Transcript: Crafting Clarity: Building a Compelling Vision for Success // Mike Sharrow, C12

Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast

“Crafting Clarity: Building a Compelling Vision for Success“

February 24, 2024

Mike Sharrow

Intro: How do you communicate a compelling vision to those you lead? And how do you change the world by advancing the Gospel through your workplace? And how do you adapt when your organization spreads around the country but also around the world internationally? Well, today on the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, we'll focus on how your inspirational leadership sets the tone for a growing organization. Listen in and learn from C12’s Mike Sharrow on how you can grow as a leader who makes a difference for the Kingdom of God.

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. I'm passionate about helping Christian leaders like you create engaged, flourishing workplaces.

I’m delighted to welcome Mike Sharrow to the podcast today. Mike is the CEO of the C12 Group, and equips business leaders through local C12 forums.

Throughout our conversation, you'll hear Mike talk about his passion about changing the workplace to change the world, key steps that he takes to practice visionary leadership, the challenges of growing an international ministry, and you'll hear him model what it takes to grow professionally and personally, and finally, the importance of life-balance assessments and the accountability for leadership effectiveness.

I know that you're going to love this interview with Mike Sharrow. But before we dive in, this episode is brought to you by BCW’s new Leadership 360 and group coaching. We help you transform your leadership effectiveness with our stakeholder-based coaching process. Learn more by going to workplaces.org/coaching. Check it out today.

And hello to our new listeners. Thanks for joining us. And we want to honor your time by creating valuable episodes just like this.

Let me tell you a little bit more about Mike Sharrow. Mike's professional journey includes several entrepreneurial ventures and financial services and health care, along with management consulting and even pastoral work. He started with C12 as a principal chair in the Central Texas region, spearheading strategic growth in that area. Since 2016, Mike has been the CEO of C12, leading growth in membership and revenue along with international expansion.

C12 is the world's largest peer-learning organization for Christian CEOs, business owners, and executives. Local groups offer peer connection and accountability to equip Christian CEOs and owners to build great businesses for a greater purpose.

So, here's my conversation with Mike Sharrow.

Mike, it’s great to have you back on the podcast. I'm looking forward to our conversation today.

Mike Sharrow: Al, I always look forward to our conversations.

Al: Yeah. Well, Mike, you know, as we've been connected over the years, your passion and vision for the role of Christian business leaders as a force for good is just really clear and crystal clear. So let's start with the foundational idea of why you invest your energy and leadership in equipping Christian business leaders. And what do you and your C12 chairs hope to ignite in business leaders and owners as they grow in understanding their purpose and potential?

Mike: Al, this is very personal for me. I didn't start the work I'm in, but I joined it. And when I suddenly stepped back and realized how much it matched with just who God wired me to be, it's been kind of funny, like, God's providence in that, because I went through a life-planning process years ago, which I, you know, arrived at a mission statement and core values, just personally. Like, “God, who do You need me to be? Not what to do, but to be?” And part of my life call I wrote out was that I exist to lead people to discover and live their destiny in Christ while creating sustainable platforms that advance the Gospel. And I think about the work I get to do now, and basically always living on those two rails. And both those things are passions.

So, I have a passion for seeing leaders, Christian leaders, whether they're running a business or a nonprofit, live fully alive. And what I find is that even people who are followers of Christ and leaders in churches oftentimes live in suspended animation, just trying to do their job and separating who they are from what they do, and miss out on the joy of an abundant life there.

And then, second, and I believe business, the workplace—I don’t care what your tax status is—the workplace is shaping the world, plus it can change the world. I have a friend in Tulsa named Sean Kouplen, and he wrote a little book called the 94X movement. And the term “94X” is his capturing the fact that the average American will spend 160 hours at work a month; the average Christian spends 1.7 hours a month at church. And so just by mere math, we spend 94 times the amount of hours in the workplace that we do in a church setting. So what if that workplace was formative and shaping of that?

So I think men helping leaders live fully alive helps them experience God's bigger story for them. And then, we are all shaping the world by design or by default, and I'd rather be by God's design.

Al: Yeah, absolutely. And God did create us to work. And I love the idea, yeah, the workplace can change the world and change the world for good, yeah.

So, Mike, what principles and practices do you see as essential for Christian leaders as they go about this work that you're talking about as they lead their companies? So talk about the role of excellence in the actual business operations, whether it's building the best widgets or offering the best customer service. You know, what's the link between being a distinctly Christian business leader, leading a flourishing workplace, and the financial results of a business?

Mike: We could probably do a whole thing on that one question. I think right off the bat, things that are important, is when I was first wrestling with my own faith in business early in my career—I was working for a big publicly traded company—and I had my first mentor of kind of faith and work identify me. And he went, “Hey, I can tell you're trying to figure out this whole ‘how to be a Christian employee’ thing.” And he was like, “Can I give you some advice?” And he said, “Two rails. Be so in love with Jesus that you don't have to, like, plug Him in as, like, a program or a track. Like, it's just, He’s just who you're in love with and thinking about, and let that ooze out of you authentically.” And then second, he's like, “But boy,” and I was 21; he's like, “be so excellent at your job.” He was an Italian Chicago guy, and he was like, you know, “Please be so bleep good at your job that no one can criticize anything about you other than maybe not agreeing with your faith. But if you are above reproach and excellent, that’ll earn the right for people to want to know of this Jesus you're in love with.”

And that was true for me as a young employee, but I think that same is true at an enterprise-board level is I don't think God is glorified by a poorly run company with sloppy culture or systems or customer relations. But we got fish symbols and crosses and Bible verses, right? I think the “build good stuff.” And so I think the importance of intentional strategic planning, discipline processes, accountability, and realizing that God cares about everything in the business is critical.

So, I mean, the linkage is obvious. And your team has helped us even study this stuff. So we had found that when business owners, no matter what their business is, get more intentional about this and deliver it—it's not a “name it and claim it.” You’re not instantly more prosperous or more blessed financially because you're a Christian—but if you begin to lead as a follower of Jesus with strategic stewardship, we see employee engagement be significantly statistically higher, retention better, productivity higher. We see the members we serve are twice as likely to be on the Inc. 5000 list as secular leaders. We see lower legal costs, lower issues of litigation—whether from employment cases or from operational breaches—higher profitability. It just creates—when you're intentional—the irony about what I love about God, wasn’t it John Piper who said, Christian hedonism, like, that God wired us to experience our greatest joy, we’re most satisfied in Him? You can be a Christian and be persecuted and have tragedy and casualties. But in general, I find that when we start thinking about God caring about how I do accounting, finance, hiring, customer relations, and I do those things better, and I do those things to the glory of God, they generally also perform better.

Al: Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have a shared passion about that, Mike. I remember one of our earlier conversations, you said, “You don't want to have anybody experience sloppy—”

Mike: Sloppy agape.

Al: —“agape.”

Mike: You love that phrase that we use, don’t you? Yeah. There’s this artificial, you know, dichotomy in the world between, you know, in accountability relationships—I just talked to somebody yesterday—truth and grace. Like, “Oh, I just want to be gr—.” Well, Jesus modeled both. That's what made Him so dangerous. Or are we about, you know, excellence or about impact? I think the Bible’s pretty clear God cares about both. And I think it's worth noting that the area God most judged Old Testament leaders—if we were to think about kings as maybe being a proxy for a CEO or executive director—His biggest criticism besides, like, personal idolatry, was when the cultures that they led were poor. It was, “Hey, people are not flourishing here. Hey, there's bad, there's injustice happening. The culture you've created doesn't reflect Me. That's insulting. I'm holding you accountable for it.”

Al: Yeah. You're not shepherding the flock that I've entrusted to you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, well, Mike, I love what you’re saying, and excellence speaks just a lot, doesn't it, about a person. And if you're excellent, that's—I think about even in Young Life—my early years I was in Young Life—you've got to earn the right to be heard in the marketplace. How do you earn the right to be heard? You know, and it's love pouring through you. The first thing you said is be so in love with Jesus. And when you are, you know, the love and concern and compassion for others just flows through you and the excellence in your work. Yeah. Just great. Yeah. Earn the right, and lots of benefits that come out of that. We'll talk about that even more. Yeah.

But let's talk about C12 a little bit. C12’s a growing organization. It’s thrilling to see, just over the last five years or so, the progress that you're making as an organization. The key focus of your organization is local C12 groups, led by a C12 chair, so that business leaders, Christian business leaders, in the local area can learn and grow together with their peers. And we know that C12 Employee Engagement Survey, through the Best Christian Workplaces, that your local chairs are highly engaged and value their life-giving work. I mean, they are bought in. And I was reading some recent results that you shared. You've got 95% retention of your chairs.

Mike: 98.

Al: 98%, yeah.

Mike: Which is probably unsustainably good. Like, that's probably a high watermark. Retirements and death will eventually affect us more than that.

Al: So 98%. So, as you add new C12 chairs and serve more cities with C12 groups, not only in the U.S., but you're seeing great international growth, so how do you keep this vision clear for C12? I mean, you've got now international responsibility. You know, you lead a dispersed organization. You need to keep the consistency and the quality of the C12 experience at a high level. What are some of the practical steps that you've taken to keep the vision clear as you grow, you know, visionary leadership? What are some steps that you use for that?

Mike: Sure. Well, you just described one of the—well, to use an Andy Stanley statement, he said some things are a tension to manage versus a problem to solve. So I think I'm always managing the tension of how to keep the vision clear, because the things that worked when we were three times the size of organization we were six years ago, and so things that worked four years ago don't work this year.

So, on the vision part, we actually went through a rearticulation, but actually five years ago now, of restating our mission, vision, and core values, because as we scaled and the distance between each other increased, we needed the crispness, clarity, and refinement to actually be really portable. In reality, we had a lot of legacy things that were true, but they were a little ambiguous. We had to do a lot of, like, painstaking work to get clarity of words, clarity of statements, celebrating the story. I've had to do a lot of work around, yeah, so, what stories we choose to tell our internal team.

We completely overhauled how we onboard and train. So we probably spend three times the industry norm on how much we invest in that initial culture training of our chairs to make sure they learn “This is what we mean. This is a football. This is what matters most.” I mean, down to a three-hour dinner at my house, the kickoff, and how we graduate commission, and really sunk a lot of time and money into getting that right. And we'd do the same thing for our employees here. We had to do the same thing on the staff side, what we celebrate, really working on what we measure. And then, I've had to make sure that we keep—and I still give myself a B at this—kind of back to, “Okay. We do a five-year planning process, not of, like, ‘Here's what we're going to be doing on November 1 in 2027,’ but that's where we're going. That's how this supports our mission and vision statement. And these are attributes we must achieve: scale stuff, product stuff, competency, impact, engagement, all these different things we describe a pretty clear picture of that five-year horizon.” And then we say, “Because of that, we've got to go there. That supports our mission. That's why this year has these objectives. And then, here's where we're at today,” and constantly reorienting to that.

Now, the consistency part, I mean, we've even done—one of the little practical things—I’ll use this—we ask our incoming chairs to memorize our mission, our vision, our core values, our brand promise, our doctrine statement, to where they could use it conversationally. One of the tests of that when they come to graduation week to become a chair and they're at my house, I pull out a matchbook, and I randomly call on someone and say, “I'm going to light this match. And can you recite, Al, our mission statement before it burns my finger? Can you recite our core values before it burns my finger?” And sometimes I’ll have, like, my wife will hold it. And the psychology of that—

Al: I would have them hold it, Mike. But you know—

Mike: Yeah, well, so the reason I hold it, though—yeah. I used to have them hold it. But with me holding it, it adds a certain psychology because they're like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m going to burn the CEO's finger or his wife's finger. Oh, my gosh.” And when we get through that exercise, and then we do a process of “Tell me what that means. How will you live that? What does it look like to embody that or violate that?” I go back to the match. I said, “Here's the thing. We are distributed missional enterprise. Some of you are going to be literally across an ocean, and I will not be seeing what you do tomorrow. And some things you don't do well or do well, you'll have personal consequences. You miss a sale, or you don’t get to succeed, or you don’t get as much job satisfaction. But it’s not just about you. When you don't live out our mission, our vision, our core values, someone else gets burnt virtually, missionally, organizationally. Someone else's finger is getting burned on the other side of the world because we're all part of this thing together. And we are not independent agents, even though we got a lot of entrepreneurs.” And so I want to drive the interdependency of the shared vision we hold together.

Now, the consistency piece, again, we did a lot of work in training. We had to put a lot of systems into our kind of lifestyle of learning and how we keep an ongoing pace of orienting people to what excellence is in our product. We had to hire a field team and get proximate. We just need to get in. You know, the shepherd’s got to get with the sheep sometimes. So, like, last year, I probably went and met with 1,000 of our members and 30, 40 chairs. And when you get in market on a regular cadence so you can sense and see the signs of drift as well as best practices to be celebrated, and then we've created a lot of customer-feedback loops, that we’re looking for the smell, the aroma of success or the aroma of drift. So last year, we had, like, 2800 people fill out a 10-minute survey for us, describing all sorts of things about their experience and how we could serve them better. But in that, we also get to see the evidence of “Oh, we got to train better that. Oh, we're losing clarity on that.” So, a lot of constant work on the consistency piece and the how do we keep driving vision clarity.

Al: Yeah. Wow. I love the success versus drift, and being proximate. So you're out there. You're listening. You know, I know you travel a fair amount, and the smell of success is different than the smell of drift. Oh, that's insightful. Yeah. And the consistency and the interdependency. Someone gets burned if they're not living the mission, vision, values, yeah, somewhere. Yeah.

Mike: There's a tension there. I was talking with the chief people officer of Chick-Fil-A last year. We were talking about the evolution of their organization. And we do a lot of note sharing, learning together. And he made the observation, that we're seeing as well, is back in the day, being a Chick-Fil-A operator, you're somewhat independent. You're operating and owning your own store, but you're, obviously, part of a brand. But you may have been the only store in your neighborhood or that part of town, and so you could kind of do a lot of creative marketing things. And as long as you didn't violate the rules, you had a lot of autonomy. But as they put on a spectrum kind of independence versus interdependence as they've scaled, the reality is you've got a lot of other stores near you and other operators, and how you operate doesn't just affect your store sales; it affects your neighbors’ store sales. And so the interdependence, kind of psychographic mapping has become a bigger thing to address. And similar for us. We went from being a lot of single shingles in a few markets to now, you know, 200 shares to 150 cities. What happens in one city affects the next city. And so that becomes more palpable.

Al: Yeah. I love the interdependence conversation about the faith overall. Churches in a community, you know, and businesses in a community. But let’s continue this conversation about C12 is the way you're growing internationally. You've got groups now in South Africa, Brazil, Taiwan, even—

Mike: Malaysia. I think we’re launching Egypt this summer, I think.

Al: Okay. Yeah. Wow. Coptic Christians in Egypt. But, yeah. So, what are some of the unique challenges that you face in this international expansion? Even at BCWI, we think about international work. About 5% of our work is international. We want to expand that. How have you identified and trained now C12 chairs in different cultural settings? And, you know, what have been the benefits? Can you maybe share a story about how a C12 leader in one of your international cities is seeing the fruit of equipping Christian business leaders?

Mike: Yeah. The fruit is the really exciting part. When we embarked on an international journey about five, six years ago—yeah, six years ago—my board, when we said, “Hey, God's calling us to begin exploring this,” I said, “I agree, but I can't even quantify my ignorance on doing this. Like, I don't even know what I don't know to ask.” So we went into this with lots of eyes wide open, tons of reaching out to other peers. Like, “What did you mess up internationally? What should I be thinking about?” So it helped us at least avoid some big potholes and discover our own new ones.

Part of our key commitment, though, was to indigenous leadership. So we don't send Americans to go be the, you know, American showing up to teach you how to do all this stuff. So when we're in those places, we're looking for resident leadership from those countries that we can then train and equip to be the steward of our mission there, which is a whole other layer of responsibility and burden. But to me, I have no idea what it's like to—we’re in Malaysia, a Muslim-majority country with Sharia laws. I don't know what that looks like. So I need someone who's in there who gets that and can steward that. So we found working with indigenous leadership really key.

And then, I wasn't sure about culture, language, economic model. So we have had to focus in. Unless there's a big population with the right leader, we try to stay within the English language of business, which still works in a lot of markets. But we do have content in Portuguese because we got 200-plus members in Brazil now. We actually do content in Mandarin, and we'll see what the next ones are. And we had to really do a lot of careful analysis on the feasibility of markets and how to adjust for economic parity and all that kind of stuff.

So we worked through that. But marketing to the fact that we really need to make sure we could communicate, what does it mean to be a leader for us in a market? And that person has got to be this entrepreneur, but have a Kingdom vision. They've got to have this entrepreneurial, pioneering esprit about them to make that work. And so we've had to do a lot of work of messaging, creating content pieces and webinars to say, “Hey, here's who we're looking for. We’re going to teach you how to do our business model, the service side. But you have to help be our cultural liaison and help us know how to navigate your cultural context while we still want consistency.”

And I'd say, you know, obviously, as we go into other countries, you have some classic stories of members fighting corruption and defying cultural norms. That stuff’s kind of—we could do a whole bunch of that. I’d say two very different examples that to me are just such the aroma of Christ. So when we launched this and we had our first bit of success that proved it was at least viable, my next question was, “Yeah. But what’s it effect?” Kind of like when John the Baptist’s disciples came to Jesus and said, like, “Are you the Messiah or not?” and He said, “Well, the lame walk. The blind see. The Good News is preached to the poor. Like, look at the fruit,” I wanted to say, “Well, what’s the fruit we're having?” And so we had sales, and we had businesses are growing.

But like in Taiwan, which we just launched there three months ago, four months ago, one of the newest members, within two months of being in this environment, was complaining about their country's economy, where they've got a lot of upper class and lower class, but they really have a pretty anemic middle class, and that's creating all sorts of social issues in the country. And in the context of a C12 forum, the peer said, “Well, why is that?” “Well, it's wages. It’s this.” They said, “Well, what's our responsibility as Christian leaders to not perpetuate maybe an Asian norm of kind of wealth accumulation at the burdened expense of the poor, but an actual developed middle class?” He wrestled with that. And in December he rolled out between 20 and 30% wage increase across his entire middle management, became the leading compensator in his industry, but in his mind, just became more in parity with really regional and kind of what the role should be paid for. And the amazing part was, you know, employees were like, “Why are you doing this? No one's doing this.” And he went, “Because I’m a follower of Jesus, and I really wrestled with, what does it mean to be a good steward of people? And I think our compensation strategies have not been consistent with that.” Well, believe me, people are like,” I'd like to know more about this kind of faith, that has you suddenly paying people more. Like, where’d that come from?”

Or in Brazil, a couple leading a really large biotech company leveraged a national holiday that celebrates a time of reconciliation in Brazil's past and said, “Hey, we're going to do a company holiday called A Day of Forgiveness.” And they called an all-hands meeting, taught on the power of forgiveness, used the national history as a backdrop to equip, and even had a chaplain come in and present things around reconciliation with family members, and they gave a paid hour and some tools and said, “We'd like you to spend the next hour, go and explore where you may have unforgiveness or lack of reconciliation in your life, and go do something about that.” And literally had dozens of employees calling estranged parents and siblings and kids, and workplace reconciliations. Even had a salesperson come and say, “I have to confess. I've been fudging on my commission numbers the last three years, abusing my comp plan”. All that coming out of cultures are so different than what I live in. And yet, leadership is leadership, business is business, and humans are humans. And when we lead healthy workplaces and build businesses to the glory of God, we're seeing very consistent fruit, just like we would in Dallas or Chicago.

Al: Yeah. And that's what we can look at. As even Jesus says, you know, what we can use to judge is judge the fruit. And I love those examples. Yeah. And I know very much the stress in Asian cultures, for example, of those that have and those that don't, and there's not much in the middle. And how, you know, again, as shepherds, how do we, you know, shepherd the flock that God has instructed to us? How do we help people with forgiveness? Yeah, boy, wow, those are great examples.

So, Mike, let me ask you, you're a learning leader, and your organization’s focused on helping Christian business leaders continue to learn and grow as individuals. You know, how have you been growing, and what has been your growing edge over the last few years? You know, what lessons are you learning? What challenges are you facing as you keep leading and growing? Oftentimes, you know, I've seen leaders, presidents, executive directors that have been in the job a long time, and they've stopped growing in a lot of ways. So how do you continue to grow?

Mike: Benjamin Franklin used to say that the benefit of staying in hot water is it keeps you clean. And I have found that I think one of God's fatherly schemes with me is knowing that when I can't touch the bottom of the pool, it keeps me treading in a more dependent posture. So one of the challenges, frankly, this mission has had is I believe in it so deeply, it does keep scaling. We keep going to places we've not been, I've not been, our team’s not been, and so none of us really know how to do the next thing that's coming. And that has been humbling because it keeps revealing gaps where I have to scale my own leadership or my understanding both of myself and how I lead.

So, I mean, I think the last couple of years—and I invest, I'm fortunate that I get to be a customer of my own products. I'm a member of a forum. I pay dues. I have annual 360. I go through the full process. I've got a coach every month. You guys have helped do 360s on us. Like, I engage in our very work. And I tell people we don't put out content that is because it's only the stuff we're good at. We put out good content, and then we go apply it ourselves and go, “Gosh, we need to grow in this.”

I think my biggest edge of constant learning but acute over the last three years has been really in the people-management and team-leadership side, finding out my default assessment of people has blind spots and gaps, my ability to assess role fit or needs, understanding how to manage and motivate people. I've learned some things now that I've even gone back to people who I've lost through attrition and said, “Hey, I'd love to reassess this. I wonder if that would have played out differently if I'd known then what I know now.” And the answer’s yes, I think there's avoidable attrition and losses because I didn't know what I didn't know. I think we were guilty a long time of hiring to what we had or also realizing there's certain things I'm not as good a teacher as I think I am. And so if someone’s being like, “Oh, I can teach them that.” Like, I'm actually not great at teaching that. I may know that, but I don't necessarily know how to teach this. So I probably need to hire someone who is already good at that or not expect them to learn that because, like, I may not be able to develop all those pieces.

And so working through understanding my own limits and where can I change those and then how we correctly source talent, structure roles. I was doing an annual presentation to my C12 forum, where I'm a member last year, on some issues—or two years ago now—on a bunch of issues around the org structure and roles. And I had my two big ideas. And literally my peers went, “Mike, both your ideas are bad.” Like, when I said, “A or B?” they said, “C, other, none of the above.” And I said, “No, no, no. I want to—” and they’re like, “Sit down. Mike, you are just not seeing what's wrong with this, or you've got emotional blind spots here.” And they were right. And I think the humbling reality that the bigger we get, the more the wake for decisions is consequential. So when I neglect a leadership decision at the executive level, the downstream of that on the teams they lead and the functional areas they steward, I underestimate often.

Al: Hm.

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 Mike Sharrow.

Yeah, thanks for sharing, Mike. Yeah. I love what you’re saying. First of all, your hot water keeps us clean. Well, you know—

Mike: Not legal hot water, so I don't recommend that.

Al: No, no.

Mike: Circumstantial, like, pressure.

Al: Yeah. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And but, yeah, the steps you outlined, you know, just continue to stay dependent on God. Be humble. You know, actually focus on understanding you don't know it all. And none of us know it all. And, you know, I love that you're a member of a forum. You're listening to others, and listening is one of the things that just came out. You're understanding and deepening your own self-knowledge and self-awareness as you listen and respect others’ opinions. Those are great things for us to all think about.

Mike: You asked earlier about vision and all that kind of stuff, a linkage here that's been a part of that even is my first few years of leading here, as we were scaling and growing, I grossly underestimated—you know, casting and big vision and make it really clear can create false positives sometimes because especially when you're doing something that’s got Kingdom language to it, who’s going to be like, “Well, I don’t want to see the Gospel advance. I don’t want to reach the world. I don’t want to grow 10x”? Like, no one’s going to say, “I’m against that vision.” But it doesn't mean they all know what that will require in terms of the change of how they do what they do or how things are. And so sometimes I’ve mistaken head nods to the vision statement with actual readiness, clarity, and alignment with what that was going to take, and not just from achievement milestones, but, like, realizing, “Hey, this means your world changes. This means your team changes. What's expected of you changes.” And that psychology and that grieving from what was to what is and who can make that move, who wants to make that move, I underestimated that massively.

Al: And whose behavior changes. I mean, that's the cultural piece. You know, we have to do things differently in order to actually achieve different results. Yeah, yeah.

So, let's talk about whole-life experiences of a Christian business leader. You know, we all face competing priorities in the business leadership responsibilities. And along with family relationships, community and faith expression, it's a challenge to balance all those. So let's talk about work-life balance. And oftentimes, it's actually going deeper than a balancing act. Some people would say there is no such thing as work-life balance, but how have you seen this play out in your own work and family? Mike, again, you're a busy guy. You travel. You know, how do you encourage and equip C12 chairs and business leaders that they serve to pay attention to the important relationships and commitments in the whole of their lives? How would you do that?

Mike: So part of it, I do think there's lots of debate around what's the right word. I think life balance can feel like an enigmatic mirage. We like to talk about an integrated life and a whole-life stewardship, and in that, realizing that God cares about what I do. So He does care about the business. He cares about how I do it, why I do it, motives. But He also cares about who I am and who I become in the process. And you don’t get to kind of choose which one of those He cares about, because He cares about all of those things. And so I've been guilty of a lot of times in my life of, well, I'm generally a Dave Ramsey kind of guy, a good financial stewardship, planner, budgeter, no consumer-debt kind of guy. I got convicted years ago when I realized I have good disciplines financially in that part of my world, but I treat my health sometimes, my rest, my spiritual life, and sometimes my family like credit-card spending, where I'm essentially overspending on the present priority of work or issues or service or anything, and I'm kind of putting the rest on the credit card of, “Hey, I'll pay that later. I'll catch up on that later.” And just as the same way I may condescend someone who's got tons of credit-card debt, be like, “Man, you're paying 23% interest on a couch? Like, why?” Well, I've paid interest physically, spiritually, and relationally for neglected those areas of my life before.

So, what we have found helpful, what I find helpful, is we need feedback loops and a cadence of accountability that helps us see reality and make micro adjustments. So every month in a forum, we express that by actually having every leader fill out what we call a life-balance wheel, that asks you to rate with a measured, like, here’s the basis of that, how are you doing in your marriage, your family, your walk with God, your health, your financial stewardship, your relationship with your church? These are all parts of whole-life flourishing that matter to God. And you're not going to get to heaven and say, “Well, I made a bunch of money for you, God,” and Him be like, “Oh, that bails you out.”

Al: Yeah. Yeah, right.

Mike: God's loaded. I fundamentally believe God actually has lots of money, He actually owns the whole world, and there's nothing we are making for Him that buys us out of obedience or disobedience. A balance-wheel peace, an annual time of intentional assessment. I've had to do time studies with my wife and looking at, where am I spending my time? and going, what’s that costing other priorities? And what we have found is this simple exercise. Like, I've had CEOs come to the first meeting, fill out that wheel, and start crying in that moment because the first time they've kind of had the visual feedback of, “This is my life. It’s this jagged starfish of highs and lows that is just not sustainable. No wonder I feel fatigued or burnt out, or my wife and kids don't know me.”

I was speaking at Texas A&M University once, and a girl walked up to me, and a finance major. She said, “Hey, I want to thank you for the way C12 has impacted my life.” And I said, “Well, ma'am, I think you don’t understand C12. I don't think you were ever part of it, probably, because you're 19, and we work with CEOs.” And she said, “No, but my father is.” And she said, “I grew up with a dad who was incredibly successful. And everyone told me, ‘Aren't you proud of your dad? He's changing the world because he gave away tons of money, and he built cool businesses.’” And she said, “But I watched my sisters and my mom, and I feel like he was changing the world, but we were never in the world that he was changing. And then he joined C12, and he came home one day, and he apologized to us, holding up this wheel, saying, ‘I've been changing that world, ignoring this world, and that's going to be in the change.’” And she said, “I went from resenting my dad's business as being what stole his affection from us, to actually believing I want to be in business because I think business can change people's lives.” And so I think the power of having people who are going to hold up the mirror and make you look at total life stewardship is just critical.

I added a little thing on Saturday nights of discipline, just to give one more practical tool. My wife gave me a cylinder with blue marbles in it for every week of life expectancy I have left, and then an empty cylinder. And every Saturday night I move physically a marble from the available to the spent column. And that becomes just a quick little spiritual discipline for me of going, “I just spent the one thing I can't get more of. And Father, am I spending my time the way You'd say, ‘Well done’?” And some weeks it's yes. I'm like, “That was a great week.” And there's other weeks where I’m like, “I survived it. I'm sorry, God. Let's do a mulligan next week. Let's not do that again.” So all of those things become pivot points to recover and restore identity and live in an integrated life.

Al: Yeah. I love the idea of a life-balance wheel. In fact, I was doing a workshop, presenting a workshop, at a C12 forum in Charleston just last month, and they were doing the end of the year, and it started off with a life-wheel exercise. And I'm glad to say that there was more balance than I've had at other parts of my life, that's for sure. And I remember doing one of these, and I guess I was in my late 30s, you know, really motivated, working hard, and there was no balance. And unfortunately, I didn't react to that as quickly as I should have. And I experienced consequences later as a result. Well, and to have that annual assessment, and what I was missing when I did that the first time was the accountability. I didn't have any accountability with a group of other peers that could say, “Okay. So what are you doing different? This needs to be balanced for you to have a really whole and meaningful life, especially as a believer.”

So, well, Mike, this just been a great conversation. Thanks so much. Starting off, you've just been so insightful when it comes to just understanding what your personal passion is for changing the world and creating sustainable platforms for doing that. And for, you know, just then, your steps of visionary leadership to really articulate and oftentimes rearticulate the clear, very clear vision of the organization to really build, then, consistent approaches to, for example, onboarding and how that passes along the message and how important that is, especially as you've grown in size not only across the United States, but around the world. And your point about as a visionary leader being proximate with those that you're serving so you can even get a sense of what success looks like and smells like versus drift and the lack of success in various areas. And again, the way you've grown internationally. I'm looking forward to hearing more about how C12 is doing in Egypt and how you're going to solve the issues in the Middle East as a result.

Mike: That’s next on my list. That’s next on my list.

Al: And just your approach to personal growth, and then, of course, this issue of living a life well led that looks at a balance because we can only give what we have. And if we're not rebuilding ourselves, if we're not living in good relationship with those closest to us, then there certainly are consequences.

Well, let me ask you, Mike, you know, as we reflect on this conversation, what else would you like to add, just to leave something with our listeners?

Mike: Some language I've been mulling over is, first of all, I think whatever your business environment is, it’s for profit, nonprofit, whether you run a thing or you're buried in the thing, I've come to realize that business is a gymnasium of our faith, that I actually believe our workplace, whether—and this is true whether you love your job or don't, whether you're leading or oppressed or whatever it is—it is where we get to work out our faith. We need to wrestle with a functional Gospel and really get clear in our identity and embrace it. And so, I think the frustrations of work are actually meant to be the place we work out what do we actually believe. And I'd also argue that it's easy to have good doctrine on Sunday. But how you wrestle through these issues on Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday is actually where you're living what you truly believe. And so that actually can be a renaissance of your faith, if you begin to say, “God, how would You have me, Father, navigate this big issue?” And then, you know, the business I lead I call, well, they say we're a dojo of discipleship in business. We're going to equip you and strengthen you for that leadership arena.

But I would just encourage that you and your team, Al, you and Jay and, man, Cary Humphries has just been, he's like, I feel like he's like my primary-care doctor when it comes to people and culture issues. Leaning into this stuff, not just as a “what do I got to do so I can give back to the mission,” but realizing this is part of where God's actually going to form us, I've realized so many times, the barrier in my own leadership is areas God's willing to father me, and that if we get this right, we get to make this place a better environment where He fathers them. And He does, He cares about the widgets we make. But He also cares about who we become. And I think that that means you're never done. So the frustrating part about what you help us with, Al, is, like, I keep wanting to take the Survey one year and be like, done. But it’s this Whac-A-Mole stuff, like, will then this change, and we were good at that, but we dropped that off, or now we got new people. And so it's a constant process. It's a tension to manage. It’s a process to pursue versus a, you know, a status to achieve. But it's worth it.

Al: Yeah. It's the journey. Yeah. Yeah. Who are you becoming? is the question that you just asked. And let me ask that to our listeners. Who are you becoming? In the reflection of Christ, who are you becoming?

Well, Mike, this has been a great conversation. Thanks so much for your contribution. I know people will really enjoy this. I'll be going back to this podcast, I know, just for reflection on my own leadership. And most of all, I appreciate your commitment, the strong commitment you have to equipping leaders who are making a difference for the Kingdom of God through business leadership. Thanks so much for taking the time today and speaking into the lives of so many listeners.

Mike: Thank you, Al.

Al: Thank you so much for listening to my conversation with Mike. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

You can always 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 or have any questions on creating an engaged, flourishing workplace, please email me at al@workplaces.org. Al@workplaces.org.

And leaders, if you want to improve your leadership, expand your organization's impact for good, and see 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 own organization to discover and improve the health of your workplace culture. 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: Next week, you're going to love my conversation with Jon Hirst, the chief innovation officer at SIL. We're going to talk about artificial intelligence in the Christian workplace.