Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast
“How Business Leaders Can Make Incredible Impact for God “
August 7, 2023
Mike Sharrow
Intro: How can your organization improve your impact on people? Well, today on episode number 349 of the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, my guest, Mike Sharrow, president of the C12 Group, shares some inspirational leadership tips to improve your workplace culture and your impact.
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 award-winning book Road to Flourishing: Eight Keys to Boost Employee Engagement and Well-Being. And I'm passionate about helping Christian leaders like you create engaged, flourishing workplaces.
Well, today my guest is Mike Sharrow, the president and CEO of the C12 Group, a global leader in CEO/owner peer advisory groups for Christians.
Throughout our conversation, you'll hear Mike talk about several practical tips, including how a healthy culture is a competitive advantage that stems from inspirational leadership, and how any strategy without a healthy culture can never fully achieve the maximum impact that you'd hoped for. Also, how the tensions between grace and truth, character and competency are key for leaders to press into, and the importance of clarifying expectations about the future with direct reports.
I think you're going to love this interview with Mike. But before we dive in, this episode is brought to you by the Best Christian Workplaces Employee Engagement Survey. You can sign up today to discover the health of your organization's culture. This fall would be a wonderful time to listen to your employees with our easy-to-administer online Engagement Survey by going to www.workplaces.org. That’s workplaces.org. Being a certified best Christian workplace improves your ability to attract more talented employees and keep them longer.
And I'd like to say hello to our new listeners, and thanks for joining us as we honor your investment of time by creating valuable episodes like this.
But let me tell you a little bit more about Mike. Mike graduated from Trinity International University with a degree in marketing. He also, then, did graduate work at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in theology. Then, at Loyola Graduate School of Business, he received a degree in project management and is an ordained pastor. So Mike is passionate about discipleship, gospel-driven collaborations, foster care, and integrated missional strategies. He believes the C12 Group represents a breathtaking platform to see leaders, families, businesses, communities, and eventually nations flourish through the ongoing transformation of their businesses in Christ. Mike grew up in Alaska and met his wife, Jackie, while in college, and they have two daughters. So join me now for my conversation with Mike Sharrow.
Mike, it's so great to have you again on the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast. Welcome back.
Mike Sharrow: Al, it's always fun to be with you.
Al: So, Mike, before we dive into the topic of investing in leaders, share with our listeners a snapshot of the purpose of the C12 Group.
Mike: Well, if I can steal the title of your book and some of the things you do, Al, I like to say, at the highest level, we're trying to help create a flourishing model for leaders by helping them integrate who they are, what they do, how they do it, and why they do it. And so we help people try to focus on building great businesses because we believe God is honored by the way we do business, not just what we do with the money. I think as Christians, it's easy in business, it’s easy to think of yourself as a funder of ministry. And we'd say, gosh, I think God actually has a lot of money, and generosity is great, but businesses are about people, and God cares about His people. So we focus on how do we help people grow good businesses, do great businesses, but do it for a greater purpose and really bring what we call the eternal perspective to bear on everything in business. That's why, you know, you and I have been doing business together for a long time because at the end of the day, we think, whether you're in business or whether you're running a school or whether you're running a church, I don't care what your tax status is or what your widget is, we're here to bring forth the Kingdom of God and proclaim His gospel. And the cool part of it is when you get to do in the middle of workplaces and work hours because it just has such tremendous dividends.
Al: Yeah. And Mike, I like what you're doing with the business as a mission. I mean, so many people are impacted by those that they work with every day. I mean, and seeing people really see Christ through, in others as they work together is great.
So, let's talk about leadership. And clearly, as a leader of leaders, you're investing in leaders. So what do you look for when you're trying to decide whether a leader is ready for the investment to grow to the next level of leadership? Oftentimes, that’s the first step. You want to really make sure that there's going to be a return on your effort. You know, so what do you look for?
Mike: My thinking on that actually got shaped by a social worker. A number of years ago I was working with a large homeless center in our city, and one of the founders is over—I mean, it was the largest homeless center in America at the time, a huge endeavor. And the guy who was leading the social-work team shared a statement that sounded actually kind of counterintuitive to me, but then it really affected the way I thought about leadership development. He said, “One of the things we have to prevent social-worker burnout by is by telling them we will work as hard as any resident wants you for their transformation, but never harder.” And I said, “What do you mean by that?” And he said, “Well, so many times a social worker will be emotionally just depleted and killing themselves, trying to rescue somebody beyond the pace that they are ready to actually invest their own transformation.” And so he said that this diligence to say, “I'm going to be as committed as you are, but I can never be more committed than you are. Otherwise, I will lose and you'll lose.” And I thought that was so profound.
I mean, Lencioni would brilliantly say things like humble, hungry, smart. I look for, is the person hungry? Do they actually have vision and want to be somewhere? And, then, do they have the humility to actually want to learn and do something uncomfortable?
But it's been—I've frustrated myself tremendously over the years when I actually had a higher desire for someone’s growth than they did; or someone just wanted more money; or they wanted to be someplace else, but they didn't actually have the humility, hunger, and commitment to actually do what it would take to grow as a leader.
Al: That's very insightful. I remember talking with somebody who was kind of in leadership development, and they said, “Well, they don't put any effort into leadership development until somebody creates their own action plan themselves. And then, okay. Then, yeah, we can work together. You've at least expressed enough interest to develop an action plan, and you're hungry enough to pursue it and humble enough to actually think about what it might take.” Yeah.
Mike: I think you have to—and I found myself finding, what are the tests, then? Not in a, like I'm playing games with somebody, but what are the validation points where you can give people an opportunity to demonstrate? Because it took me a long time to begin to differentiate and discern between someone who just complains about where they are and actually has the commitment and drive to go somewhere else as a leader. It's always to be in putting breadcrumb trails out, saying, you know, will you read a book? Will you listen to a podcast? Will you go to the conference? Will you do something with it? If they won't do those simple, kind of low-hanging-fruit pieces that you provide, well, then, investing in a class or mentoring or other pieces is a poor, a low ROI for me.
Al: Yeah, right.
You know, as you think about different leaders that you've invested in recently, particularly C12 chairs, is there someone who stands out as exceptional at developing people? What are some of the qualities that make that person so special and give them an impact on how they influence other leaders? Does anybody come to mind?
Mike: Yeah. I think—so, we work with—our organization’s kind of funny structured. We’ve got about 22 employees that lead, but then we have about 150 full-time leaders we call chairs who run these business forums, who, then, work with 3,000, a few hundred, different leaders every month. And I think some of the attributes have been when someone is willing to be, can have the security to be frustrated for somebody, not frustrated with them, and to never take that person's growth as a reflection on them, but to truly be a caddy, just trying to help that person be a better golfer. And like, we just have a, we’ve a chair launching in Idaho, who people will say, well, here we call this person a rock star, and I went out and watched him work, and he's having really tremendous early impact and success, but it's because I found a wildly secure identity, where he is able to speak to leaders, challenge leaders, but never looking for them to validate his identity. Nothing is about, his effectiveness is not about his self-worth. It's all clearly, and they can tell. I mean, you've got no other agenda than trying to help me become God's best.
Or there's a leader who, two years ago, was a rookie of the year nationally. And I was so proud of him because three years ago, he had come and we'd actually turned him down, denied him for a role, because of some gaps that I actually personally had to deliver to him, saying, “I think there's all these great attributes, but there's some critical flaws here that give me pause about confidently launching you,” which is typically pretty demoralizing. But to his credit, he came back to me the next day and said, “What are the kind of things I’d have to do to grow in those?” And I described some pieces, but said, “None of these things are microwavable. Like, you can't do this overnight.” But he took those things, and he diligently pursued them for next year and did some hard, hard work and came back and said, “Okay. Here's who I've become. Here's attestation of that,” and the humility it took to then go attack that and do that has then made him all the more powerful at getting to speak into other leaders from a place of, “I've been there. I'm growing as a leader.” And again, that security piece. So I think those are some critical intangibles.
Al: Those are great examples, Mike, and I appreciate that. And even for leaders, as they lead their organizations, I don't think their organizations will grow until they're growing as leaders. And in fact, oftentimes, it's seen as an organization is capped based on a leader's ability to grow. And that's a great example of somebody that's taken feedback and works hard at it to grow and improve. Yeah, wow.
Well, sometimes, you know, when we're investing in leaders, we face a tension, you know, a tension between having to be patient to see results and personal development and then deciding whether we need to steward our investment and discern that somebody is actually not as capable as we thought. How do we decide when to release a leader to move on to something different, perhaps one of the most difficult questions any leader faces here? You have any insights for us, Mike?
Mike: Yeah. Al, you and I have talked a lot about the paradoxes when you’re a particularly and explicitly Christian leader, and if you’re in an organization that explicitly claims the name of Christ, it can create a really unhealthy relationship with accountability and tough decisions. And so I benefitted a lot—Henry Cloud's book Necessary Endings—
Al: Yeah.
Mike: —and the framework he uses of wise/foolish versus evil people, drawing from Proverbs, is such a practical rubric that has helped me so much because I think one of his statements was as a Christian, we have a propensity to want to treat everyone as though they are wise. But if someone is acting as a fool or evil in that moment and you treat them as though they're wise, that actually makes you the fool.
Al: Yeah.
Mike: And so finding—like, I had to make a really hard exit last year with a leader, but one of the leading indicators was not that there was issues, because I got issues. I mean, your organization did a 360 on me, and I’ve got a work list of 360 gaps that my team already told me about. So we've all got issues. But this leader, when presented with the issues, didn't embrace them; didn't lean into, you know, what do I do with it? but actually tended to attack the data, attack the feedback. And the moment a leader isn't willing to embrace the issue, well, man, I'm wasting my time trying to help equip them to it.
And then if you combine that with kind of a two by two we use a lot that is popular in the human-development space is if you think about the vertical axis being performance and the horizontal being potential, kind of plotting people out of where’re they at, performance versus potential. Obviously, we want everyone up at the top-right box, and you can do nine boxing and all that kind of stuff, the top grid. But the question becomes, if it's just performance that's underachieving their potential, then you coach, motivate, figure out what's the deal there, that's easier. If it's the potential side, if it's a skill or competency, then figuring out, okay, can we skill that? Can we train to that? Are we okay with that?
And I think knowing which lid it is—like, we use something called the culture index right now. It’s a psychometric tool for assessing your team and new candidates. And if you look at someone's psychometric profile and go, “Gosh, is the role we're trying to develop them into actually require them to become less of who they are, rather than more of who they are?” that could be abusive or unsustainable or exhausting. So I think the wise, evil, foolish person, is it performance versus potential, and am I helping them become more of who God’s made them to be, or am I actually asking a zebra to look like a cheetah? has helped us know when to double down versus when to realize this isn't good for you or us.
Al: Yeah. Helping them flourish is what you're trying to say, Mike, right?
Mike: Helping them flourish, yes. I was at a Global Leadership Summit conference years ago. One of the speakers said, “Everyone is made to be successful and flourish. And if they can't be that here, then that must mean they're made for somewhere else, so you have to release them to their future.”
Al: There you go. Yeah, exactly.
Bringing up Henry Cloud's book Necessary Endings, that is such a great book for every leader. I mean, if you haven't read it, I'd encourage you to go back and read it. The wise, foolish, evil. And I remember dealing fortunately with somebody who we would, I would give advice to, not just me, but others would give advice, and we'd just give wise advice over and over, and they wouldn't do anything with it. And it was that example that really helped us say, “Well, just stop giving advice and put some accountability behind what you're saying and just stop talking, because foolish people won't listen to wise advice and act on it.” Yeah. Great book.
So, Mike, you just mentioned, okay, so you've done a BCWI 360 leadership review for yourself and the leaders of your team. You know, are there some special ways that you've seen these 360 reviews help you and others continue to grow in your leadership abilities? And tell us a little bit about that.
Mike: It was just six, seven months ago we did the latest round of 360s for our leadership team. I have often said in the business I'm in, this idea of running peer advisory groups for business leaders like myself, that it's oftentimes what you don't know, you don't know that is holding you back. And so I say you know, you and I don't know, we don't know, but we still pay the price.
In marriage, my wife and I are big fans of the book Love & Respect, and we've often found that most people's dysfunction in marriage is not a lack of effort or energy. It's usually just the wrong currency. It’s the wrong method. They're doing the wrong things to get a return on that effort. And so if you can help them see the right model, they can reapply the same energy in something that's more fruitful.
And my hope is that if we're doing 360s that people are trying, otherwise they would not be here, but maybe they don't even know they've got a gap to be trying in. And so I found it to be really helpful to surface where the right path areas are to help validate in a, you know, wise, foolish, evil person rubric to help them realize this is from multiple data points and, really, tests. Are you going to be wise with this? If nine people took the time to fill this out and they all describe the same gap, what do we do with that?
And then I think it's helpful for our organization to see that we are all growing. And I mean, one of the things that haunts me as a leader is I'm acutely aware of the things that made me effective at leading five years ago, our business has doubled since then. And some of the areas I'm missing the mark right now because what worked five years ago don't work now, and my team needs different things from me than it needed then. And five years from now, it'll be the same thing again. And so the recognition and modeling for our organization that we are them, and you never outgrow the need for accountability, for development. It gets harder as you grow in leadership because you have less mechanisms or reflective devices to give that to you. But I think every one of our leaders, myself included, came out with encouragement of going, “Oh, gosh. There's an asset I bring to our team. I didn’t even realize how deeply valued it was.” That’s always encouraging. And oh, wow.
I mean, there was some low-hanging fruit I was able to implement within three weeks that began to instantly provide lift. In fact, I was just, we were at a staff retreat the last few days, and one of my leaders was sharing professional-development gains from something that was literally something I did the week after the 360. That was like, “Oh, I can do that. That wasn't expensive or hard. I just didn't realize you guys needed that from me. Okay.”
Al: Low-hanging fruit, yeah.
Mike: Low-hanging fruit.
Al: Yeah. You didn't use the word blind spots, but your comment, you know, you don't know what you don't know. Well, yeah. I heard a leader say, “Well, everyone has at least 2.7 blind spots on average.”
Mike: Yeah.
Al: And it’s like, oh, what's a 0.7 blind spot? But—
Mike: Yeah.
Al: —yeah.
Mike: I’m above average. I have more than that. So I had at least twice the average blind spots.
Al: I don’t know about that. Anyway, yeah, well.
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 with Mike Sharrow, the president of C12 Group.
That's part of that humility thing.
Well, so, accountability is an important part of growth as a leader. And, you know, that's an important part. People often don't change without accountability. So at BCWI, you know, we're starting to offer stakeholder-based coaching to our ministry partners, our mission partners, where a leader can work with a coach and then interact with their own panel, those stakeholders that are close to them, to get regular feedback. So what's been your experience, Mike, with accountability and feedback as a part of your own work to grow and develop leaders?
Mike: You're hitting the right target there because we would say, internally in our product space and at the end of the day, what we do is we offer these business forums where leaders come, and they get, you know, content learning, all sorts of stuff. And it's pretty good stuff, I think. But the actual secret sauce is that we have accountability mechanisms. And what we found is that the higher the leadership role, the lower the accountability they naturally experience, which creates a handicap and a hazard for most leaders, where it is just so perilous, where you can, you know, do what I say, not what I do. And as Christians, that oftentimes manifests as hypocrisy.
For instance, we have a mechanism in our forums where at the end of every forum meeting you will voluntarily just say, “What do you want to be held accountable to between now and next month? What are you going to do?” You describe one, two, three smart goals. You self-select them, you put them in a system, and then the next month, you report out. “Did you do what you said you were going to do?” And these are voluntary assignments. And what we find is that the average CEO coming into our program does about 67 percent of the things he or she says she will do. And when that initially comes forward, they're usually like, “Oh, well, you know, I was busy,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they make excuses. And I love to flip the script and go, “Out of curiosity, what would you do if your sales team was averaging 67 percent of sales quota for the year? Or if your healthcare providers were hitting 67 percent of quality ratings in their healthcare compliance? Or if your accountant had 67 percent of your bills paid on time,” I mean, where else would you be okay with 67 percent execution? And the reality is nowhere, and yet that's the way they were living. And within months, we can typically get that up to 85, and when you get up to 90 percent, the game begins to change. But being the terminal niceness in Christian spaces, where you talking about sloppy agape is a phrase we like to use, but too oftentimes, Christians don't call out the accountability gap early enough to actually create change. And what we tend to do is be nice, nice, nice, nice, nice. And then we get harsh, and someone's got to leave, or we grind through people. And that accountability is honestly at the gate. No one wants to pay for accountability upfront, but it is the number one thing people get benefit from, and at the end of day, it’s the secret sauce for our model.
Al: Wow. Yeah. And you know, just on the surface of it, you know, integrity, of course, is all we have. And when we make promises, like you just said, and actually, you know, we can say, well, there's, you know, if I don't do them all, then that's okay. But it's really not, because you're setting an example for others, for sure. Yeah.
Mike: You doing stakeholder bit, I don't know what that exactly looks like, but, for instance, we have two programs. We have a program for business owners, and then we have a program for their leadership teams, called Key Players. We created an instrument a few years ago called a development action plan. It's a one-page social contract where our facilitator, our chair, will ask the sponsoring CEO, what do you want Susie to grow in in these areas of professional development? And then in a year, let's come back and report out on, did she grow in those areas? And the thing we didn't anticipate was a majority of time, like, literally, probably 90 percent of the time, the CEO was so quick to complain, like, “Ah, man. I wish Mike was better at. I wish…” And we said, “Okay. What are the things?” Well, they never really told them that, and they didn't know how to specify it. And then once they did and we began to have any mode of accountability to that with that leader, man, the leader grew, and the leader just wanted to know what is success and then have our feedback loop that actually held me accountable to that. And it was such low-hanging fruit, and yet most leaders just don't do it.
Al: That’s an encouragement for everybody that’s listening, yeah.
So, Mike, you know, you've talked about a point in your life where you realized that you were operating with a sacred secular divide in your life, in your work. How did you move past that to an integrated way of following Jesus?
Mike: Yeah, that's a huge part of my story, and I was just talking with a leader before getting on this interview with you, actually, about that, sharing my story with him. And I was saying my prettier language now would be that I was letting my vocation determine my identity instead of my identity transform my vocation. And initially it has begun with confession, of actually acknowledging, like, I had to be able to say, “Father, I'm letting where I am determine who I am. But that’s because I don't know how to be who I am, where I am, or at least who You say I am.” And there's actually freedom. And I think we, some of us, are reluctant as leaders to say, “I don't know,” but we serve a God who loves—you know, James says He gives wisdom without condemnation, if we will ask for it. But then you've got to be willing to do something with what He says. And so when I first confessed it, then I began asking better questions. Like, I began saying, “Okay. I get that I'm supposed to live an integrated life. I have no clue how to do it.” I really found that God actually likes that question. “Show me how.”—
Al: Yeah.
Mike: —because then that sent me on a quest of seeking mentors and books and frameworks and integration. And it began an increasing journey, and I think it is just that. I think it's a journey because in reality, what I've come to realize now, it’s why I'm so passionate about what I do in this business is that really is discipleship. It's sanctification. It's a journey of submitting to the lordship of Jesus Christ in every moment of every day. And the cool part is and why I love to mess up a leader's life is when I say, “What does it look like to be a follower of Jesus the way you're handling accounting, or human resources, or manufacturing?” I usually get, like, “What are you talking about? I mean, I don't do bad stuff, but what would that even look like?”
Al: Yeah.
Mike: If you get asked it, bad news, you'll find out you're not doing such a great job. (B) it will actually draw you into dependance with Jesus, and it’ll actually make even the mundane parts of any business become an arena of discipleship, of ministry, of living in who God made you to be. So it started with just confession, and it's just kind of snowballed. And frankly, it's snowballing every day.
Al: Starts with confession, yeah.
Well, let's talk a little bit about, then, kind of business as ministry. As you talk a lot about business as ministry, give us some examples of how that works and even in different industry settings.
Mike: Yeah. To circle back on the confession piece, I have a grandmother who is not a believer, and when she heard I was doing C12, she's like, “It sounds like AA for CEOs.” Well, it's not a 12-step program, but it does start with admitting you have a problem. And so I do think in some ways that we have some resemblance to AA. But yeah, we're built on this whole idea of business as a ministry. You'll see us talk about BAAM, to kind of play off the software-as-a-service motif. And it's this belief that every business that is led by a believer is a ministry platform. It's a platform for demonstrating the rule and reign of Jesus Christ in and through your business. And we don't have a cookie-cutter set of do these five things, and you're good to go, because if you're running a restaurant—
Like, we got a restaurant owner in Tennessee, who for him, part of that meant beginning to view every one of his 350 employees as souls, not just low work ethic, showing up late, high turnover, frustrating. Like, no, these are souls made in the image of God. And the question beginning flips from, how do I get the most out of them? to how do I love them? And for him, that actually began when he was looking at the same employee who was, they were struggling to show up to work on time, realizing that his restaurants were in a high-income area, but he had lower-wage employees, and transportation was the barrier. And so for him, that actually meant becoming passionate about enabling mobility and actually buying bicycles and bus passes and figuring out how do I actually create quality of life for my employees? Their dysfunction at work is actually a symptom of life challenges. And I went and audited one of his restaurants once, without him knowing, and talked to a waitress who described, “This is the weirdest place. Like, the owner, I feel like genuinely loves us, and he's obsessed with us doing well in life. And I don't—it's cool. It's just weird.” Like, in that business as ministry, he's having people come to Christ, and even people who are far from God are experiencing the love of God in a restaurant.
But that's different than if I go to—I was just talking to a woman in North Carolina. She runs Regulator Marine. It's a boat manufacturer. Pretty good boat manufacturer. I just got a report the last month, the business funded sending 25 couples to A Weekend to Remember marriage retreat. And she's got, I think, 80-something employees going through a Dave Ramsey financial-literacy course. None of those things have anything to do with making better boats. None of those things have anything to do with that. And yet she is making, she's helping them experience the fullness of who God made them to be. And she's getting to do things that you don't think of happening in a church in her business.
But it's not just programmatic things. It's also changing how you deal with vendors and suppliers and bank relationships. And it's looking at what, we look at a balanced scorecard of business, and we go, the gospel should motivate how and why and what you do in every dimension of business. And that's when banking can become ministry and accounting can become ministry and hiring and fire. How does firing become a ministry? You know, we were talking this month in our forums, actually. How does even coming to the conclusion that someone shouldn't work for you anymore or can't work for you due to cutbacks or shutting down a division, how do you do that in the name of Christ in a way that actually blesses people? That's huge. That’s a whole arena. So business as ministry is believing that everything in business is meant to honor God and actually impact people for the glory of God.
Al: Yeah. Boy, I love that. And you know, better people actually can make better boats, I think, Mike.
Mike: I don’t disagree.
Al: And I love that idea, investing in people, and you don't see a direct outcome of that, perhaps, from a job-related standpoint. But yeah, better people. And you know, that just really comes to my passion of when people are working well together, they draw others to them, because it's such an unusual thing. And in business as a ministry, I love the story that you gave at the current 21, where in a specific part of the country, more people are baptized, I believe was the story, in this area than actually were baptized in the churches in that same area. And so where people can see the love of Christ, actually the face of Christ, and a way to say it in a business setting the way people interact with each other. And you know, that's like culture. Culture is largely determined based on the owner's behavior, or the leader’s behavior. So, yeah, those are great stories.
You know, as you look back, can you describe a person who had the biggest impact maybe on your own growth as a leader? You know, how did they shape you? What was unique, and maybe over and above about their influence?
Mike: Al, that’s a really unfair question because I feel like Forrest Gump in that I am the byproduct of so many incredible people investing in my life. So, I mean, I think back to working in Chicago for the Walgreen Company and having a boss named, a leader in the business called Jack. And Jack actually asked me if I would take a job in a department that I didn't want to work in. And I said, “No, thanks.” And he said, “Hey, I really think you should go work in that department.” And I said, “Why?” And I said, “Jack, it's boring, and it's not very fun. It's dysfunctional, and everyone knows who’s got problems. And, man, I don't need that. And the pay is not that great.” And he went, he came back to me and said, “Mike, I'm asking you to join that department because I want to see—sometimes as a leader you have to deal with things that you don't enjoy, because it helps you become what you need to become. And I want to see if you can learn to navigate these types of issues, and I think your character will be tested in it. And I want to see if you're only good when you get to do fun stuff or if you can be good in the hard stuff.” And he vision cast me to begin thinking about even my vocational assignments not as a pleasure meter, but actually in a character formation, in an enterprise contribution. And he was the first leader to level set that kind of perspective.
And then I had a boss there named Todd, who gave me a bad performance review, actually, even when I crushed my goals that year, but because he thought I crushed them in an unhealthy way and that I was on the path to creating unhealth in others if I didn't address that. So, I mean, those are bosses that weren't believers, but hugely impactful.
But then, like, Buck, the guy who founded C12; Dave Dunkel, chair of my board; my C12 chair, Dan Walters, and friends and the peers I'm in forums with have all held up the mirror to me at times, asked me better questions, forced me to see and think and elevate my leadership and thinking in season and did not get stuck in a rut of where I was. And they have just had, I mean, incalculable influence on my life.
Al: Yeah. Those are all good examples, Mike. You know, it just causes me to think that we're only as good as the caliber of the people around us as well. So you just described high-caliber people around you, in your C12 Group and your board, other places, yeah.
A mentor of mine, George Duff, who is the 26-year CEO of Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce, really led Seattle to be a great city. He's now retired for 20 years, and he is a little disappointed the way it's gone in the last couple of years. But a huge influence on me, and his fingerprints are all over my life. Yeah. So it's great to have good leaders around us.
Well, Mike, this has just been great. I have so much enjoyed our conversation, learned a lot from you. I just love the whole topic of developing people. And we go back about just being secure in our own identity, our own identity in Christ, not our identity based on what we do, but who we are. And then just the discussions, you know, about 360s, and you don't know what you don't know. And we all have blind spots and how that's great to know and be encouraged by what we're good at, but also just to continually have that development mindset. And gosh, accountability is such an important thing. When you think of despot leaders, who create situations where there's no accountability to reality, and then, you know, stupid things, bad things happen as a result. So yeah, accountability is great for all of us. And how our own integrity, you know, saying that we're going to do something and then actually doing it is so important to the character of any successful leader. And yeah, just again, knowing what our identity is, that sacred secular divide, and how for all of us, the way that we interact in our business, in our roles certainly is a reflection of Christ in our lives. So boy, it's just been a great conversation. Thanks.
I bet you've got maybe one more thing that you'd like to add that we, you know, about this topic that we've talked about.
Mike: I think when a leader, the leaders listening to this and frustrated by it at all, I hope there's actually something about our conversation that agitates because maybe there is no accountability in their life, or maybe there is no, I mean, they're not developing others, I think what we tend to do is get stuck and frustrated without stepping back and wondering if we're asking the wrong question or chasing the wrong answers. So my sacred secular divides are of me asking, “God, get me out of here, and why You get me out of here to where I could go become called to be.” And I realized I was asking the wrong question. I was asking a place question. And I need to ask, “How do I be who I am?” But I think the wisdom of Solomon in Ecclesiastes when he talks about the need to sharpen the saw and as leaders were produced, kind of keep hitting harder and harder and harder. And if you're not getting the right results, then you know something's got to change. And if you're the leader, it’s probably got to start with changing in you, and that can feel condemning because most of us, on a good day, if we knew exactly what we should do to get better outcomes, we would. But we're stuck. And so if you're stuck and don’t like it, then we’ve got to figure out how to lead the example of embracing truth, embracing feedback, embracing insights, and embracing accountability. Most leaders are frustrated with people not performing at the level they want them to perform, and a lot of people are frustrated leaders not performing the way they'd like their leaders to perform. So it's kind of mutual. And if we can begin to close the gap in concert, it doesn't mean everything is peachy keen, but it does unleash flourishing, to use your favorite word, because it gets us all on a journey of what's God's best, and God cares about the flourishing of our work environment and us as individuals in that. And that's, I hope they are encouraged to know that you never graduate out of the program, unfortunately, but the dividends are worth it.
Al: Yeah. Great.
Mike, thanks so much for your contributions today. And most of all, I appreciate your commitment to multiplying leaders who will follow Jesus and make a difference for the Kingdom through their business leadership. I'm so appreciative. So, thanks for your taking your time out today and speaking into so many lives and so many listeners. Thanks, Mike.
Mike: Thanks, Al. I’m grateful.
Al: Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with Mike Sharrow, and 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 the transcript at workplaces.org/podcast.
If you have any suggestions for me about our podcast or have any questions about a flourishing workplace culture, email me, al@workplaces.org. That’s 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 by seeing more flourishing Christian-led workplaces. To help, please share this podcast with other leaders or launch a project in your 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: I hope you continue to enjoy our summer series. And next week you're certainly going to want to listen in as we talk with Pete Kelly, the president of a business-as-ministry organization called Apartment Life. Pete will share four key rhythms for developing healthy communication and a flourishing workplace culture.