Transcript: Strategies for Building a Flourishing Remote Workforce in Higher Education // Dr. John Reynolds, Los Angeles Pacific University

Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast

“Strategies for Building a Flourishing Remote Workforce in Higher Education“

April 22, 2024

John Reynolds

Intro: How can you intentionally build a flourishing workplace culture? And how do you keep growing as a leader so that you can help your team flourish? Well, today on the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, we'll talk with Dr. John Reynolds about his new innovative Christian university and how it's built a flourishing workplace culture. Listen in for practical steps that you can implement in your own leadership journey.

Welcome: Welcome to the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, your home for open, honest, and insightful conversations to help develop your leadership, your team, and build a flourishing workplace culture.

Al Lopus: Hello, I'm Al Lopus, the co-founder of the Best Christian Workplaces and author of the book Road to Flourishing: Eight Keys to Boost Employee Engagement and Well-Being. And I'm passionate about helping Christian leaders like you create engaged, flourishing workplaces.

Today join us on this insightful episode as we sit down with Dr. John Reynolds, the president of Los Angeles Pacific University. Dive into the world of higher education through the lens of an online Christian institution dedicated to serving the needs of working adults.

As I reflect on our conversation, there's at least five takeaways to consider. The first is discover how they use our Engagement Survey results to guide strategic priorities and foster impactful initiatives. Also, learn about foundational steps to cultivate trust within a remote faculty and staff environment. Thirdly, gain practical advice on nurturing a sense of community within a hybrid organizational structure that many of us have. Also, understand the value of 360 reviews for leaders to obtain objective feedback and create personal-development plans. And lastly, explore John's personal methodologies for continuous growth as an individual and a leader.

Listen in to uncover these key insights and more with John Reynolds. He brings a wealth of experience and thoughtful leadership to the evolving realm of online education, and I know that you'll get a lot from it as well.

I think you're going to love this interview with Dr. John Reynolds. But before we dive in, are you ready to unlock the full potential of your organization's culture? Well, look no further because this episode is proudly sponsored by the Best Christian Workplaces’ Employee Engagement Survey. Seize the perfect opportunity to hear what your employees have to say with our user-friendly online Engagement Survey. In fact, visit workplaces.org and embark on the journey to a healthier, even flourishing workplace. The time is now to gain valuable insights and pave the way for a productive summer ahead. As a certified best Christian workplace, elevate your impact and enjoy the benefits of heightened productivity, attract top talent, and enhance employee participation. Take the step forward towards excellence because when you listen, you lead.

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 just a little more about Dr. John Reynolds. John’s the first president of Los Angeles Pacific University. He served as CIO and executive vice president for 16 years at Azusa Pacific University before being named president of LAPU in 2018. He founded Azusa Pacific Online University and Azusa Pacific University College, which became the foundation for LAPU. He has undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science and information systems and a Ph.D. in higher education. His research interests include leadership, organization effectiveness, change management, and strategic thinking, and these have resulted in several publications in leadership and strategy, particularly related to nonprofit organizations. In addition to his years of experience in higher ed, John has worked in the mining industry as well as the CIO for World Vision International. He's a regular speaker at conferences throughout the world and serves on a number of nonprofit boards.

So, here’s my conversation with Dr. John Reynolds.

John, it’s really great to have you on the podcast, and I’m looking forward to our conversation today.

John Reynolds: Well, Al, thank you for inviting me, and it's a privilege to be with you and talk with you about what's happening at Los Angeles Pacific University.

Al: So, John, you're the founding president of Los Angeles Pacific University, LAPU, and it's a different model of education, as I've come to understand, over the years. So share with us the origins of LAPU and the unique characteristics of the school, and give us a glimpse of the kind of student that benefits from access to higher education through your university.

John: Sure. Well, thank you for allowing us to explain a little bit about what we are doing here at LAPU. We are unique in some ways, and having been around for only 12 years, which is fairly new for a university, was a response, really, to the 2008 financial crisis. If you were in university at the time, your parents had already done the refis and all the things they needed to do. But just after 2008, there was a huge issue around affordability. And so in response to that, really what we're looking at is how we could make available Christian higher education that was both affordable and accessible. Really, Christian higher ed wasn’t affordable to all. We were looking at and for was the accessibility. And so making a flexible, convenient model available specifically to adults, working adults, who had made a decision to go back and either complete the higher education or start the higher education, a class time of 4:45 on a Monday just didn't work for them. So we needed the flexibility and the convenience. And so the modality for that was online.

And often I'd be asked, saying, “What is it like to be an online school?” Online was the vehicle. We were really looking at providing flexible, convenient, Christian higher education, accessible 24/7. For many of our students, then and now, this is something they will work on at 9 p.m. at night or 4 a.m. in the morning. Hard to run classes at that time, but it is possible using online.

So we actually are totally online. It's what they call an asynchronous model. So there's no set times or anything at any time. We only work with professional programs. We’re really looking at the working adult who's already in a career.

Two types of students, really: those who are seeking to advance their career, either through promotions or salary increases, by attaining a degree; or for those looking to actually change their career. We try and work that flexibility. We run year round, which, again, is a little unusual—six starts a year. So we don't want to wait too long for somebody who wants to start a program and then has to wait for six months. Everything starts every eight weeks.

Just some demographics would be interesting over the years. We’re just around 3,000 students now, but primarily Hispanic women with what I'd call help degrees. These are relation degrees: allied health sciences, education, social work, etc. And the median age is about 34. So this is a much older population than you would normally find in a traditional institution. For many, it's been regarded as a university of second chances. Most of our students come in with a partial degree, maybe a third quarter or a third, and then they would transfer in from a previous college or university.

So, in essence, the school was really designed for the student. This is the gap we saw with students. We wanted to give quality Christian academic opportunities to those who, perhaps, would not have had it before.

Al: Wow. Well, I love that, John. Thanks so much.

And LAPU has been a ministry partner of the Best Christian Workplaces since 2019. And what was your catalyst for, and decision for, starting to focus on workplace culture, even really at the beginning? What did you hope to learn from surveying your employees as you began to really grow LAPU?

John: Yeah. Al, throughout my career, the health of the organization, climate surveys, the other terms we have used have really been important to me. A healthy workplace, an engaged workforce relates directly to the impact and the meaning of the organization. So personally, as a leader, it was really important to me.

The other concern I've always had as a leader is that often, especially when you have longevity of your leadership team, you often get into kind of a group-think model. Everything is good. We are healthy, and the odd instances are just anomalies. We don't have to worry about that. And so this idea of actually having an external review of the health of the organization, often confirming or affirming what we already knew, is really important with it.

So we've actually had decided right back in 2019, five years ago, to look at some external metric on a consistent basis. And so in November of every year, this is what we do. We engage your organization to help us to move through that. We measure where we are based on where we've been and where we want to be on the future.

The last few years, obviously, that's also helped us to help focus strategically what our interventions are going to be around our most important people as a people. As anyone would know, higher education is a very people-oriented industry. And so to help us think through what our goals are for the following year and being strategic about that is critical.

The other piece that's been really important is, I think, the flourishing framework because that aligns very closely with our vision for a healthy workforce, a good culture that's aligned with our core values. We have three core values: exemplary, learning, and caring. And you can see how all three of those would align well with a flourishing institution.

Al: Yeah. I love that. Yeah. Exemplary, learning, and caring. Wow. Sounds like characteristics of Jesus. Anyway—

John: One would hope, right?

Al: Well, so, your emphasis on workplace culture certainly paid off in the last five years, John. And, your university has moved into the healthy range of engagement, actually, and it's now beyond into a flourishing workplace. So I'll just say congratulations. And we know from our recent state of the Christian workplace report that workplace culture in Christian higher ed is often below the range of healthy on average, and it's below our other sectors. So you've really done a great job to move your own workplace culture into a very healthy, even flourishing place.

So, in the past few years of measuring employee engagement, what did you and your leadership team learn from the Survey results? What did you decide to focus on? You mentioned it helps you with your initiatives and your goals, but so give us an example of a couple that you've worked on to focus on improvement.

John: Well, thank you. Again, we're very pleased as well that we've made the progress. And we have now data to show that we have made some progress.

I think the first and most-critical issue for me is that we have a team that owns and is committed to a healthy workforce. This is not an intervention we take lightly. It's not a checkbox for us. It's an important part of our management year as leaders to use this data and to be guided forward as we plan for the year to come. As you would know, the first year’s showed good results, reasonable results, I would say, but not results, again, that would match what we would aspire to with our core values of being caring, learning, and exemplary.

And of course, then in 2020, four years ago, almost to this month, we had the pandemic, and that had us rethink what engagement looked like. We were early adopters for a permanent remote workforce. In September 2020, we actually made a decision with the board to actually become a remote virtual university, which was only, at that time, five months, six months into the pandemic. But we had no intentions of actually coming back to being an in-the-office campus environment. That actually had us rethinking, then, what does it mean to have workforce engagement?

So considering we had a baseline from 2019 that helped us identify our focus and intentionality, I think both of those characteristics are really important for anyone using any form of climate surveys. How do you focus and be intentional? Again, you just don't want it to be part of the process. It has to be something that leaders actually take seriously and move forward with it.

So the Survey became a codified goal for our annual management plan. In fact, we just started working through our fiscal year ‘25 plan, and that's to a large extent the people interventions are founded on what our results of our last Survey and then combined with what I would do every year as a president, listening tour with the organization.

So the input from the pulse survey has been essential. We have that every January. And those two things help us move forward.

To give an example, two years ago, there was an obvious Survey result that managers actually felt excluded from leadership. We were meeting as a senior leadership team. The whole organization was meeting regularly, but managers felt they were kind of a lost-in-transition group. And so based on that data, we developed an intervention. Once every six weeks, I have a special master class with just the managers to work through that and areas like conflict resolution and so on. So the data over the years has helped us refine, really, what we do in the future.

What we also found that has helped us align with some of our strategic objectives, we have a shared-equity leadership model for inclusion and belonging of our employees. And so as we met, for example, yesterday, we start to look at different interventions that align with confirmed, I guess, with the data, help us move forward as well.

Al: Yeah. John, I really like what you're saying here. And how would you know if your managers were not feeling like they were a part of the process if you didn't ask them and get some good data to look at? Yeah.

John: Yeah. That would almost be impossible, especially in a virtual world, right?

Al: Yeah.

John: It’s not just like everyone sends a message to the president saying, “Oh, by the way, I don't feel included.” So it's just not something that we would actually be able to identify without the data, without good interpretation, and then actually showing it as being critical to some of the many other important people issues we have to address.

Al: Yeah. And I love your intervention, as you call it, that you've actually, you meet with your managers to make sure that they feel included and special in that regard.

Well, John, all employee-engagement surveys are important to help leaders access the health of their organization. But a survey is only one time a year. And that's what we recommend is an annual approach. And for a flourishing workplace, I'm sure there are some practices or habits that you and your team put in place on a more frequent basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis. So I'd love to hear some of the examples that you have that take place to help sustain healthy communication, to help sustain each of the FLOURISH factors on a day-to-day basis. So what are some of the practical steps that our listeners can implement in their organization to help move forward to a flourishing workplace?

John: Yeah. I think the first characteristic attribute, I would say, is that people work is not an event. So you cannot just have once-a-year survey and then leave it for another 10 months, 11 months. It's an ongoing process. So really, I see the Survey as being a census point for us to measure where things are.

So some of the other things that we do to actually make this a process versus an event is, for example, we meet as a community every Monday morning. That is a time of devotion for about 15 minutes and then a time of community for about 10, 15 minutes, where I share events, what's happening in my life, important celebrations—we’re just celebrating an accreditation visit—celebrating results, and sharing some of the downsides that we're going to have to adjust: financial plans or whatever it is. So I found the weekly intervention, the weekly time with the whole community gives a sense of transparency and trust.

And again, that data has shown itself in the Survey, and there’d be something we see an increase in, we really attribute it to the kinds of interventions. We use technology. We use a product called Slack, and that is being well utilized. And except, we have a very young employee group, so that technology works really well for them. In Slack, you can have channels, and we have everything from the traditional “how do we work everyday meetings,” etc. to a channel for kudos, if you want to give kudos to a particular employee. So it's a time to celebrate. I have a channel as a president where I can share once a week anything from International Happiness Day last week to how do we celebrate International Women's Month? and what that means for us as an organization. There’s a channel for foodies, a way for those to find the best places to find tacos nearby. And then we have one that's called random, which could be anything from we had hail in Southern California yesterday to something else.

So these channels help create community in a virtual world. We have employees in two countries, and the other country does not border. We actually have an employee in Chile. And then we are spread kind of over 20 states within the U.S. And this is faculty and staff. So we, in fact, only have two people actually in the office right now.

We run a leadership-development program for about 12, 15 of our team leaders every year. That's a senate program. And a lot of the content for the program is actually influenced by what we receive as input from the Survey. Of course, the president's leadership master class. It’s a time that I, just what I’m reading and I'm thinking's important. It's a lunchtime session, and people can attend.

But, really, the outcomes we're looking for is transparency and trust. Can they trust us as leaders? Are we transparent? And again, we saw that in this recent Survey just how many times it appeared in the comments, which, again, we see is we’re not there yet, but it is moving us in the right direction.

The other thing is even in the results. We shared the results with the entire organization about two weeks ago, and then yesterday with our senior leadership team. We go into a lot of detail about what the results are telling us and where we see opportunities to improve in the year to come.

Al: Yeah. And as you mentioned earlier, John, you understand how a healthy, flourishing workplace culture translates to the work you're doing so that the students experience, again, exemplary, learning, and caring as a result.

So, well, these days, there's lots of conversations about how to engage employees in remote- and hybrid-staffing models. And many organizations are saying, “Well, we need to bring everybody back to the office.” And then there's those that aren't. And your students are all online, and your faculty is now online, and there's two of you in the office, you know, so… And there's, what?, 150 or so faculty and staff at the university. You know, so most of your staff is working remotely in this hybrid model. And yet your school, your faculty, and staff tell us that there's a high degree of employee engagement. So what ideas can you share with other leaders who are struggling with engagement in this remote or hybrid work environment? How do you keep your team's focus on connecting in an online environment, for example? And again, as you say, there's high levels of transparency and trust, and yet you're not face to face. So how does that work?

John: Yeah. That's a really good question and one that I think every leader's struggling with right now, even four years after the beginning of the pandemic. What we, I think, we all learned in the pandemic when we were suddenly having to work in a remote environment, is that I think our leadership styles had to change. So moving from having goals and results and being able to measure activity as best you can by walking around and seeing people being busy, we couldn't do that any longer, right? So I think that what happened for me, and I think for many of our leaders, is that we moved from goals and results to how do we attain trust? How do we trust those that we have working for us? How do we empower them to be successful? And then, how do we actually have absolute clarity on the outcomes we are expecting, not just the results? And what we found is by moving to trust, empowering, or enabling and outcomes, not saying how the outcomes needed to be achieved, but actually what they were, that gave a certain amount of freedom to the employees and how they could achieve it and work around their schedules. So how do you get kids to school in a pandemic? How do you actually work with two, both you and your spouse, perhaps working at home and making it all happen?

So I mentioned before, and it may surprise, in our entire university group, we actually only have two people in the office, and they would be what we call the traditional receptionist, kind of office-management-type group. We've had to be real intentional about community and engagement and how we make that happen. We do offer some hoteling options here. We have one employee who has twin 2-year-olds, so he finds time in the office really useful. So we have to adapt for that.

But really, we have a small team that actually looks at community as an outcome, and engagement as an outcome. They will handle everything. As I said, we have devotions, these weekly games using Kahoot! We use meals. DoorDash has become our best friend in terms of getting meals out there. Amazon cards for Employee Appreciation Day. It's one of the things they did. I've just received at home a little packet with three of these Peeps sweets, and it says, “Tell your peeps about Jesus,” that kind of thing. So almost, I'd say biweekly, every two weeks, we receive something that just reminds us of who we are as a community. And we spend a lot of time—virtual Christmas-decorating competitions, virtual Easter-egg competitions. We are a very competitive group. I found actually competition works really well in creating community and engagement.

I've also mentioned their technology. We've had to actually find one platform that everybody feels comfortable with. And so that has worked with us with Slack.

But it also has its downsides. So we've had to look carefully. We have people across time zones, from Florida to California. So what is the expectation if somebody in California calls a 4 p.m. meeting for the person in Florida, where it's 7 p.m.? So we've had to put some guidelines together on how we work as a community. For example, we never have a meeting where video’s switched off. All meetings have videos switched on. We have a core set of meeting hours. We have several guidelines on how we call meetings and how we can actually make things happen.

But in general, and you probably hear the steam come through all the time, it doesn't just happen. You have to have somebody who champions it, owns it, and actually works at it all the time. I'm constantly surprised at how innovative they can be in terms of utilizing, the one thing is to say, it seems to be apparent, is competition to keep this community engaged.

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 John Reynolds.

Well, John, I love this idea, and I think for our listeners, it’d be interesting to reflect on. You've got a team of people who actually focus on community. And it just reminds me earlier in my career, and you kind of, I think, we're alike in some ways, those aren't naturally things that I would think of, but I knew that they were important, and you know they're important, so you actually have a group of people who focus on building community to create these competitive events that really that create community. So that's something for all leaders to think about. And yeah, it really does make a difference. There's no question about it.

John: You really do have to adapt your style. I'm a technology background, so a dark room with nobody else for 12 hours is actually a good place for me to be. You can't lead like that, right? So you bring a good team around you to help you be accountable for being engaged with the community.

And it reflects our values, right? So the value of caring says, how can you care if you're not a community? So we care both externally for our students and for those who work with us. But caring is also internal. We care for each other, and so you cannot do that if you're not part of the community.

Al: That's great, John.

So, another area that you've invested in is leadership 360 assessments for you and your top leaders, and developing action plans for growth. And it takes some humility as a leader to be open to feedback and to identify areas for improvement. So I'm just curious, and share with our listeners why you decided to do leadership 360 assessments. How has the process of receiving and acting on feedback helped in the growth for you and for the leaders on your senior team?

John: Well, again, you'll hear the theme of looking forward at an external assessment of what you may or may not already know. So we've been pretty consistent about running this process now for several years. We alternate between one year being myself as the president and my direct reports, and then the other year being for the senior leadership team. We kind of stayed on the two-year cycle because we just feel that if there's going to be something that we'd like to see improvement or development on, it probably takes for a leader about a couple of years for them to make that happen, because most of these are fine tuning. If they were bigger challenges, we wouldn't need a leadership assessment. So that's, we're looking for fine tuning in terms of moving forward. And actually is it almost even created a bit of a shared language in the organization as well. Somebody referred in a meeting yesterday to the spider chart for the leadership assessment and actually spoke about that. So it gives you a shared language, which is something that, again, I find really useful.

We have a diverse, like many organizations, we have a diverse work group. And so people have different styles, competencies, different chemistry. They work differently. We hope character is not a negotiable, but we need to find out where the gaps are, where the blind spots are, and work them.

And I found it’d been particularly useful in terms of setting kind of improvement goals. So again, these are not “I need you to pick up six competencies,” but say “How would you improve your relationship with your stakeholders, because I see they’re coming out.” So it gives us something objective to have to work on as well.

Ongoing performance reviews. It's just part of who we are as leaders. And in some ways it tends to be a little implicit. We think we know. This gives us an explicit kind of framework to say, “I thought this was an issue. Now I know it's an issue.” And so you can have a much, I think, a much more informed and valuable conversation with you and your team around them.

Al: Great feedback. Yeah. Thanks, John.

So, yeah, one of the hallmarks of LAPU is reaching students who may not have had the access to a traditional model of Christian residential university experience. And I've noticed that 32% of your students are the first ones in their family to attend college, and that creates, you know, its own set of issues. But also, you're rated as the top 10 military-friendly schools. So what do you and your team, what are you learning as a result of this really unique, diverse student body? What training or support do you offer staff, for example, and how are they able to engage students from this variety of cultural backgrounds?

John: Yes, that's firstly, just internally we work, we have five generations within our workforce. So everyone from Gen Zers through to baby boomers. And so internally, we have diverse age. We primarily are female, a woman in our staffing, and fairly young. Our student range, as I said, is primarily women Hispanic over the age of 34. That changes all the time. And so the ability to actually understand diversity of everything from faith—Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, North American evangelical—is important for us.

Yeah. And there's so much even in terms of programs. So if we think about products and programs, we actually had, as an example, an information-technology program, which we stopped. What we found is that the information-technology program is primarily, the students who are into those programs are a white male under the age of 25. Not our demographic. And so being able to understand our demographic and actually work to it is important.

What we have done in terms of different groups is we have a student-success group, which is where a student on entering the university is assigned to a student coach. That coach actually works with them until they graduate. So the understanding of who they are, everything from the diversity of their background, their faith, possibility, their home circumstances.

And then we have a shared-equity leadership model where everybody is responsible for meaning, purpose, and impact to the university and how that actually is manifested, as well as how everyone feels they are included and they belong. We work on two very simple principles that every person is created in the image of God and love your neighbor. Everyone is a child of God, and we work from there. It's a changing demographic. It's a changing world. And probably the diversity and the issues are first generation. And I would say probably age and economic circumstances are becoming the bigger issue. But again, if you have your core values well-defined, you can align how you do what and where you go with something that’s very evident and explicit to all.

Al: John, you've introduced this idea of a shared leadership-equity model. You've mentioned it a couple of times. You said that, well, you look at people from a standpoint of the image of God to love your neighbor. Tell us a little more of what you mean by the shared-equity leadership model.

John: Sure. Yeah. For many, if you have a department of customer service, then customer service, when a customer says, “I have a problem,” you direct them to that department. It's not my issue. I don't have to handle customer service as a department. And I think for many, the DEI perspective along inclusion as being, I think, left to a department towards an area to actually manage. And so we wanted it to become more of a mindset and a culture, something we thought about every day. And so this kind of shared-equity model.

So every individual in the organization is responsible for creating a place where one can belong and be included with the image of God and loving each other. And what we do intentionally is almost—not almost—every senior leadership meeting, we start with what has gone well in terms of certain things people have tried and are working with, from reading of books together as a team to examples of how we’re recruiting to make sure that we keep, really, an organization or a university that reflects what I hope heaven one day would look like in terms of diversity and where things are.

And it really stretches to many things. We've just started a program for many of our students, some of which actually, they live in their cars—they really are homeless or surf couching—and where we can actually arrange for them to get a laptop for under $50. That to me is a diversity issue. We have students who actually are economically deprived, and so we are able to give them something that actually helps them have equity with the other students in the organization. So really, the principle, and it's well researched, is that we've moved to from a department or to an individual or to an individual group to every leader's responsibilities, how do I actually ensure that those under my span of care, those who follow me, are treated as Jesus would like us to treat any other person?

Al: Thanks, John. That's really helpful. I really like that. From sharing what's going well to reflecting, I'd love to have all of our workplaces reflect what heaven would look like here on earth. Yeah. So what a great vision.

We've known each other for nearly 20 years. You're a remarkable leader, and you really have delved into great conversations. But I'm really interested in your own formation as a leader. Help us and help our listeners understand a little bit more about the way you've looked at leadership. I talk about leaders who shepherd the flock that God has given to them, and the importance of leading a flourishing culture. So I'm interested in learning, you know, how you've grown through this season of leadership through your previous seasons of leadership. Share with us a few reflections of what has influenced your own growth as a leader. You clearly have, I think, just very mature observations about leadership and the importance of leadership. What were some of the catalysts that you've experienced that has spurred you on to your growth as a leader?

John: Well, it's not a topic I find easy to speak about, but let me start with my definition of a leader. The definition of a leader is they have followers, not a title. I've never seen anybody with a title “leader” on their business card, but they have followers. And so our role as leaders is to ensure we create a space, enough meaning, gain enough purpose, enough impact that people want to follow our vision of where we’re going.

Personally, for me, it's always a case of never stop learning. There's no leader I've known that says, “I’ve got it all. I don't need to buy the new book.” Everything is brought there. There's always something to learn. Therefore, you will buy the new book, and you will see what you may have missed. So reflection, being able to reflect, to learn, and then to execute.

I think for me as a leader, following on with that is the sense of having never arrived. I always feel that I'm at the bottom of my or the start of my learning process for a leader, and for that, I have to be pretty agile with what I do because the world's changing. As the world changes, work changes, organizations change, and I have to be somebody who can actually identify, gain the insights, and move on.

I've tried to be curious. I've tried to simplify. I'm a simplification or a pragmatic guy. One aspect that's been very important to me in my development leader is having good mentors and coaches. In some ways, I've actually even tended to take on some of the actions on how I respond by putting my finger to my chin or whatever it is with it. I found that time over time, different mentors, different coaches, you know, I've had the privilege of having people like Dr. Ted Engstrom be a mentor, etc. But again, it comes back to that fundamental issue of just being able to learn.

The other aspect, not the only other aspect, the other aspect is I come from a holiness background, and so being fair and just is really important to me. Equity’s really important to me. So I've been able to actually handle things as if every person is a precious child of God, being fair about and being just. That doesn't mean that everything is an act of grace, but I need to be accountable one day to God and say, “I did as well as I could at the time.”

And then perhaps, just perhaps, the last piece is my personal mission statement, and I presume most leaders have these, is, really, to equip and to encourage leaders to their God-given potential. And so I would see most of what I do in leadership is saying, “How do I encourage, and how do I equip, and how do I move people forward?” My joy is having people that have actually worked with me or have reported to me actually take positions that are presidents of other universities, etc. That's spreading the Kingdom. It's more than just a job. It's actually, how do we create leaders for the future?

So, hold a light grip on your title, and find the time to lead your followers.

Al: Yeah. John, thanks. Well, gosh, that was fantastic. And yeah, I love even your own core values there. You mentioned fairness and justice as part of the holiness background, your faith background, and how you've lived that out in this role that you've got at Los Angeles Pacific University.

Well, we've learned so much today. I just think about, going back to the initial discussion about the university, who you're serving, how you’ve used the Best Christian Workplace Engagement Survey to really impact the organization for good, to help you be strategic and focused on and intentional about creating a healthy workplace culture, how the pandemic has really shaped a new approach to working remotely, and the practices that you've put in place to help make sure that is working effectively. That's just that your hybrid-work experiences are very helpful for all of us as leaders. The importance of 360 assessments, looking to that external source for assessment, and how we can just get trapped into group thinking when we don't have that external source. And the work you're doing to provide fairness and justice to your students, as well as your faculty and staff, through creating just a great workplace experience.

So, John, this has just been a great experience. Let me ask you one last thing. What would you like to leave our audience? What would you like to add that we've talked about?

John: Leadership, as I said, it requires followers. Leadership can't be done on your own. And I probably haven't mentioned enough in this conversation how important it is to have the right team with you, who are aligned with your values, align with your organization's values, and are also intentional about caring and overseeing their particular spans of care. Obviously, I don't have the entire organization reporting to me, as any leader CEO person does. So the idea of actually it’s got to be a mindset and a culture, and you can't do that if you don't have the right team to do it. And so it cascades down. So that probably, if I haven't said it before, the right team to make it happen, leadership’s not a solo deal. I would just encourage leaders do that first and then move on from them.

Al: Great advice.

John, thanks so much for your contribution today. Most of all, I appreciate your commitment over these years to be innovative in Christian higher education as you invest in the lives of students and also those that you lead. So thanks for taking your time out today and speaking into the lives of so many listeners.

John: It’s a pleasure, Al. Always good to talk to you. I love telling our story, and I hope it's a, yeah, I hope it's a gift and it's useful to your listeners.

Al: Yeah. Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to my conversation with John Reynolds, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

You can find ways to connect with him and links to everything we talked about 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 workplace cultures, please email me, al@workplaces.org.

And leaders, if you want to improve your leadership and expand your organization's impact for good, to 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 within your own organization to discover and improve the health of your workplace culture. If you're interested in learning more, go to workplaces.org and request a sample report.

Outro: The Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast is sponsored by Best Christian Workplaces. If you need support building a flourishing workplace culture, please visit workplaces.org for more information.

We'll see you again next week for more valuable content to help you develop strong leaders and build a flourishing workplace culture.

Al: And join me next week as I talk with Steve Woodworth about his recently released book on leadership succession, called Lost in Transition.