable.” So here it is: as directors, as managers, as executives, as CEOs, we're in the business of delegating work, right? Wrong. We are in the business of asking others to help us get this done. There's a totally different approach. In the business books, we're told, “Delegate and give authority, give responsibility.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. Try something different. Go and ask someone to help you get it done. They will be honored by the ask. They will do their best work, if you ask them. It demonstrates my vulnerability.
And then later, say thank you in whatever is the appropriate area. The reason we as leaders don't say thank you often enough—why don't we say thank you more often?—because it has an implied obligation. When I tell you, “Thank you for that cup of coffee,” what does it mean? I owe you a cup of coffee.
When I get up in front of our family meeting and I say thank you to someone—and every month we try to identify one person who was truly outstanding. We give them this beautiful piece of petrified rock. It's really not that beautiful, and it's kind of ugly, but they put it on their desk with great pride because they rocked the month before. What we're doing, we're saying thank you—we cannot say thank you enough, in the same way that we can't praise Christ enough for His work; in the same way we can't praise the Creator enough for who He is, the Almighty, and the fact that He sent His Son, our Lord, to allow us to commune with Him, that He could walk among... the same thing is true: we can't say thank you enough to people around us. We owe everybody.
Al: I trust you’re enjoying our podcast today. We’ll be right back after an important word for leaders.
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Al: Welcome back to my conversation with Mark Maxwell.
The rock award. Well, you don’t hear straight talk like this very often, so welcome to the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast. I think many will say, “Yeah. This is the truth, the unvarnished truth of how flourishing cultures can be created.” And speaking of this, Mark, and this kind of leads to a thought, one of the strong areas you've got is actually your people have good conflict-resolution skills. Great leaders understand the value of bringing together different ideas, and conflict in itself isn't bad. So how do you and your team create this environment? I think our listeners have a sense of that already, but how do you create this environment where people feel free to disagree and work out their conflicts in a healthy way? Is there a particular training or set of values that guide your people in conflict resolution?
Mark: I suppose, in today's current language, it's a culture in which they belong. If you're on our team, you are accepted. You are included. You belong because if you don't belong, we're going to get you out of there. But if you're in, then what we want is as many new ideas, especially in the formative stage where we're trying to make a decision. Let's hear about five different ideas. Let's hear three different good ideas. It is not true that any idea is a good idea. That's not true. That's hogwash. But it's not a bad way to start. And then you quickly call away the bad ideas to, what are the three good ideas? It is very common in our executive committee for us to have one dissenter on a decision, but we go ahead with the decision. We are not looking for unanimous. In fact, I think unanimous is bad. It means we're not thinking hard enough. And then, I need to make sure that I'm among the people that gets shut down, because that demonstrates, “Tis is actually good. We're trying to make the best possible decision. Mark thinks we should go that way. We all think we should go that way. Let's go that way. And Mark gets shut out.” And then, how I react to it demonstrates whether or not I'm actually a good executive, because if I am small minded, then I'm going to be hurt.
A year ago, we needed to close the gap on our upcoming budget, and we were overspending by $300,000 on $11 million revenue now. So I had four of our executive team—we call them managing directors. I don't like the title “vice president” because there's too much baggage. So we made everybody managing directors, and I'm one of them—four of them came in here, and to be honest, I felt ganged up on, and they were saying, basically, “Mark, you're not doing your job of telling us where to cut costs.” Now I flip it back, and I'm going, “You tell me. What can you afford to get, you know…” But no, no. They were saying, “We've told you. You just have to make the decision and carry the ball.” They were right. They were right. And I was sitting there feeling smaller and smaller. And I actually said, “Well, I'm feeling crowded, but okay.” Now, one, because they were right; two, because we made a good decision or a pair of decisions out of that, and God brought more revenue than we expected. We finished the year with $700,000 profit instead of a $300,000 deficit.
I am wrong at least half the time. I just need to know when to shut up and let others win so that I'll be right again.
Al: You know, we asked the question, you know, I feel free to express my opinion in my work area. I mean, you're giving us great examples. In fact, I was just looking at a Survey result. And this one team, they had a zero percentile score. They had the lowest score on “I feel free to express my opinions.” And you know, there's only one way to describe that, and that is in a culture of fear. And when there's a culture of fear, then nothing positively happens, or rarely would something happen.
Mark: You know, Al, there are a couple of good, really good books that I would recommend to your readers, and I know you know them already. The Art of War is one, and the other is Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership. But there is a certain, especially in The Contrarian Guide—it’s by Steve Sample, former president of USC. Great thinker, great guy, great book. I think it's a timeless book—but in there, Sample talks about the importance of fear. It has a place. I try not to have a pervasive culture of fear here on campus, but people do need to worry about who I am, and they do need to worry about the fact that I'll make decisions that include firing them. And so when we have new, our new employees, they all—we're small enough. We have 100 people on staff now, maybe 110—I will meet with everybody on their way in. And then once a year I'll do the freshman class. So August, just before we start September, I'll take all the new people who have come since August the previous year. And we do the same thing again. And I explain, “These are the things that will define your success. If you will succeed, you'll have good character, competence, chemistry, and you will be called. And if you don't, we'll let you go.” So it's rather than a rah, rah, “Welcome to the team. It's all going to be good;” it's a wake up. “You're going to have to work, and you are going to find this the most rewarding thing you've ever done. But it's tough. So get ready to work hard.” The challenge, of course, is students who think they're going to go from a student lifestyle of visit and carry on to professionals who are having to produce every day. And of course, they're the ones who think they're going to get away with it. They need a little bit of fear. So there is a place for fear. And in effect, the executives who fail on our team are the ones who don't know how to instill that fear in the right place, and they’re just loved, and they’re taken advantage of. And then I have to let them go.
Al: Yeah. Others might call that accountability, too. But my earlier point was you're creating an environment where people can speak the truth, even though it may not agree with you. And you'll listen to it, and you’ll take that and maybe agree that, “Yeah. Well, I don’t necessarily see it that way, but we’re going to go with that.”
Mark: Well, yeah. You know what, Al? You’re right. And they will find a ready ear in me. Now, if I instinctively know they're wrong, I will be very clear about that. But otherwise, “Okay. Good. Thank you.”
Al: And then your leaders below you, they're creating that kind of a culture as well, where people can express creative, innovative ideas, because when people are fearful, they're not going to bring up an idea. They're not going to express their own opinion, right or wrong, and you lose out opportunities like that. Yeah.
Mark: Here's what I have observed about our Creator: He often speaks through the people around us. And I have observed, seldom through the same people. He manages to drop in little bits of wisdom around the room, and everybody feels engaged, and everybody's contributing. That's the work of the Creator. And I have often listened to someone who comes into my office to tell me off. I'm going, “Huh, I think I'm hearing from God.” That's interesting, right?
Al: Yeah. And again, in a Christian workplace, where everybody has the Holy Spirit living within them, shouldn't we be respecting what they're saying? because they could be, you know, very much speaking the word of God to us. Yeah.
Mark: Collateral benefits of a good Best Christian Workplace score. I was thinking about this a couple of days ago. With Elaine and I, my wife and I, have been here 14 years, going on 15 now. We're past the 14-year mark. In all of our time, we hadn't raised serious money. And I thought, in fact, a year ago or two years ago, I acknowledged to God—in sort of my routine of quiet time with Him, which is not a normal morning quiet time. I have a different approach. Mine’s more evening time and that kind of thing. And then I listen through the Bible on a regular basis—but in talking with Him, I acknowledged, “Well, Lord, I guess the only thing I'm going to really build around here is that nice, big, beautiful sign out front, because we got no buildings up. I got nothing to mark my time here. I got no icons to stamp it.” And I actually said to God, “Well, okay, I'm preparing the ground for whoever's coming next to be able to put up a building or two on,” and that kind of thing. That was less than two years ago. And I knew that we needed about $100 million to renovate various buildings, put up a couple new ones, double the capacity of our flight school because we're running right at capacity in our flight school. In fact, this September, we've got 42 new students coming in to a class that last year had 14. So it's a good thing. But we need bigger facilities, and we need to double our hangar. We need to put a classroom building out there and so on. So I added up all the dollars. I knew we needed 100 million over the next 10 years. And, I thought, “Well, let's talk to the board.” The board embraced it totally, “A hundred million, yes, let’s go for it. 110 million.”
And so then we went out looking for money. And, you know, the consultants also do the silent phase. And it's like, “I don't know if that's what God wants us to do, and I’m not feeling that one from God. I'm rather feeling, let's do a grassroots-growth thing and see what God does.” So May a year ago, this is now a year ago now, we had $1 million in, and I kind of looked at God, and I thought, “Well, I think you're telling me it's going to take 100 years to raise this money.” By October we had 2 million. And I thought, “Great. We're down to 50 years.” And I think He chuckled. By the end of September, we were at 10.5 million. “Whew, it's coming.” By the end of March, we were at 21 million. By the end of May, we were at—actually the end of April, we’re at 28.5 million. That's one year, Al, without us doing anything slick, without us doing anything tricky, without us playing any game. We started with a grass roots, “This is your story,” as we rebuild the school, and we need to do some— We need new residents. We need a new auditorium. We need a new dining hall. We need a new hangar. And God gave us people on our team. Specifically, He gave us a campaign lead who stepped into it and has been tremendous. He’s, like, he's committed to our… he's not a consultant. He is our lead on it. And he deserves the credit for the fact that we're now at 28, approaching 30 million.
And I sing his praise all the time, but his name is Gord. He would not have been able to do it if we had not done the first 12 or 14 years of renovation of the real building, and that is the people. We're in the human-capital business in ministries, and that is the real building that we have to invest in and get right. That's why what you're doing with Best Christian Workplace, monitoring people's progress, finding their weak spots, and helping people zero in with laser focus on what needs to be done, that is the important fundraising work that must be done before you go out to raise money. I think we would have failed if we hadn't done that first 12 or 14 years of work. So Gord couldn't have done what he's doing if we hadn't done this groundwork first. And I don't think I could have done what he's done, without him coming in at the right time to get it done.
So it's an interesting thing, but I think these are highly correlated. Fundraising is a function of internal culture. And I know you believe it, but it's a good illustration that you'll be able to use with others, or maybe some can take away. When we went back to our creative purpose—now, I believe our creative purpose is to teach Bible, as a university, teach Bible. And seven courses works. I think it's the right formula for us. I'm not saying it's the right formula for anybody else, but I would invite anybody who wants to double their donations to do it, because when we went to seven-course coverage of the canon, our annual donations doubled the next year. God's people stepped up, and they said, “I will help do that.”
Al: Fantastic. Mark, you know, as I was preparing, you know, I've prepared this question, and you're kind of answering it, and that is that Prairie’s over 100 years old. And your grandfather was a co-founder back in 1922. You didn’t say what your, you know, as you came out of college, what your profession was. But your ministry, Prairie is thriving. Some of our listeners, you know, would say you've had a long history, but what are some of the unique challenges in leading an organization with a long history, and how do you honor the legacy of the school, and also, then, also, lead it into the future?
Mark: Yeah. That's an interesting, really relevant question. Just as your segue, I got an MBA from Baylor University. I love the school. I went into investment banking and investment management, built a couple firms and so on, and it was a blessed career. It was God tipped His beaker over us, and it was very good. And then in 2010 was when my wife said, “I think you should go and look after that school.”
The problems in old organizations, and it's not completely, it's not just the ones who have arterials instead of arteries like ours, young ones can become quite entrenched in certain things. But what I would say is this: what we need to do is recognize that ruts that our organizations are in are nothing more than graves with the ends knocked out. They will kill us. And we need to fill the ruts. We need to carve over the ruts. We need to do whatever we can to get people out of ruts.
What do ruts look like? Well, they look like silos. They look like bureaucracy. They look like entrenched entitlements. They look like habits that worked five years ago and don't anymore. What I began saying here is we should never do something twice the same way. If someone says, “Well, that's what we did last year,” I'm going, “Good. Now we know what not to do. Let’s make it better,” where what that person was likely saying was, “Well, we did it that way last year. It was good enough.” No, it wasn't. Can we not do better? If you think we can't do better, you need to find another team.
So to me, it's dealing with ruts or dealing with silos, dealing with bureaucracy. Professionalism is another version, another word for bureaucracy. It's an impediment to effectiveness. Now, professionalism isn't something we should just completely write off, but it should not be our goal. We get effectiveness as our goal, and then we make our effectiveness better, so it looks like we're doing it professionally. Great. But the minute professionalism becomes our icon, it's an idol. Tear it down. Effectiveness always.
Al: To help meet the greatest needs of the world. Isn't that the way we started off the conversation?
Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. Really appreciate all that we're talking about.
And leave us with your personal practices and habits that are part of your regular routine, daily, monthly, annually. How do you keep your relationship with Jesus vital and growing? Our listeners are interested just as they look for their own spiritual renewal. And how would you describe yours?
Mark: I love the question, Al. Thank you. This will be no guilt trip for anybody. I don't have morning devotions. I don't have all of those kinds of things that cause us to sort of freeze up. I do have one prayer that I try to say every day: “Lord, give me Your words. Let me deliver them Your way so that I can do Your will today.” That's my only daily routine. I spend a certain amount of time—I'm mostly a listener as opposed to a reader, so audiobooks are a Godsend to me. So I try to listen my way through the Bible every year. So far, I'm quite sure I haven't succeeded in any given year. But if it takes me a year and a half, I’m okay. The first time I tried to read through the Bible, it took me five years. I began doing the read through the Bible, and I’m flipping pages, and I realized I was counting page numbers, not reading the book. So I went and closed it up, went back to the beginning, and then I decided I'd like to underline something on every page. If I didn't find something on the page, I'd have to go back and read it again, and then find something that meant something to me that day. And so then I know when I’ve read the whole Bible and there's a mark on every page. So I do that. But it's not on a calendar-type basis. It's on a when I'm in the car, I’m listening; when I'm in the evening, I often sit back and skim a few chapters.
When I was first working on turning Prairie from where it was, the rut that it was in, as you alluded to, in ’07, I somehow heard the challenge of skim the New Testament once a week. And I began trying to do that, and I doubt I ever did it successfully in a week. But it's shocking how much you pick up as you skim the New Testament weekly or in a speed-read type of thing. And you don't have to read that fast. It's just 15, 20, 30 minutes a day, and you'll get through that whole New Testament. And that was where the importance of harmony, John 17, Jesus praying that we would live as one.
I talked about the miracle of harmony at a conference or a place that I was speaking at in Toronto, and a Chinese pastor came up to Elaine afterwards. “What book was it that Mark was reading that helped him get this?” And so she asked me later, “Pastor,” I don't remember his name, Chinese—"Pastor Cho,” let's say, “wants to know what book it is. Would you just send him an email?” And I was like, “You know what? Just send him a note. Tell him it was John, Romans; it was Galatians. It was Hebrews. It was…”
We have a spectacular textbook. All of the new textbooks that are being written by popular authors—and I'm a big fan of many of them, Jim Collins, Patrick Lencioni—but we have the textbook. Lencioni says, “You people are all going to know what I'm talking about because you know where it's from. It's all from the Bible.” Well, I love that guy. But we have the textbook. We just need to open it up and get back into it. People in China buried the Bible in their backyard because they wanted to be sure to preserve it. Well, okay. We can think of them as a critically and maybe judgmentally as they buried it and they didn't have access to it. No, no. They cherished it. And quite often, the dust on our shelves is as deep as the dirt was on the backyard over top of our Bibles. We just need to dust it off and skim it and read it, and then dive deep enough to read and see something on every page.
Those are some of my—I don't have any very specific routine, but I want the freedom of enjoying it. In our management team, I think I mentioned this to you, we start every management team with a song. Okay. Is this good use of executive time? Oh, yeah.
Al: And I think what you're saying, Mark, for every one of us, you know, our personality, the way we're made, that God works with us individually, and we all have to find what works for us. To be engrossed in His Word, which is what you've just described, whether it's listening, whether it's reading, whether it's on a calendar, whether it's not, you know, whether it's from the beginning to the end, whether it's on a program, yeah—
Mark: That’s the beauty of the Creator.
Al: That’s right.
Mark: Every one of us will have a different perfect solution.
Al: Yeah, yeah. And I'll be the last one to say, “Well, oh, you don't have morning devotions? Well, how can you?”
Mark: I’m guilty.
Al: Exactly.
Well, Mark, this has been a great conversation. Thanks so much.
Mark: Thank you, Al. What a delight.
Al: I love your story. I love what's happening there at Prairie. I love the flourishing workplace culture. I love the connection that you've made between doing the work of culture first, and then the fruit that comes from a flourishing workplace culture, and being able to see that when it comes to your own fundraising.
Mark: Well, thank you for your part in helping make us who we are. So thank you very much, Al.
Al: I'm looking forward to hearing the bell ring on a $110 million.
Mark: I don't think I'll get there, but, you know, it might be someone who follows me.
Al: Yeah. Lord willing, we'll see when that is. Yeah.
So, Mark, thanks so much. One last thought, Mark, that you might have for us?
Mark: Thank you, all, for your time. Thank you for listening to us. Thank you.
Al: And Mark, I want to thank you for your contribution today, and most of all, your commitment to equipping the next generation of Christians to live out their faith wherever they go, whether it's Colombia, whether it's Vietnam, wherever they go. So thanks for taking your time out today and speaking in the lives of so many listeners.
Mark: God bless you and all of your listeners.
Al: Well, thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Mark. And I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
And you can find ways to connect with him and links to everything we discussed in the show notes and transcript at workplaces.org/podcast.
And if you have any suggestions for me about our podcast and have any questions on flourishing workplace cultures, please email me at al@workplaces.org.
And leaders, if you want to improve your leadership, expand your organization's impact for good, and see even greater faithfulness in our broader culture, help us achieve our goal to see more flourishing Christian-led workplaces. To help, please share this podcast with another leader or launch a project in your organization to discover and improve the health of your workplace culture. And if you're interested in learning more, go to workplaces.org and request a sample report.
Outro: The Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast is sponsored by Best Christian Workplaces. If you need support building a flourishing workplace culture, please visit workplaces.org for more information.
We'll see you again next week for more valuable content to help you develop strong leaders and build a flourishing workplace culture.
Al: Well, next week we'll be talking with Gene Habecker about essential soft skills that transform your leadership.
Then, join us throughout July and August as we feature some of the best of our recent podcasts. Whether you're catching up on a podcast that you've missed or you want a refresh a particularly good podcast topic, keep listening through the summer and grow as a flourishing leader.