Transcript: Flourish Together: Elevating Christian Education for Generations to Come // Sadie Elliott, Herzog Foundation, Dr. Doug Waldo, Best Christian Workplaces

Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast

“Flourish Together: Elevating Christian Education for Generations to Come“

April 8, 2024

Sadie Elliott and Dr. Doug Waldo

Intro: How do you build a healthy culture with engaged employees? And what are some of the keys for training leaders to focus on the essentials of culture and engagement? Well, today on the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, we'll focus on developing training for those who lead Christian schools. Listen in and learn about some practical components of training retreats that will apply to your own leadership setting, regardless of the sector that you're in.

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, which was a finalist in the Christian Book Awards. And as you know, I'm passionate about helping Christian leaders like you create engaged, flourishing workplaces.

I’m delighted today to welcome Sadie Elliott and Doug Waldo to our podcast. Sadie’s the training director for the Herzog Foundation, and Doug Waldo is a senior consultant with us at the Best Christian Workplaces.

Throughout our conversation, you'll hear Sadie and Doug talk about the Herzog Foundation's goal to catalyze Christian education, how Herzog has pioneered a three-day program for developing leaders to create flourishing workplace cultures that are moving the needle forward for Christian education. They also talk about the three key issues that impact the future of Christian education, and the goals of their leadership-training retreats and how they’re achieved.

I know you're going to love this interview with Sadie and Doug. But before we dive in, this episode is sponsored by the Best Christian Workplaces’ Employee Engagement Survey. You know, just like a seed needs the right environment to grow, your employees need a flourishing culture for your organizations to thrive. Discover the health of your workplace culture with our easy-to-administer online Engagement Survey. Just visit workplaces.org and sign up today. Don't miss this springboard for growth. Act now, and you can study your results and craft your action plan before summer. Join a community where certification marks a standard in talent attraction, retention, and productivity. Empower your team, enhance your mission, and elevate your workplace because a certified best Christian workplace is where excellence lives. Start today at workplaces.org. That's workplaces.org.

Well, hello to our new listeners, and thanks for joining us as we honor your investment of time by creating valuable episodes like this.

Let me tell you a little bit more about our guests. Sadie Elliott is the training director for the Herzog Foundation. She creates transformational learning experiences facilitated by experts and practitioners. Her work with Herzog Foundation combines her love for Christian education and her experience in nonprofit management to grow healthy organizations. Sadie's an MBA with experience in a variety of nonprofits. Herzog Foundation exists to catalyze and accelerate the development of quality, Christ-centered K-12 education. Their vision is for families and culture to flourish through quality Christian education. The legacy of Stanley Herzog's career centered around making national transit ecosystems accessible and sustainable. Likewise, the legacy of Stan’s philanthropy centers around making the ecosystems of Christian education more accessible and sustainable for families across the nation.

Dr. Doug Waldo is a senior consultant with the Best Christian Workplaces, and one of his focus areas is equipping leaders of Christian schools to grow flourishing workplaces. A product of Christian education and part of a family with a history of founding and leading Christian schools, Doug has devoted much of his personal and professional background to this cause. In addition, he serves on the board for Christian schools and nonprofit organizations for over 20 years, and he continues to mentor educators and administrators today while also teaching strategic leadership and organizational development for Christian universities.

So, here's my conversation with Sadie and Doug.

Sadie and Doug, it's great to have you on the podcast, and I'm looking forward to our conversation.

Sadie Elliott: Al, it’s great to be with you today.

Doug Waldo: Yeah. Thank you for having us, Al. Really looking forward to this. You are two of my favorite travel partners on this road to flourishing.

Al: Yeah. Right. Great.

Well, Sadie, let’s start with you. Share with us a little more about the Herzog Foundation and how you train leaders for Christian schools. You know, what's the vision and mission of the Herzog Foundation, and how do you live out this mission through specific training programs?

Sadie: Al, thanks for the question, and thanks to Best Christian Workplaces for being a partner with us in our work.

So, we exist to catalyze and accelerate the development of quality, Christ-centered K-12 education so that families and culture flourish. We are a national foundation focused on catalyzing this movement of Christian education. We started in 2021, so not all too long ago, but just after COVID had really disrupted the K-12 educational ecosystem in our country.

So everything that we do at the Herzog Foundation is to honor the legacy of Stan Herzog and his generosity, and to steward the wealth and the platform that he has left us with. And so Stan was tremendously generous to the foundation. But when our board of three members, who Stan had hand-selected, looked at how we could spend this wealth, they decided that rather than invest in a few schools largely, that we wanted to invest in the capacity-building efforts to grow the leadership within Christian education so that this movement can really be sustainable over time. And so with that, we've launched a series, multiple series, of trainings that really try to step into some gaps that we see in the space of Christian education, but also step into some really exciting momentum that's building, and use the wealth that Stan has left us to really leverage the platform that we've been given. So culture training obviously is a core component of that. And I would say, I know we're going to get into the details of our culture training, but I would say even the trainings that we run that aren't explicitly culture have so much to do with culture.

Al: Wow. Yeah. I think you're exactly right. And I'm looking forward as we get into this conversation.

So, Sadie, in your leadership-development training series, you have several different areas that you focus on in your leadership retreats. You devote three-day retreats to culture building and employee engagement. So why has the Herzog Foundation focused on the importance of workplace culture in your training, and how do you use the FLOURISH model as a tool to help achieve your goal in catalyzing Christian education for these leaders?

Sadie: So, a little bit of context. When we came on the scene in 2021, we got together a group, kind of an advisory team, of people who had been in Christian education for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And we asked these folks, we said, “If we stepped into leadership development within Christian education, what are the most-important topics that we need to get right and that there's not really high-quality training on in this space right now?” And so they came with a list of about five different topics, things like board leadership, strategic planning, marketing and enrollment, donor development. And the other topic that they came up with was organizational health and culture. And so this really surfaced because of those leaders who were on our advisory team, saying, “In Christian education, we have to get this right.” And so, we do education really well, but do we run our organizations well? became the question.

And interestingly, organizational culture was something that Stan knew a lot about. So Stan, the way that he made his wealth is he grew his father's company to become one of the largest railway infrastructure companies in the U.S. And this success largely came from the culture that Stan set from the top down. And at the Foundation, we actually go to Herzog Corporation for our own culture training because they do it so well. And so Brad Lager, the current CEO at Herzog Corp, recently said that as a company they pour concrete, but their competitive advantage is their culture, and that's just something that you can't replicate. And so if successful companies care deeply about culture, I would ask, how much more should we as homeschools and schools that are forming young souls?

And so, we really see success for the movement of Christian education, not just as our external outcomes, right? So right now we have significant demand, we have growing enrollment, we have all of these kind of metrics of success, but I would say that we really can't be successful if our employees are not thriving. And so what Best Christian Workplaces does in the FLOURISHing model for the school and homeschool leaders that we serve is really take culture from this big-picture, kind of ominous, topic and give it a framework. And in that framework, there are different levers that you can pull, different things that you can invest in that will have a higher return on your investment from doing so.

And so what Doug does so beautifully at our trainings is describe the FLOURISH model, but how it specifically affects the Christian education sector, which you all have so much wonderful data on and stories from. So that's how we really use the FLOURISH model.

Al: Wow. That's great, Sadie. Yeah. I love what you say that for Herzog, I mean, they understand, and so many organizations now are beginning to understand, that culture can be a competitive advantage. And I believe and it felt that way for Christian schools, for Christian organizations, that when people feel like they're making a difference, that they're really impacting the world for good and people's lives for eternity, you know, what more important thing could you do? And culture is a key part of it.

Well, Doug, let's bring you into this conversation. What did you want to add about how we at Best Christian Workplaces and our model for FLOURISHing fits in with what Herzog Foundation is doing?

Doug: Well, there is such great synergy between the Herzog Foundation's aspiration and the aspiration of Best Christian Workplaces. We just heard Sadie talk about how the Foundation is working to catalyze and accelerate the development of quality, Christ-centered K-12 education, with a vision that families and culture would flourish through that education. Everything we do at BCW is aimed at flourishing, too, but from a workplace perspective. And our vision is that if we equip and inspire Christian leaders to create engaged, flourishing workplaces, those workplaces, and in this context, Christian schools as workplaces, will be the best, most effective schools to work in the world. And why shouldn't they be? So there's great alignment there between the Herzog Foundation and BCW.

And they have an intentional focus on making the ecosystem of Christian education more sustainable. We know that sustainability is affected in large part by the health of the ecosystem itself, namely, the health of the school as a place to work, workplaces where brothers and sisters in Christ bring their full investment of how God is uniquely and intentionally handcrafted them to serve in His Kingdom. And to evaluate and promote that health, we use a proven model that, like most forms of assessment in the educational arena, is based on data-driven research. That model is appropriately called the FLOURISH model. I'm sure you've heard of it. So we bring that scientific rigor to the culture conversation, which for many might otherwise seem a little too soft or, frankly, not practical enough in application. It's something leaders may talk about, for sure, but, you know, is it actionable for them?

I spoke with an educational leader just recently who said, you know, we're not really taught much about culture, even as we pursue formal education at the graduate level to become administrators. And there's an article that appeared years ago in the Harvard Business Review that we often talk about in our retreats. And the title of the article is “What Is Culture, and Why Do We Care?” And I just love that question. It's a question I think is often on the minds of folks as they walk into the retreat, just in the first few minutes, and we get right at that.

In the article, the authors concluded that at the time—this is going back 10, 20 years ago—most leaders could acknowledge that organizational culture exists, and they recognize that it has a powerful impact on their ability to accomplish their mission. But beyond that, they know very little about it. So as a result, they can experience drift and disillusionment and distance and disarray and all of those things that could impact the culture negatively. Well, fast forward to today, and due in large part because of your research and the work of BCW, we know a great deal about culture, especially within Christian-led organizations. So as we join together with the Herzog Foundation to invest in these schools, we're strengthening the ecosystems, the workplaces, and we're doing that in a way that makes them more effective and more accessible and ultimately more sustainable.

So, bottom line is we're on the same page. We love Christian schools, and we seek to invest in those who are called to serve in those schools. We want those schools as workplaces to flourish, just like we do other ministries. Our research suggests the same keys apply.

Al: Yeah. Thanks, Doug. I'm touched, I'll have to say, to see the FLOURISH model just thrive in itself, as it continues to work through organizations. And, you know, we're going to talk about the importance of Christian schools that changed post-COVID, of how schools, the number of people coming to schools, the number of students coming to schools and their families is increasing, and even a little bit of the stress that's putting on schools.

But, Doug, let's talk more about a couple of specifics. When you walk leaders of Christian schools through, as you're guiding them during the leadership-training retreat, what do you focus on?

Doug: We hit on several key aspects, some at a high level and some with a deeper dive. Realizing that for many leaders, this topic can seem too abstract, we first work to establish a common language around what culture is in the workplace, and we provide access to a lot of great content on this, such as a wonderful book titled Road to Flourishing. We also provide another great book by Mark Miller, who I think you've talked to recently, Culture Rules. Through those books and through our coaches we hope to equip leaders with understanding of what culture is, what shapes it, what catalyze it, and what can threaten it.

We ask leaders initially, right off the bat, to envision what their schools would be like as workplaces if they were characterized by a flourishing culture. And we try to get them to articulate what that vision might look like, hoping that if they can articulate it in that retreat, they can go back to their schools and articulate it to their stakeholders. And we do that through an exercise called Miracle Monday. And we try to help them to see how much, if not most, of the gap between where they are today and what Miracle Monday might look like at their workplace, how much of that gap is really related to cultural issues. And the idea there is to get them to think about what it means for God to bless them with a flourishing workplace. How would they know it? How would they celebrate? How would they protect it and steward it?

So we talk about engagement as the primary means for evaluating the health of the culture. We talk through different levels of engagement, from engaged to neutral and disengaged, with the implications for each. We want them to see and to feel that tension, to know the upside potential of moving people from neutral to engaged, for example, and what the costs are if they move in the other direction.

BCW recently published its 2024 state of the Christian workplace report. We're incredibly proud of that and excited to release that to the world. And in that report, along with a lot of other insight, there's one insight in particular that suggests that 53% of Christian-school employees are currently engaged. That leaves 40% neutral and 7% are disengaged. Now, considering that Gallup's recent findings show is that 31% of employees across all U.S. workplaces are engaged, 53% is pretty good, though we know we have room to grow, and other sectors that we monitor are actually higher than this, with the overall health in Christian-school-sector engagement declining a bit since the post-pandemic period.

So we want to help leaders to calculate the cost of that. What are the costs of this engagement at their school, and explore some of the ways to get that back by reengaging employees or engaging for them for the first time.

For example, we know from research reported in Forbes that every non-engaged employee costs the organization around $16,000 a year, and that's the result of turnover and absenteeism; lost capacity; in this case, declining enrollment; when a disengaged employee working in a school impacts what children and families experience. So there are certainly costs and implications that we want our retreat participants to recognize.

And then, we walk them through a process for looking at how even a small number of disengaged employees can really impact the organization. There are other coaches involved in this culture training as well, and they explore related topics. These folks are extraordinarily gifted. They're inspiring. They're Christ-like leaders who have given their professional lives to this cause. And we know them well at BCW because each of them is currently stewarding a certified best Christian workplace. They are shepherds of flourishing Christian schools. So some of these names are Stefanee Tolbert at Life Christian Academy of Louisiana; Andrea Chevalier at Denton Calvary Academy in Texas; Jason Rachels at Calvary Christian Academy in Fort—I know you've had Jason on before; Gene Frost, Wheaton Academy in Illinois; and Tammy McIlvoy of Logos Prep in Texas. These brothers and sisters are second to none in their passion for Christian education and their willingness to invest in other leaders.

So they cover other topics that are closely aligned to culture but that are complementary to the FLOURISH model. So things like, how do we operationalize a mission statement, clarifying our organization's aspiration? How do we leverage core values to guide individual and team behavior? What are the aspects of talent management that we can improve, such as how we appraise performance? How do we recognize, reward, and compensate our employees? And these topics are especially important right now because we know these can tend to represent some of the lower-scoring areas on BCW’s Employee Engagement Survey, areas of the FLOURISH model that touch on things like outstanding talent, rewarding compensation, and healthy communication.

And then, finally, we wrap it all up with one-on-one coaching sessions with each leader at the conclusion of the retreat. And this allows the coaches to invest a little more time and a little more personalized reflection with the leader regarding the development of a culture plan.

So needless to say, we're covering a lot of ground in those couple of days, but we really want to maximize that opportunity.

Al: What a rich opportunity for leaders of these Christian schools. That's phenomenal. Thanks, Doug.

And now that you've participated in a number of these, you've heard there are common challenges that Christian leaders in education face these days. So what are a few of the top burning questions or issues regarding the development of a flourishing culture that you've heard from these leaders?

Doug: And we actually do an exercise for this. We've sort of called it the Post-it Note Exercise, or more recently, the Burning Questions Exercise. And this usually follows one of the earlier sessions in which we're calculating the cost of disengagement. And it's often at that moment when some leaders recognize the specific and very personal tension of disengagement, and maybe for some, for the first time. They've certainly felt the effects or implications of disengagement, but prior to that session, they may have attributed those effects to other causes, especially external causes. Again, because the topic of culture can be abstract for so many.

But in this exercise, we distribute Post-it Notes, and we ask them to jot down a burning question—what is a top-of-mind question or concern that they have?—during that very first night. And usually, as they're walking out of the room, we ask them to place that Post-it Note on a whiteboard or a wall. And the questions are fascinating. And no matter how often we've done this exercise, we tend to see some of the same questions, such as, how healthy is my school? How many of my employees are disengaged from the mission? How many of us know the mission statement? How many of us share the core values? How many of us even know the core values? How do we define success? And how is success defined from the perspective of my employees? What's a win for each of us, and how does that connect with the mission and the vision? What are the barriers holding us back from flourishing? And how do I get my culture under control when it seems out of control? And they’re burning questions, for sure. And as the coaches and I read through them, you can feel the sense of urgency of the leaders asking them. And we then try to adjust the contents to the subsequent sessions so that we can try to at least touch on some of those questions.

In fact, over the last year, Sydney and our team have adjusted the curriculum for the training overall to better focus the time and to address some of these same themes that we're seeing in the questions. So when we did this exercise at the most recent retreat we had in Florida, the coaches and I noticed that just about every theme within the burning questions for that group of participants was actually going to be covered in the training content over the following day. It was really gratifying for us to see that what we're training on is exactly what the leaders are thinking about and losing sleep over.

Al: Well, those are great questions, Doug. And I'm sure our listeners are saying, “Huh. That's exactly kind of the way I feel,” you know? “So how healthy is my organization? How many really know our mission statement? How many know our core values, or have ever really seen them?” Those are great questions. And again, I would imagine our listeners are asking some of those same questions.

Well, Sadie, let's turn this back to you. These training retreats are so well thought out, just remarkable. And as you and the Herzog Foundation have been at this now for several years, what outcomes are you seeing as a result? As you follow up with leaders and those that have been through the training, what are they implementing, and how is it contributing to the excellence of Christian education ecosystems that they're part of?

Sadie: Thank you, Al, for those questions.

A lot of the work that we do in the education sector when it comes to these leadership-development trainings, especially when we're talking in our culture trainings about, how do we have conversations? How do we grow our people? How do we help them find flourish? I mean, the statistics that Doug was giving, about 53% of people are engaged in our Christian schools, that number as a leader would keep me up at night. I mean, 47%, then, are not fully engaged, are not fully flourishing in their workplace? So as a leader, the question becomes, how do I help move them up, coach them up, or coach them on if that's the reality of the situation?

And so in education, what we see so much of in Christian schools and Christian homeschools is leaders who have come through the education ranks, right? So you start as a classroom teacher, you move to become a principal, and now all the sudden the school is growing, right? Post-COVID, we're at high enrollments. And so we move that kind of high-functioning principal or lead teacher up to a position of leadership.

And I think that's great because you cannot train passion for the mission. You cannot train someone to be excited about the vision. But oftentimes, boards of our schools fail in coming alongside those leaders to give them the people-management and financial-management skills that we need in order to actually run a successful organization. And so one of the things Doug does so well at our training retreats is show that culture has a direct impact on the bottom line of an organization. And for us, the bottom line is financial, and it does have a direct financial implication on the organization, but it also has a direct impact on the ultimate vision and product of our schools.

And I think that this is a little bit of a mind shift that we need to have in the education space as leaders is when you're a teacher, your focus is the classroom. It's the students. When you become a leader at a school, your focus is now the adult culture. And so our product as schools is not so much the students that we graduate. There's so many variables that we cannot control when it comes to student faith formation and academic formation. What we can control is the educational environment that we provide. And so if there are characteristics that we want to see in our portrait of a graduate, in our vision for our students, but we're not seeing those among our staff, it's just not going to happen, right? If our staff can't resolve conflict well, can't show each other grace, if our staff are gossiping, or if we are not communicating well with our staff, right? So all of these adult behaviors really become the air that that our students breathe at their schools.

And so for us, and this was mentioned already, it really is redefining what success looks like in our schools. And so many of the outcomes that we see with the school leaders we've served and since 2022, when we started these culture trainings, we've served just about 500 school leaders from more than 200 schools. And so a lot of the outcomes are more qualitative. It's confidence that these leaders walk away with, knowing not only that they need to have some hard conversations, but having the skill set to do so.

We see leaders walking away, and if their one goal is, “I need to go back and create clarity,” that's a win. The right clarity around, what is our mission? Why do we exist? How are we going to behave in order to get there? What are we willing to tolerate as a school when it comes to our adult culture? And so really defining success in a way that, yes, of course, includes the academic formation of our students. We’re schools, right? We're also Christian schools. How do we incorporate the kind of virtues that we want to see as a part of our expectations and evaluations for our staff? is, I think, really important.

So we're seeing a lot of that when leaders leave our trainings. Many of them say, “My first act is to go create clarity.” So I think Max Dupré would be proud of us, Al, with the need to create clarity.

We're also, like I said, that confidence is really important. Taking an educator and really helping turn them into a leader, to be able to coach up and coach out, if necessary, staff at our schools. The net promoter score of our events is about 96, which is really incredible. And I think a huge testament to that is our coaches and the environment that Doug and the other coaches set in having our leaders know that the goal is not to walk away so much with answers as it is to walk away with asking the right questions.

And so, like Doug mentioned, one of those questions is, how do I know the status and the health of my organization, of my school? And so one thing that we do as Best Christian Workplaces and Herzog Foundation with our partnership is actually make your Survey accessible to these schools. And so we step in and help them financially to be able to access a Survey.

And I think what that does for our schools is rather than us saying, “Okay, go back and fix all these things,” we can say, “Go back and identify exactly which levers of culture and of the FLOURISHing model you could pull for the biggest return on your investment.” Right? And so we get a lot of schools who are like, “Well, we just need better compensation,” right? “Our teachers just need to be paid more.”

I do think we have a responsibility as leaders within Christian education to pay our teachers better. And we have an entire three-day training just focused on that, at the Foundation. The reality of it is that no one is in Christian education for the money or the fame, right? We are in Christian education because we believe in the mission. And so what the FLOURISH model and us providing that Survey for schools does is it helps them identify, okay, maybe we're really low on healthy communication with our admin staff. So what that would indicate to me is, well, maybe we tell our teachers and our parents before we tell our own admin staff, right? So simple things that this Survey allows you to do and identifying and really clarifying the reality of the situation so that you know exactly where to invest in your culture.

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 Sadie and Doug.

Yeah. Let's eliminate the guesswork and really understand what's important, where you stand, and as you say, measure the culture so that it can be improved. Yeah. Wow, 500 leaders in 200 schools so far through the training that Herzog provides. And this has just ramped up in the last couple of years. And that's just fantastic. Thanks, Sadie.

Sadie: Thank you.

Al: Well, let's move from the specifics of leadership training, more up to a 30,000-foot level. What are the challenges for the current movement of Christian education? I mean, many of our listeners have been through Christian education. Their children or grandchildren are going through education at a Christian environment. And what do you see on the horizon? What's next for Christian education? So give us your thoughts, Sadie. What are you thinking? What are you seeing?

Sadie: Well, first of all, I'm so encouraged by the things that we're seeing. And I will, of course, talk about a few of the challenges that we're trying to do our part here at the Herzog Foundation in addressing. But I am so encouraged because education lately—talk about during and post pandemic—has somewhat become a hopeless conversation. There's parents who feel like they are not sure whether schools are going to be able to meet the needs of their children. There are teachers who are burnt out. There are teachers who are maybe frustrated with leadership at different organizations, different schools. And so I think that I'm encouraged by the fact that Christian education has a huge opportunity to be a beacon for hope within the educational conversation, but also outside of that.

Stan Herzog's son recently told me—I was speaking with him, and Stan was a major funder, primarily within politics, during his lifetime. And so I asked his son, I said, “Jake,” you know, “why do you think Stan left his wealth to Christian education?” And what Jake said was just so beautiful. He said that he believed his dad realized that the heart of the problem in our nation is a problem of the heart. And so what Christian education does is it has a chance to provide quality education, to set our students up for success, but most importantly, to find purpose and whose they are, right?, in their Creator. And so I think that's the opportunity that we have in Christian education right now to capture this moment.

With that and with the growing attention on this space does come a handful of challenges that we need to wrestle with seriously for the sustainability of our movement. And so I'll mention a few things here, but the one that keeps me up at night is simply our leadership pipeline and our leadership sustainability. I have had one leader a week for the last month call me and say, “Sadie, my health has taken a toll from the pressure and the weight of this work. I'm done. I'm out.” And we're seeing the kind of retention of our headmasters, of our heads of schools, is strikingly low. And part of that is schools are just complex entities. Part of that is we need better board training and more strategic board engagement. So I would say our leadership pipeline is a challenge for us. We have got to get our houses in order and really help our leaders be sustainable, because that's where, if our leaders are not healthy, our schools will not be healthy. And so I think that there's a conversation there for boards. Or if you're a church-run organization, for your pastors to say, “How can we invest in the leader of this school to be able to grow themselves, to have time to connect for their marriages and for their own personal health?” So board-culture pipelines.

And the last thing that I would say is clarity. And this has been a theme throughout our conversation today. But I was on a call with one of our coaches for strategic planning the other day, and I said, “I've realized that I can summarize all we do in our leadership series, all five training events, in two lines. The first is, know who you are. And the second is, then act like it, hire like it, promote like it, recruit like it, fire like it, behave like it.”

And so I think those would be the challenges that we're really trying to address in our training events is our board culture is a culture from the top down, our leadership and our teacher pipelines, creating a culture that's really going to attract high-quality leaders and educators, and then creating clarity for our staff.

Al: Christian schools that have a flourishing workplace culture should set the standard as the best, most effective places to work in the world so that you can attract, you can do the things that you're exactly saying.

Sadie: That’s right.

Al: I fully believe it. For a full pipeline of teachers and leaders; to have a board culture that is supportive, effective, strategic; and for leaders to know who they are so that they can lead based on that. Yeah. Sadie, that’s just so wise. I appreciate it. Amen is all I can say. So, yeah.

Doug, what would you add to these challenges that Sadie’s outlined? She's done such a great job of it. And what an opportunity it is for Christian schools at this point in time, as more and more families are looking for alternatives to government education. What are the challenges you see?

Doug: Yeah, it's actually tough to follow that quotable wisdom that Sadie just offered there. Clearly, we have a lot of reasons to be optimistic, even as we face these challenges, and we should expect to be challenged. If we're doing the work of advancing the Kingdom, we should absolutely expect to be challenged. And from our state of the Christian workplace report, we're seeing declining levels of commitment among employees, especially top performers within Christian schools. As Sadie just mentioned, leader retention. We're also seeing that employee retention is a challenge. It's a challenge across all sectors, of course, but it may be particularly concerning amongst schools. More and more folks are leaving the profession. That's the bottom line. Highly capable, strong performers are walking out of the classroom for the final time, even as we need them now more than ever. We see the employee net-promoter score declining also, as employees, especially teachers, may be increasingly reluctant to recommend that others join in this mission.

And there are a number of potential reasons for this. For one, we're seeing a concern regarding the increased workload on employees. With many schools struggling to balance changing expectations from parents, financial pressure, or even how society views the norms of student behavior, all of these combine to make the core job of educating children just more difficult in general.

And our data shows another potential reason may involve experiences related to unhealthy communication; that is, employees not feeling heard despite them having a strong sense of ownership or agency in their role. This can be especially true as schools grow and we emerge from what may have once been described as sort of a family atmosphere, where we all roll up our sleeves and pitch in, to more of a layered and structurally defined model that can seem too corporate for many.

And we hear that often, really as a lament. They'll think about what happened in a prior generation. For example, I remember even as a kid growing up in Christian education with a family so involved, on a Saturday, we would be striping the parking lot or laying mulch around the landscaping, all of those types of things. You just did that. It was an all-in mentality. Whereas today that stuff still happens, but not to the same degree. And so you hear that transition.

And the climate of the schools has changed to some degree. And so for some, we don't recognize what originally attracted us to the environment as still being there today.

Another key challenge is in recognizing and rewarding top performers. We talk a lot about best-practice ideas on how we can honor those who invest all of themselves in this work, including more effective ways of appraising performance, ways of identifying who is performing at a high level and who is not.

More recently, at one of the retreats, we were talking about appraising performance using rubrics that add clarity. We talked about clarity consistency, and rewarding top talent with implications for compensation. So rather than simply providing the same flat cost of living regardless of performance, something that we see a lot of in education, and it can be demoralizing for a high performer, but some schools are now shifting over to better recognizing and rewarding performance. And of course, there are challenges even in making that shift.

There are other challenges as well, which, although not new, we seem to be experiencing to a greater degree more recently, such as the inability to recruit, promote, and pay the highest-capable teachers and admin. All this is happening at a time when enrollment for many schools is at record level, with wait lists and packed classrooms, all of which beg for facility upgrades, which means capital campaigns and so on and so on.

All this is putting more pressure on leaders to get it right. And from our data, we can see that these challenges combine to impact the level of dedication that school employees felt in their role in 2023. Even while our interest in Christian education is growing, our margin of error is narrowing, and we need to get a handle on this to protect that Christian-school ecosystem that we care so much about.

Al: Yeah. Wow. That's great, Doug. And boy, this has just been a great discussion as we focused on equipping leaders in Christian schools.

And let's generalize this topic a little bit, Doug. What can leaders who are in different types of organizations learn from the retreat-training model that we've discussed and that Sadie has helped to bring with Herzog Foundation to schools? What are your thoughts on this?

Doug: Oh, we can learn a lot. Sadie and her team do a remarkable job of structuring each retreat as an investment in the leader. The leader, after all, is the top steward of that workplace as an ecosystem. So that investment involves world-class training, with topics led by experts in the field. And each of the coaches facilitating within the retreats has many years of real on-the-ground experience in leading these workplaces. They have lived the realities and the challenges that we're talking about, many of which are hitting every sector, not just Christian schools. The topics are heavily vetted and carefully developed to ensure the leader walks away from the retreat having addressed key learning objectives, such as those burning questions we talked about. And there's a very intentional and urgent focus on equipping the leader with tools they can use immediately upon their return. That's an essential aspect of this approach. We hear the word retreat, and we just think rest. There's no theory, no fluff in this. It's real. It's actionable guidance to equip the leader. And the guidance aligns with what leaders are asking about, again, what they lose sleep over. And every sector can benefit from an approach like that.

Now, covering so much ground over a two- to three-day training can be intense. So Sadie's team builds in very intentional opportunities, I should say requirements, for self-reflection also. Time for devotions, reading, sitting by the fire or in a rocking chair overlooking a beautiful landscape. Opportunities to grab some of the best books that we know on this subject and jot a note in the margin for the next leader to read. They treat the leaders in a way that these leaders rarely get treated, with a tender care, a personal touch, and with generous hospitality. There are times, of course, to return a phone call or check an email, but there is intentionality even in those times. The idea is that the leader comes equipped and inspired, but also cared for, nourished, prayed over, and they form community as they work through the discussions and the exercises and even a comprehensive case study where they get to work in teams to analyze the culture of a hypothetical workplace, apply what they've learned in the retreat, and then offer their own recommendations. This, too, is a powerful opportunity to learn from each other, to gain and practice new insights, and then to acquire some new tools that can be deployed as soon as they return.

That entire playbook can be applied to other types of Christian-led organizations, from ministries to businesses. And the bottom line is the leaders will leave better equipped and inspired to keep at it, to grow, and to do the hard work of pursuing flourishing for their workplace cultures. And that playbook works.

Al: As our leaders and our listeners are listening to this, a three-day training. You know, there's so many organizations have kind of stopped doing this kind of training. They've gone to online training. You know, it's become solitary in that sense. But, you know, to really invest in the individuals coming, to have topics that are vetted ahead of time, to have real tools that you're working with, to give time for self-reflection, to have case studies that you're working on together, I mean, that model is fascinating.

And, Sadie, anything you'd like to add on applying this model to other leadership settings?

Sadie: Absolutely. So, before we ran our first training in 2021, the board gave me the opportunity just for about nine months out of the year to go attend other training events inside and outside of Christian education, study what good professional development looks like. And so a lot of what I did is I just asked simple questions of, how did this experience make me feel? Did I actually leave feeling equipped? What have been some of the best experiences of your life? I asked that to my team. Even as far as you know, when you go on a trip, what are some of the best experiences? because we wanted to create an experience that was actually effective. And if you do any research on professional development these days, the results of how much actually gets implemented is quite bleak.

We have recently started surveying our leaders who go through all five of our leadership-training events, and we ask them to self-identify how many of the learning objectives they are either working on implementing or have implemented. And the average implementation rate is 86% of the learning objectives across the five trainings. And largely that's because, like Doug was talking about, we create a space for the leaders to guide themselves through the training. I say this at every event, but our time spent together is only as valuable as the leader makes it. And so we really give them space.

And we have three goals: that our leaders would leave feeling equipped to actually implement the work that they've learned, not just hear inspiring stories or good ideas. That they would leave feeling connected, because I think in ministry, regardless of whether you're in education or Christian ministry, it can feel lonely. Sometimes there are unique nuances to ministry that others who aren't in ministry just don't quite understand. So we want them to leave feeling connected. That peer-to-peer connection’s really important. And then making people feel valued. And I think this applies whether you're talking about PD or leading a flourishing team themselves, but making people feel valued, that the work they're doing is actually making an impact is really important.

So there are some really simple things that kind of undergird any training that we run, regardless of the topic. We tell our leaders, ask questions. Ask the right questions, connect vulnerably with your peers, and then take strategic risks. I often say that the riskiest action is inaction. So take strategic risks if maybe that's for improving culture. Maybe that's for your strategic plan or creating a new revenue model, whatever that is in your business or your ministry, take strategic risks.

Something we often say, and I think this can be applied more broadly as well, is our strategic-planning coach, Dr. Alan Pugh, says, “God is not going to bless our poor business practices. He's not going to bail us out of cheap grace, poor hiring and firing practices, relying on donors year over year to cover the same gap that we had last year,” right? And so we really can't afford to get this wrong. Or especially with culture, we can't afford to say, “Oh, well, we'll focus on culture when things slow down,” because I assure you, things are not going to slow down.

And so I think really focusing as a leader yourself to invest in your own growth and identify the barriers that are holding you back, to seek that clarity that we've been talking about, and really defining reality, these things will help us make sure that our businesses, make sure that our ministries are actually operating in a way that honors and glorifies God.

Al: Amen. Amen, Sadie. That's fantastic. We can't afford to get this wrong. I mean, that's true. And in every segment of the body of Christ, we're at a critical time. And I love the focus that you've said earlier. We've got to really fix the problem of the heart. And I've often talked, as I've talked with Christian-school leaders and Christian-higher-ed leaders, boy, wouldn't it be great if our students came out of the experience of participating and being a student in our schools, if they had an actual mental model of what the body of Christ would look like for them as they grow and mature as individuals? And I think of that experience that I've had early in my Christian life, seeing how Christians can actually work together to make a difference. Yeah.

This has just been a great conversation. Thanks so much.

As I think about, just so appreciative of the generosity of Stan Herzog, as you said, Sadie, and how he wants to build the capacity to grow leadership in Christian education. And how you started off with an advisory team, how you've built this program. And, Doug, thanks so much for the way you've outlined it. This has really been really a great, and can I say, flourishing conversation. And how we have the issues of leadership pipelines. And I know our listeners are, these are issues that every organization has. The issue of, what about the leadership pipeline and the sustainability of our organization? What’s the board culture, and how is that really guiding the organization? And for every leader, you know, self-knowledge is the key to leadership, for sure. And our research shows that spiritual leadership is really important. And of course, that starts with the individual. So thanks so much for this really rewarding and great experience.

Let me ask one more question. What would you like to leave with our listeners? What one more thing would you like to include?

Sadie: Al, I would just say that I have grown so much over the last three years with Herzog and designing and developing these trainings, and I've had a chance to sit with folks like Doug and learn from BCW, sit with Mark Miller, sit with the other coaches that we have. And the encouraging thing that I've learned about culture is that it's not just another addition to the already full plates that we carry. It's not another branch of your organization. It's not for H.R. to figure out. It is simply how we behave. It's the air that we breathe. It’s how we carry ourselves with our team. And so as a leader, we really set the tone. And so I would just encourage anyone listening to this, that culture is how you interact. It's how you have conflict. It's how we celebrate. And I think oftentimes in Christian organizations we don't celebrate enough, right? It's how we run our meetings and encourage questions and feedback. It's how we, most importantly, I think, cast vision and create clarity.

And so as leaders, regardless of the sector you're in, I hope you feel encouraged. And specifically, for those listening from the education sector, we have a huge opportunity. Al, you said this earlier, we have a huge opportunity to create cultures that attract the best-of-the-best educators. And if we can get this right, we can really reclaim some of the talent loss that we're seeing over these last few years. So I'm encouraged. I would say let Herzog, let Best Christian Workplaces come alongside you in creating flourishing culture at your organization.

Doug: Yeah. We are at an inflection point. Coming out of the pandemic and into a larger societal culture that is increasingly hostile to the faith, a time in which thousands and thousands of families are considering Christian education for the first time, even while fewer and fewer brothers and sisters in Christ are entering the profession, we are definitely at a turning point. And we praise and thank God that in His sovereign plan and providence, He gave a vision to Stan Herzog, which is now carried out skillfully through the Foundation that bears his name. And when Sadie invited us to join her in this cause, I don't think I waited for her to completely finish that sentence before I said, “You can count me in.” I didn't really know what that looked like, of course, at the time. But after several of these retreats now and crisscrossing the country and getting the chance to serve hundreds of schools and leaders, we're more excited about this than we ever have been. And as Darrell Jones, the Foundation's president, has said a number of times at these retreats, we are moving the needle. It's an honor to be even a tiny part of that work. It's work with and for amazing people, and it's work with eternal consequence. And we know from Scripture that the calling to lead, like the calling to teach, is a very special one. We get to invest in the folks who are walking faithfully in that calling.

So I just want to thank Sadie again; Darrell, the president; the board of the Foundation for allowing us this privilege. We couldn't be more excited about what's ahead.

Al: Yeah. Thanks, Doug. And Sadie and Doug, I want to thank you for your contributions today. And most of all, I appreciate, I deeply appreciate, your commitment to equipping leaders who are rising up the next generation of Christians to impact the world for Christ. So thanks for taking time out of your day and speaking into the lives of so many listeners.

Sadie: Thanks, Al, for having me on.

Doug: Thank you. It’s always a pleasure.

Al: Thank you so much for listening to my conversation with Sadie Elliott and Doug Waldo. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

And you’ll find ways to connect with them 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 flourishing workplaces, please email me, al@workplaces.org.

And leaders, if you want to improve your leadership, expand your organization's impact for good, or 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 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: Next week, you'll want to join us as I talk with Ryan Duerk, the CEO of Miracle Hill Ministries, about exceptional teamwork and goal alignment across diverse programs and locations.