Transcript: Top Reasons to Ditch Culture Gimmicks for Honest, Reliable Data // Kevin East, Mentoring Alliance

Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast

Top Reasons to Ditch Culture Gimmicks for Honest, Reliable Data
May 8, 2023

Kevin East

Intro: Do you think trying different gimmicks will dramatically improve your workplace culture? Well, let's go a level higher. Do you think paying your people more by itself will improve the health of your culture? Well, today we talk with a leader who now understands what is most important when it comes to creating a flourishing workplace culture.

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 create engaged, flourishing workplaces. Thanks for joining us today.

My question today is, how do you build a foundation for a healthy organization? Well, today on the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast, we'll learn from a leader who has built a flourishing workplace culture over a decade. Listen in to learn how you can stay the course as you value your employees and keep a growing organization focused on its vision.

I'm delighted to welcome Kevin East to the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast today. Kevin is the president of the Mentoring Alliance, which serves children and families in East and Central Texas. The ministry includes high-quality afterschool programs, summer camps, and dedicated mentoring relationships. Kevin has served as the president for the Mentoring Alliance for 10 years, and prior to that, he was the executive director of ministries at Pine Cove, a camping ministry in Texas. Kevin and his wife Stephanie have five—count them, five—children. They adopted two of their children after serving as foster parents, and they have a heart for mentoring children and providing godly love, security, and healing.

Well, Kevin, welcome to the Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast.

Kevin East: Thanks, Al. So fun to be here with you today.

Al: Well, it's great. I'm looking forward to our conversation. And, you know, as I said, you've been there now for 10 years, and you've really seen some positive changes that have happened over those years in the ministry. But first, let's go back to the first year or two. And I remember those years. They were painful years, weren't they? Growing years. What was the situation in the organization that as you became president, what were a couple of the challenges and opportunities that you saw?

Kevin: Well, it's funny, Al. I think most leaders have their stories of their bumps and bruises and the horror stories of kind of what they walked into. And mine was similar. I mean, I walked into an organization that from the board structure on down, they had developed three different boards somehow as a governing structure for the organization, with 34 board members that didn't really get along. They had run out of money. They had a half million dollars in debt, and they had laid off half their staff. And the staff at the time was kind of people from all different faith backgrounds, from their different competency levels, that didn't get along. And that was kind of day one. And we just kind of started trying to love people and lead people towards the mission that God had given us.

I remember quoting from the very beginning with our staff and with our board that we just need to get healthy. I think it had come from Pat Lencioni’s book The Advantage of just remembering the importance of organizational health. And so I just really stressed from the beginning health. The problem, though, was, Al, as you well know, even though I talked about it, not much happened for quite a long time. And so I didn't really know how to get us there. I just knew we needed to get there, and I didn't really know how. That was unfortunate.

Al: Well, you started working with us in 2015, so it's been eight years at this point, so eight out of those 10 years. And your organization has moved from lower scores in the early years to being a certified best Christian workplace in 2018, so three years later. And now you've continued, and you're a flourishing workplace. And I'll just say congratulations. I know it's been hard work. And that progression shows a commitment over time to pay attention to employee engagement and to keep working on the improvement of your workplace culture. As you say, you knew you wanted it; how do you get there?

Well, and I know it's not just one action that causes this kind of improvement. So can you point to a few decisions or leadership commitments that you made that were instrumental in the improved health of your workplace culture? How did you keep it moving over the years?

Kevin: Yeah. Let me back up and kind of tell you how we got there. So for us, I came in to lead the ministry in 2013. Like you said, in 2015 we finally engaged BCW to say, “Hey, help us understand where we are.” And what I loved as a leader is it gave me data. Up until that point, it was just all anecdotal. I would talk to people. I'm like, “Okay. We're going to try to make this more fun. And we're going to try to make this more engaging,” or love our people better or whatever it was. And it just seemed to be, like, driving a truck in mud. Like, it just wasn't getting anywhere.

And so 2015, we met you and your team. I'm proud to say all these years later, I think I'm your sales manager for East Texas, Central Texas at least. I've told so many people about BCW—pastors, CEOs of ministries, all sorts of things—because I firmly believe in this. And I'll tell you why, Al. For us, 2015, we got our first score, and it was 3.72, which wasn't good, out of five. I believe that's toxic, if I remember correctly.

Al: I remember. Yeah, right under that 3.75 level. Absolutely.

Kevin: Yeah. So then we tried hard, Al. We formed a culture crew. We did all sorts of stuff. In the second year, we went down to 3.67, and I was like, “What is going on here?” And so we bumped along the next year, a little bit more, maybe 3.81, something like that, until we finally got certified as a best Christian workplace. But then it still kind of just, we hit, like, 4.08, 4.12, somewhere in there. It just kind of, for a few years, was sitting there. Until this past year, we finally broke through to being a flourishing workplace, I think at 4.32 or something like that.

And the reason why I tell that story a little bit is that for us, honestly, we tried, I would call them different gimmicks. We tried different things, parties, surveys, whatever it was. And for us it boiled down to leadership changes of just—when I came in, we had to hire a bunch of new people. We did. And a lot of them were neat, godly people, friendly people, outgoing people, relational people. But some of them lacked really core leadership competencies of follow-through ability, of good communication, of clarity, of all the stuff that people really appreciate from their leader above them.

And so what I would tell you is what didn't work was the gimmicky stuff that I thought would work, the, I don't know, putt-putt tournaments or things like that, that we still do. They’re very fun. But on a day-to-day basis, it was really getting key leaders in there that were trusted both with their character and with their competence. That's when our culture really started to improve.

Al: Yeah. Key leaders, yeah. Character, competence.

Well, so share with us now how your senior leadership team works differently. Sometimes assembling a team requires some pretty hard decisions. You've made some hard decisions. So how did you then begin to build a team that enables flourishing? Have you hired or promoted, you know, a different kind of leader who would actually make a great culture and then release them to work into their gifting? What was your process there?

Kevin: Yeah. So probably, like, in 2016, ‘17, ‘18, somewhere in there, I gathered a group of people, and we created what we call our team values. These were different than our core values, but they’re really—we came up with nine different team values that were like, “Hey, look, if you work here, here's how we're really covenanting to work together here.” So we have one of them that's called Celebrate the One. Like, we're going to celebrate the small things, the goals hit, the tasks accomplished, the lives transformed. We're going to celebrate things. Al, for me, I don't know about for you, I'm not one to stop and celebrate often. I like to get on to the next thing, kind of conquer-the-next-mountain-type thing. And so we had to name that as a team value. Like, we need to celebrate here. We named another one Follow Jesus. We want to live well. We want to submit all areas of our life to Him.

So these nine team values, we are like, “Okay. What do we want this culture to be like?” And we just kind of identified it. We named them. We created a hero statement, like Follow Jesus. And then parroted with each one. Like, Live Well is underneath Follow Jesus. And then, a small definition that every word and then maybe the one- or two-sentence definition was picked on purpose for all nine things.

And then, over time we started hiring people that really already emulated those team values for us. Like, one of them is Honor Up, Down, and All Around, we call it. Well, that's because before, people weren't responding well to emails. They weren't on time to meetings, things like that that are just kind of basic competencies. But when you're at an executive-level organization and you're not doing those things, it's really frustrating people underneath you. So when we named that as a team value, like, “Hey, look, we're going to honor up, down, and all around. And what we mean by that is we're going to be on time. We're going to give grace before we assume the worst in people. We're going to communicate well.” And so when we hire people on, we said, “This is how we roll here at Mentoring Alliance.” And then over time, we're like, “Hey, we're going to promote this person. We're going to hire in this person. Or we’re going to promote this person.” And it took us a while, but we really started to get a team of people that really emulated those team values. And now it's just kind of part of who we are. We talk about them often, but they're really emulated in our senior leadership.

Al: Mm, wow. Yeah. So team values. Kevin, we’ll oftentimes talk about core values as an organization, but you've even got team values for your senior leadership team, is that right?

Kevin: Well, we have team values for our whole organization, so when we hire people—

Al: Oh, the whole organization.

Kevin: Yeah. —we interview people with those nine team values in place. When we do reviews on every staff person, we go through those nine team values. We celebrate them. We give goofy awards on them.

And I tell you partly why we needed them, Al, I felt like is we are an intentionally multiethnic ministry, which I love and I believe in. I think it's beautiful. And I think it's one of the most difficult things I've ever tried to be a part of ever, because people from different ethnic backgrounds just come at life differently. Not right or wrong, just different.

So, for instance, our ministry’s based in Texas, so you have a lot of Hispanic people, a lot of African American people, a lot of white people on staff. And then other cultures, Filipino, things like that. But on our staff you might have in some cultures, you want to honor the relationship, so you're not worried about your next meeting. So you're here in relationship. That's great. But an organizational setting, like, “Okay. How are we going to operate here?” because there's so many different perspectives. Some people weren't good at emails. That's just not how they communicate. Well, that frustrates people. So it's like we needed to say, “Okay. Here, it's not right or wrong; it's just how we operate here.” We're going to start meetings on time. We're going to be on time for meetings. Like, it's not right or wrong; it’s just how we operate here. And then once we kind of named that and identified that, then it kind of became the expectation for all staff, which I think brought clarity.

Al: Yeah, clarity. So important.

Well, you know, at the Mentoring Alliance, you've expanded now to serve children and families beyond your original core there in Tyler. And now you have programs in Waco. And as you've grown, your workplace culture has flourished and has continued to flourish. So are there some specific steps that you've taken with your expansion to make sure that your values and vision and the core of your organization stays intact as you grow?

Kevin: Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you, Al, when we first started doing the Survey, I was, like, fighting tooth and nail to not have to replace certain key leaders or things like that. Like, I just was like, “Man, that just makes me sick to my stomach, thinking about it.” I didn't want to make those changes, so I tried all the stuff around that until, finally, we just had to address the obvious. And that's kind of the big learning lesson for me. Although I'd read it in books, it starts with leadership. We experienced it firsthand. So as we grow, now we're just very keen on who we're getting in leadership positions.

We talk about our culture often. We might be flourishing right now, but in my experience, culture can just shift overnight. Like, it's not guaranteed it'll be flourishing next year. So it's like a small plant that you're constantly nourishing. I would emphasize a small plant because they're so fragile. It's like your workplace culture can be so fragile, where something’s done wrong, a wrong hire or things like that, it can just make the whole thing start wobbling. And so for us we see it as a small plant that we're constantly having to nurture and to watch closely, how are we doing? And just to make sure that the staff know this is important to us, so we're going to talk about it often. We're going to do informal surveys. We're going to do formal surveys, you know, all sorts of things to keep our pulse on how our team's doing.

I wish it was as easy, honestly, Al, for me to say, like, we just love our people well. I hear people say that, other organizational leaders, and maybe I’m just not great at doing that, honestly. I feel like I'm really—like, I love the mission that we're about, and I have to make myself stop to remember that God cares about the people that are executing that mission as opposed to just the mission. And so what I love about, again, this whole process with BCW is that it reminds me that people matter; that they're important; that I need to stop, slow down, listen to them, love them. And to me this process has kind of given me kind of actionable ways to do that, as opposed to just kind of ethereal saying, “We love our people.” I need that brought down to the bottom shelf. I need help with what that looks like, honestly.

Al: Yeah. Oh, I appreciate that.

So, again, you know, as you've looked at the even growing now to Waco, you've even transferred some of your staff to help make sure that DNA is in place. Do I remember that correctly?

Kevin: Yeah, that's right. When we're going to plant new places—I mean, we're about to open a different city here soon. We're looking to plant. We've identified some key leaders that, really, we feel like they have the DNA. We call it the DNA of MA, of Mentoring Alliance. They have the DNA of MA, and we're going to send them out there and start building it around them is kind of planting it there as opposed to hiring kind of new people that we can't see just as staff. Like, it's important to us what we're establishing there, so we're sending the key people to help establish it.

Al: I trust you’re enjoying our podcast today. We’ll be right back after an important word for leaders.

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Welcome back to my conversation with Kevin East, the CEO of Mentoring Alliance.

Well, I like your point there. It really starts with leadership and being keen on who is put in leadership positions even as you grow and expand. That's important. Yeah.

Kevin: Yeah.

Al: So in the nonprofit sector, you know, we see organizations struggle to get compensation to their employees many times. And Mentoring Alliance is well above its peers in terms of several of the components of our rewarding-compensation factor that we measure: medical plan, PTO, keeping highly capable staff, rewarding top performers. So what drives your compensation philosophy? The sector you're in isn't well known for even having a compensation philosophy, let alone having people that are satisfied with their levels of compensation and benefits. So how has your board taken a stance on this emphasis?

Kevin: Yeah. Well, I think, unfortunately, I'd probably say we got around it the wrong way. We went backwards in a sense. Because I didn't want to deal with leadership issues, we tried doing other things. We paid better. And look, we wanted to take care of our staff. We knew it's a competitive work environment. It's been that way for years for us. We wanted to take care—we wanted to provide great insurance. When we hear of different perks that organizations offer, we really want to consider each one and to go, “Okay. You know what? We feel like that's reasonable. We're going to do that.” And so I've been pushed at times out of my comfort zone to add certain holidays to our mix or to provide—paternity leave is not something I'd heard of until a few years ago. Like, paternity leave was a thing. I didn't even know that. I mean, I had kids. I took a week off work. I went back to work. I didn't know that paternity leave was a thing. And so as we look at all these different things, we started putting in place different ones. And our staff appreciated it while our scores were still just certified, not flourishing, but certified.

Every year, Al, I would look at, you know—y’all make these circles so easy to understand. The smallest circles have the least impact on your overall organizational culture. And here I am, somebody who has to raise millions of dollars a year to make this whole ministry work, and I’m like, we’re paying people well, and that’s such a small circle. I’d be like, come on, man. I want that to be a bigger circle. I want this to impact our culture better. So we have these bigger circles to the left side of the graph, and this small circle to the right, and that small circle was our compensation things. But it is something we did. But honestly, I probably tried to address those things before I addressed the leadership things, and those things have just stayed in place after we've changed the leadership. That's probably how we got to that place. It just shows more mistakes on my part and more inaction on my part for a long period of time, and people get paid better as a result.

Al: Your point is really a good one. It's not, you know, just by paying doesn't create a flourishing workplace. You know, it's other things. Yeah.

Well, another area in which your scores are really high now relative to other peers is valuing diversity. You've even brought that up in our conversation so far. And we know that diversity is God's design—every tribe, every nation, as we read in Revelation. And we invite and embrace diverse voices to the table if we're really going to see innovation and creativity, from my perspective. So what does this value of diversity mean to your staff team and ministry? And how have you grown in your own understanding of the importance of diversity over the long term?

Kevin: Yeah. So we have five core values: Christ centered, biblically grounded, grace based, excellence driven, and multiethnic is the fifth one. And we define each of those things in a very short kind of five- or six-word sentence. We define multiethnic as we pursue oneness with diversity. The phrase came from a thought after reading a book called Oneness Embraced by Dr. Tony Evans years and years ago. But we recognize we're trying to serve kids and families from all over the communities that we serve or try to serve: white kids, black kids, rich kids, poor kids, west side of town, east side of town, this side of the train tracks, that side of the train tracks. And as opposed to looking like what would be easy for me to kind of hire an all-white staff because I know people that know people, we felt like from the very beginning, if we're an intentionally multiethnic ministry, this mosaic of the body of Christ working together will be more potent and more effective in the communities that we serve. So when we always got to that section in the BCW Survey about multiethnicity, or diversity, I should say, on our staff, we got good scores. But honestly, Al, I was surprised they weren't as high as they should be, being an intentionally multiethnic ministry. So again, we listened to our staff. We asked a lot of questions. One of the things that surprised me was some people rated us a little bit lower because they were talking about gender diversity. They didn't see enough women in leadership positions, which I thought was an excellent point. And so over the years, that's also something we've kept our eye on to be intentional about, bringing women that are key leaders, just like men, in our ministry, and not just focusing on different ethnicities, but making sure that now we have three women that provide great leadership, and gosh, half our board is women that are just super sharp, neat, godly people. That was a surprise to me. We had not thought about gender diversity as much as ethnic diversity.

Al: Yeah. And you listened, that’s the key. You asked the question. The Survey kind of brought up the issue. You asked the question, you listened, and yeah, it got better. That's how things work. Yeah.

Well, so many important areas that we've touched on. But fun at work is also important, even if it doesn't always get the attention it deserves. We've talked about that a little bit, too, putt-putt tournaments. I've got my own story about putt-putts in the book. But having fun at work is one of those top-ten areas of employee engagement with you. So what do you think employees are considering when they respond to that question? Are there some intentional ways that your teams bring fun to the everyday work? Tell me a little more about this fun at work.

Kevin: I could be wrong on this one, Al. I mean, we do. We literally have a putt-putt tournament around the Masters. We actually have a red jacket with the MA logo on it, a Mentoring Alliance logo, not a green jacket, that the winner wins. We've done gimmicky stuff like that. And I think over the years some of that stuff's been fun. I would say, though, I'm going to bring it back to leadership. When you have good key leadership in place, it's almost like people can just enjoy themselves better in the workplace, and so, therefore, the fun goes up.

Now, I will say we learned from another organization that's also certified through BCW as a flourishing workplace, another organization that was doing something they called Team Week. It wasn't, like, a staff retreat, but really an intentional time of going to a certain city all together as their staff, with kind of key lessons, like kind of like, you know, you might go to a museum or different key places in a certain city that you want to see that help kind of drive home points, and just the togetherness, fun just happens. People start throwing a football off to the side, or we brought our staff to a basketball game one time, NBA game, and just sitting next to each other and seeing how different people cheer and how they get into the game and some don't, fun just happens. So I would bring it back to kind of the idea of leadership, but also even something significant like a Team Week that we learned from a different organization, bringing staff retreat to a whole new level of intentionality and purpose that really fostered teamship, relationships, and fun during that time is a really key few days for us each year now.

Al: Yeah. Creating those kinds of situations is really, really helpful.

When I was in my previous role as a consulting leader, managing the office here in Seattle and Portland, I knew that we needed to have more fun in the workplace, and I wasn't the one to do it. So I created a fun committee, and I told them, “I don't want you to spend any money, and don't spend a lot of time on this, but we need to have more fun.” And one of the things that they did was they created a putt-putt course through the office, and it was our largest, most important client walked in that day. And I just had the shakes, horror stories, you know, just kind of running through me, thinking, oh, my gosh, they're going to think we're wasting their money, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, our receptionist invited them to play the course, and they came into my office afterwards, and they were just thrilled and so glad that they work with such a fun, innovative organization.

Kevin: That's great.

Al: I wasn't sure how that was going to go.

But, you know, one of the things—you work with our consultant Cary Humphries, and Cary's just a great guy, a great brother in Christ, and a great consulting director, who works with us. And he told me that you enthusiastically—and I know this, too—but you enthusiastically share with other leaders about the value of Best Christian Workplaces and the Employee Engagement Survey process. And let me say thank you. We appreciate you spreading the word with your friends. But, so, what do you tell your peers? What do you talk with them about when it comes to assessing employee engagement? And how does you having a flourishing workplace culture enabled Mentoring Alliance to make a greater difference in the lives of children you serve?

Kevin: Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like I said at the beginning of this conversation, Al, I kind of pride myself on being a sales manager for y'all, with no—I don't get, of course, any pay for it, and our organization doesn't get any benefit for it, and I'm glad we don't—I purely speak about it to people because I believe in it, and the reason why I believe in it is to me the process gives us data that's actionable. Kind of like you knew, Al, “Hey, I'm not the guy to make us have more fun. So here's a committee. Y’all make us have more fun.” I didn't know what I didn't know about our culture. I knew we needed to get healthy, from day one. That was a burden I had. We need to get healthy financially. We need to get healthy at our board level. We need to get healthy with the type of staff we have. We need our organizational culture to be healthy. Everything was about health. We restructured the board. We made one board of seven to 17 board members. We rewrote our bylaws. We changed our charter in the state of Texas. We got rid of a lot of staff, hired on new staff, and yet our culture still wasn't thriving. I knew it; the data showed it wasn’t.

So when I emailed quite a few of my leader friends that are leaders of organizations, ministries, churches, pastor friends, I mean, I've emailed 15 people at a time before, saying, like, “Look, y'all need to check this thing out.” And as you and I were talking ahead of our conversation, we've had quite a few people now who’ve come through, and they're now been on your podcast. They love it. And they say the same things that I do. It just, it brings data. Even now, data within teams as the organization’s grown, and you can see how certain teams are doing, and you go, “Oh my word. Look at this team. It's not doing well. What's going on there?” that's so helpful. It still keeps anonymity for the individuals taking the Survey, but allows us as leaders to see in different cities, different teams, things like that, what's going on. And oftentimes, that data kind of reinforces something we already feel or think. It just now kind of confirms, okay, the data shows it. So that's why I believe in it so much. It gives us data.

Cary Humphries is a gem of a man. I love him. I tell every organization, “If you’re going to use them, make sure you get Cary Humphries.” He's become a friend over the years. He's such a different leader than me, Al. I’m stuck on this type A guy, who's just insensitive sometimes, and I hate that. And Cary’s all nice, and he'll say, “Kevin, you might want to think about that a little bit different.” I’m like, “Uh-oh. That’s Cary’s way of telling me, ‘You're way off base, Kevin. Get back in the game.’” He's so gentle with how he tells me.

Al: Yeah.

Kevin: So that's why I talk about it a lot with people.

Al: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We've all been in those conversations with Cary, yeah. And, yeah, very helpful.

Well, Kevin, we've learned so much from our conversation. Thanks so much. You know, I think about what you walked into: out of money, laid off half the staff, people weren't getting along. How do you fix that? Right? And then you kind of say, well, give me data. You gave me data. And we're able to go from a toxic to maybe a critical moment, or at least on the way to healthy to a healthy and now flourishing workplace culture, and what a difference that makes. I loved the way you talked about your nine team values and the way you were able to identify and communicate just the way you roll, as you described it, and to celebrate, to follow Jesus, to really honor people up and down and around the organization. And how that means we're on time for meetings, we respond to emails, very specific things that make organizations just work and make relationships even more effective in organizations, where there's deeper levels of trust that allow things to move forward. And how, yeah, compensation is important, but it's not the most important thing, and it's not going to build by itself a flourishing culture. And yet I love the way you really focus on the diversity. You know how, yeah, as you admit, all of us can say, well, we could easily hire all white people because that's where we are and who we know and who our friends know. But by being intentionally multicultural, multiethnicity focused is really the way we represent the kingdom of God here on Earth. And I look forward to one of those red jackets. Maybe I'll have to come down and just participate in that putt-putt tournament around the Masters.

Kevin: You can certainly try. I can’t promise you’ll win it. I’ve never won it. Yeah, you can try.

Al: Yeah, well. And again, thanks for being such a great spokesman for Best Christian Workplaces.

So, Kevin, is there something that you'd like to add that we've talked about, just to put a sharp point on the conversation?

Kevin: I imagine, you know, the type people that would listen to this conversation are probably organizational leaders who are scratching their head, going, “Man, what do I do here?” And I would just want to talk to me 10 years ago of what we've learned through this process and the data we've looked at. I'm just, for one, it's not going to change overnight. I had a business leader tell me when I stepped in to lead this organization, he said, “Three to five years.” I was like, “What's three to five years?” He said, “It'll take you three to five years to move this in a different direction.” I'm like, “No way. I'm not going to waste my life, taking three to five years to move this organization in a different direction. Like, why not six months from now, you know? You just don't know me. I'm a really good leader.” And it just wasn't the case. It just, it's one conversation. It just takes time. And so for me, I would tell leaders it's worth it. You can't overlook leadership. It really starts with that. And it really is key. I read it in the books. I knew it. But I'm sitting there, thinking, like, “But I can make it work with this one person. I can make up for their deficiencies,” and it just didn't work. And so for those people listening, I'd say, hey, look, really look in the mirror at your own leadership. Look at your leadership team. And if you want to change culture, I promise you, you'll eventually come back to that leadership team. Whether it starts there or ends there, you will eventually address it. You'll have to if you want a thriving culture.

Al: Amen and amen. Thanks, Kevin.

Well, thanks for your contributions today. Most of all, I appreciate your commitment to serving God's kingdom by mobilizing godly people into the lives of kids and families. I mean, that’s so important. Your organization supplies tangible help and eternal hope for those you serve. So thanks for taking your time out today and speaking into the lives of so many listeners. Thanks, Kevin.

Kevin: Thank you, Al. Appreciate the time of being with you.

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 be sure to join us next week, with my wide-ranging conversation with the talented Tami Heim, president of the Christian Leadership Alliance.