Transcript: Ask for Feedback Before the Decision: How DiscipleMakers Built a 100th Percentile Ministry Culture // Peter Krol, Tom Hallman, DiscipleMakers

Peter: I think I’ve learned the hard way over the years, as President, that I’m going to hear people’s feedback whether I want to or not, so I can just make it easier by asking for it upfront, before the decision becomes encoded in stone and then we can shape it and actually help people to be a part of the process, rather than waiting until after a hard decision is made and then we have to spend even more time cleaning up the mess of all the people impacted by it who are, you know, struggling with not having had a voice in it.

Narrator: This is the Called to Flourish Podcast, where leaders and cultures grow.

Robert: Hello and welcome back to the Called to Flourish Podcast, where leaders and cultures grow. We are excited to have you listening or watching. I’m more excited to have Peter Krol and Tom Hallman with us, as our guests today. Welcome Peter and Tom.

Tom: Hello Robert.

Peter: Thanks Robert. Hi.

Robert: Hello to both of you, Peter and Tom. Peter’s the President and Tom is the Vice-President of DiscipleMakers, which is a campus ministry. I’ll tell you a little bit more about them. But Peter’s the President of DiscipleMakers. He provides the strategic direction and spiritual leadership for the team’s mission. Tom serves as Vice-President of DiscipleMakers where he joyfully - and I’ve learned how joyful Tom is in our time prepping for this episode – joyfully overseeing the ministry’s work with students and staff and helping lead the organization’s direction. We’re excited to have DiscipleMakers and these two incredible leaders with us. DiscipleMakers is a Christian campus ministry based in Pennsylvania. They have grown and I’m excited. I’ll let you guys talk about maybe some of the growth, but you’re represented on 26 campuses now, is that right?

Peter: Yeah.

Tom: And then some.

Robert: And then some. Tell us a little bit more about your ministry and how things have been going.

Peter: Well our ministry is all about reaching college campuses where we want to raise up effective disciple making disciples of Jesus Christ. We’re mostly at secular schools, although we just branched onto our first evangelical Christian college this last year or two as well. But we want to help the students as they grow from boys and girls to become men and women of God who when they graduate, wherever they go in the world, they’re dangerous because they know how to make a difference for the kingdom.

Robert: Yeah. Amen. Beautiful. I love hearing about you guys’ growth and the campuses and how you’re just multiplying. What an incredible mission to capture these students for Christ, and not only just lead them to Christ, but develop them, disciple them to become disciples. I think that’s – if I’m understanding your ministry correctly - that’s powerful and very exciting. Super excited about what you guys are doing. Just for a little bit more context, DiscipleMakers has been working with Best Christian Workplaces since 2015 in doing your engagement surveys. And what’s so cool about this . . .

Peter: Right.

Robert: Yeah, you guys are in the top echelon, of the 100^th percentile, in your sector. Out of 168 peer organizations, you are in the 100^th percentile, so congratulations on that.

Peter: Wow.

Robert: Yeah.

Tom: Thank you.

Peter: Praise God.

Robert: That is something to celebrate.

Peter: He’s given us some incredible people.

Robert: Yes. Yes. But it all starts with leadership, which is you guys, and I’ll commend you for that. But we want to learn from you. We want to learn from you. We want to learn how this happened, what worked for you. We want to give some encouragement to our listeners how they can go from wherever they are in the health of their workplace culture to where they’re in the 100^th percentile or the 95^th percentile. I know it didn’t happen overnight.

Peter: We like competition. It’s okay.

Robert: A little competition. Yes. Well, so we’re going to talk about that today. We’re going to talk about leading with humility and alignment, how ministry teams can stay healthy, engaged, and mission focused, and so I want to talk to you guys a little bit. Let’s kind of start from the beginning. You know a lot of leaders might say that they want to hear feedback, but truth be told, feedback’s not always easy to hear. There might be hesitation to really want to receive honest feedback, right. So I want to ask you guys, what practices have helped you, DiscipleMakers, create an environment where people feel safe to speak candidly? Maybe through an engagement survey, but even beyond an engagement survey, how did you go about creating an environment where there is a sense of, hey, I can be honest, provide candid feedback so that we can grow as an organization? I’ll say, Peter or Tom, I’d love your insights on that.

Tom: Paper, rock, scissors.

Peter: Go for it.

Tom: Just a couple thoughts on that is that I’d say we have a culture in our ministry where we take the Lord very seriously, but ourselves, not so much. I just think at every level of the organization we really like to have fun, be friends with one another. We love to have ideas bouncing around all the time. And so if you look around, for example, we have semi-annual staff conferences, and there is lots of training. We have Biblical training on that, practical tips that we give for how to make disciples, making disciples effectively on campus and things like that, but then as soon as the session is over, our staff are immediately hanging out with each other, they’re playing board games, they’re playing sports. The top levels of the organization are just sitting around on couches, talking with the newest staff, and that’s entirely normal. No one thinks twice about it. So, how we got there, I don’t know. It’s just always been that way as far as I can remember.

Robert: Yeah. What do you think Peter?

Peter: Yeah. Well, my predecessor as President, who was the founder of the ministry, I think he built it right into the culture, and we inherited a lot of that culture. It’s written into our core values as a ministry that all DiscipleMakers will be forgotten, but we will rejoice in God, our Savior forever. That’s what Tom is talking about, taking the Lord very seriously, but ourselves not very seriously. So we just have inherited and continued to steward a culture where we evaluate everything, every talk, every Bible study, every meeting, every piece of training, every process, every financial system is always undergoing review and evaluation. I think I’ve learned the hard way over the years, as President, that I’m going to hear people’s feedback whether I want to or not, so I can just make it easier by asking for it upfront, before the decision becomes encoded in stone and then we can shape it and actually help people to be a part of the process, rather than waiting until after a hard decision is made and then we have to spend even more time cleaning up the mess of all the people impacted by it who are, you know, struggling with not having had a voice in it.

Robert: You know . . .

Tom: There were many . . .

Robert: Go ahead, Tom.

Tom: Oh, just that – just an example of what Peter just said there is that – so we have an executive management team, as most organizations do, and a lot of policy decisions would be made at that level, and there were plenty of those meetings that Peter and I and others were sitting in and we thought: Oh, here’s a policy we really need to bring more alignment. Let’s write this policy. Sitting right here, we’re writing it. Okay. Great. We figured it out. We sent it out to staff, and they wouldn’t love it. How weird is that. And so what we realized after a while is the first people who would always write back, there were like four or five of them that would always be like: Why didn’t you do this, this, this, and this? What about this case and this thing? And we were just like, oh. So what we did was we invited them to become our official policy consultants and so now every time we’re going to write a policy or even revise a policy, we agree on a draft, but then we send it by them and without question, it has never been the case that we have regretted that decision. Every time they send us all kinds of great feedback and we’re like, oh man, this is so much better now so that by the time the whole staff sees it, I mean, it is just so much better, and we look like geniuses, so everybody wins.

Robert: I’d say that it’s - research I think really shows that when employees believe that you’re actually genuinely listening and you involve them in those processes, it’s going to increase moral. They’re going to feel a stake in that outcome that happened, rather than, what is this? You didn’t invite me into this and we couldn’t provide any feedback. So, I love that. It sounds like that’s just something that’s happening across the board with you guys, that you are genuinely listening, and I think that’s the key. If I do say something, it’s safe for me to say it. I can provide this. You’re creating these channels for me to provide our feedback and get these better outcomes. I love hearing that.

Tom: One of the – just one of the aspects that is also just built into our culture is that DiscipleMakers very much has a family feel and the great struggle for us is to try to figure out, okay, as your family grows to – we’re around 120 staff right now, that’s a really big family dinner table, and so how do you let everybody get a say? That’s the great challenge we’re constantly facing is trying to keep the feel small and allow lots of feedback cycles and the ability for the newest person to just sit right down next to Peter, or I, and hang out and give us feedback and ask us questions and all that stuff. It’s not easy, but we’re constantly trying to figure out how to do it well.

Robert: Yeah. Yeah. With such a high level of engagement and health as the 100^th percentile in your sector, now you guys have fundraise roles, right? So you have roles that are based on fundraising, correct?

Tom: Um-hum.

Robert: I’d love to explore this a little bit.

Peter: Yes.

Robert: How you keep the staff remaining energized, rather than drained? I can only imagine having to do the fundraising, having to rely on that and trusting in that process that it can become something that can, kind of, require faith and maybe even wear you down at times. How do you keep your staff energized through the process of fundraising based roles in the organization?

Peter: One of the things that we do there is – that I haven’t seen anywhere else, but I would love to find out if anybody else does this – is that every position in our organization is a fundraised position. So, as the President, I raise personal support for my position. Tom raises support as Vice President. There is nobody in the ministry who is paid out of an admin fee that is put on those who fundraise. Everybody fundraises. That’s one thing that I’ve seen that we’ve done that keeps moral high is that every one of us is in it together.

Tom: Yep.

Peter: And so we all know what it’s like. We can talk about it. We share stories. We can mentor one another. So if you have any listeners who have that same model, I have yet to learn of another organization that does that even for executive staff, administrative staff, so I would love to . . .

Tom: Let’s reach out.

Peter: So that we can learn more from each other too because there are some unique challenges there that come with that, and I would love to learn from others. But Tom, what else would you say we do to help keep people invested there?

Tom: Yeah. Just to add to that, I myself joined DiscipleMakers 23 – 24 years ago – as an IT guy. Like I joined to write code for Jesus, and I had to raise my own support. I wasn’t paid from some admin fee or centrally, whatever, and I remember people saying, that’s crazy, you know, they should just pay you to do this. And I mean, nobody loves fundraising initially, I don’t think, but I eventually developed a gospel-centered viewpoint on what fundraising really is, and I’m so grateful for that. It’s been revolutionary in I think throughout the ministry to think about support raising, not as prerequisite to ministry, but is itself actually ministry. So we train all of support raising staff, again, whether they’re going to campus or they’re IT or working in HR or whatever, we teach them to share the gospel with every single person that they meet with, and as they’re talking about what God is doing on campus and engaging with their donors, they’re not just trying to get money, they trying to minister to these people who are going to be part of their support team who are willing, this could be 25+ years, they’re going to be your brothers and sisters in the Lord, as III John 8, fellow workers for the truth, and so that’s just baked into the whole process. It just keeps moral high because you’re like, these are my brothers and sisters. We’re in this together. I don’t have to fear support raising. I can actually view it as a gift from the Lord for my sanctification and for the gospel partnerships that take place.

Robert: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that level of energy and retention isn’t all about how you’re compensated as well, so I think the fact that you guys, 100^th percentile, clearly your staff, your team is feeling supported. They’re feeling developed, like you just mentioned, Tom, confident that their work is making a difference and so I just think what you guys have created, the culture, the engagement levels, the health, being at the top echelon of your sector is – I mean, who doesn’t want to work for an organization and with people where you have that kind of family as you mentioned, and to do that even as you’ve grown to over 100 folks on your team – 120 or more – that’s remarkable. That really is remarkable.

Narrator: Leading well starts with listening well. At Best Christian Workplaces, our Employee Engagement Survey helps you collect honest, anonymous feedback from your staff – so you can lead with clarity. When you understand what drives team engagement, you retain top talent, increase productivity, reduce turnover, and uncover cost savings. We equip Christian leaders with research-driven insight to strengthen culture and lead with purpose. Because when your people flourish, your mission impact multiplies. Visit workplaces.org to learn more today.

Peter: We’re really committed to discipling our staff the same way we disciple students, so all that we’re doing with students we are personally invested so that every staff has a mentor when they first join to mentor them through fundraising and that mentorship is not just about tasks and job performance, it’s also about character and ministry skills as we come alongside people in their lives to shepherd them and provide that life on life discipling. In addition to job supervision, I think that does a lot to help with our engagement and morale as well.

Robert: Yeah.

Tom: Yeah. And that continues all through. Like everyone in the ministry is being invested in by a team leader, by their peers. There is constant encouragement, both in the spiritual realm of things, the personal and familial realm, and even in the support raising sort of stuff. Because yeah, you have to continue raising new support and making up lost support year after year. Every one of our area teams just bakes that into the processes. For a lot of our campus staff that happens over the summer because often there is not as much going on over the summer so that’s a great time to take vacation, prep for the next semester, and raise new support. Those who work in our headquarters, behind the scenes, they are just certain rhythms throughout the year, in between conferences or in between high volume times where there is high need, okay, let’s make sure all of our people have time to go out there and raise new funds. We’re going to support them and pray for them and cover the bases while they’re gone. It really does work, by God’s grace.

Robert: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love this because as, you know, I think that leaders who have been a part of organizations that have grown, which you guys have shared, you know how much you’ve grown over the last 10 years and meeting and exceeding your growth goals and all of that is remarkable, but in the process of that there’s growing pains. And even though you guys are the 100^th percentile, there’s no such thing as a perfect organization, a perfect culture, and so I assume along the way – correct me if I’m wrong – there were some growing pains, there were some, maybe, signs. Could you help some of the people listening, leaders listening, how you could identify, or some signals that maybe the culture’s drifting a little bit or that there was a need to sort of realign some teams or something like that? Is there anything that you’ve learned along the way that would fall into that category of culture drift and how you mitigated that or managed that well, whether it be through your rhythms of communication and those kinds of things? But I’d love to just encourage leaders who are listening on if they – how can they stay ahead of that? How can they see if there are some signs or signals that maybe they need to shore up some things?

Tom: It’s a great question.

Peter: It is a great question.

Tom: I think part of the answer is we, probably like everybody else, we usually realize it later than we wish we did.

Robert: Yeah.

Peter: Uh-huh.

Tom: Maybe this is cheating because it’s kind of similar to what I think we said before, but we just have a very high feedback culture so when we start to hear multiple people, especially in different areas of the organization, saying similar things, we give attention to that. Obviously, the BCW surveys have been a real great way that we’ve gotten that feedback is that we’re able to see through these various questions. Like, hey, we may be doing really good in these areas, but huh, there are more people here saying this than we would have expected or that I knew about. Okay, let’s just offer some roundtable discussions at our next staff conference. Let’s say, hey, we’re just going to have a dinner and anybody who wants to talk about this and give feedback, please come, sit with us, and just share, and then we really try to implement as best we could the things we saw, which is how I think over the years, as we’ve looked at our BCW results, every time we would been able to say, wow, okay, we’re seeing improvement here. Let’s keep pushing on this flywheel a little more and see if we can get there and so you know, the last time we took the survey, we were in the 99^th percentile, and we were like, man, we’ve arrived! This is great! You know, look how much God has done! And then our scores came back even higher this time, and we thought, let’s keep pushing. Is there a 101^st percentile? I don’t know. Let’s go!

Robert: Yeah. I love that.

Peter: Yeah. I think too maybe some of this came up just in our experience this past year. We just completed a 10-year goal for the ministry where in 2015 we had been around for 34 years at that point, started at Penn State University, had grown to 11 campuses over 34 years of ministries in those schools, and we realized that the Lord was calling us to stretch the tent pegs and look out a bit more. We set a significant expansion goal where we wanted to try to have ministries in 25 campuses by the summer of 2025. We were looking at more than doubling our ministry in 11 years, which felt like a huge obstacle because that was a huge amount, because we weren’t willing to sell our souls in the process. We were not going to compromise our disciple making culture just to say, oh, look at the hundreds of campuses we’re at. So as we did that, over the last two years I’d say, the last year of the goal and then since we finished the goal, as we have stepped back and we’ve evaluated with our leaders, our team leaders, area leaders, and such, looking at, what did God do in this goal? What did we learn from it? As by God’s grace we not only hit 25, but we exceeded it. We reached 26 campuses. One of the themes that started coming out as our leaders were just talking about their experiences on their teams working on this goal was that the expansion outward to broaden the ministry had an unintended effect in some places of starting to water down a little bit the core mission. Now there were no code reds for us. We aren’t like we’re a completely different organization, but flags were going off for people who realized, wow, we’ve got – we’re stretching ourselves out thinner, we’ve got fewer resources to invest in the disciples we’re already making on the campuses where we already are. What do we need to do to shore up this thing, the whole reason we exist to raise up effective disciple-making disciples? We’re not willing to dilute that just to expand to more places and be able to tell donors that we’ve gotten bigger. We don’t want to sell our souls in that way. For me that was just an example where we had this early warning system with all of our leaders because of the core values we have in place because the mission that is crystal clear. These things that we live by, they don’t just live on plaques on the wall, but they guide our decisions, and multiple leaders were starting to feel nervous by some of the signs they were seeing that has caused us to go back and say: How do we tighten these things up and get ready for the next level of growth, whatever that the Lord might have for us, but in a way that makes sure that we’re aligned across the whole ministry with the kind of disciples we’re trying to produce.

Robert: Yeah. Well, with your growth and your corresponding high levels of engagement and health and 100% percentile, one thing we know for sure is that it’s intentional. It’s intentional leadership. It doesn’t happen by accident to get the scores that you’re getting and clearly you guys are intentional about your culture, about channels of communication, of course, surveying and looking at the data, being open to the data, and those things, and continue on this journey. You know, I don’t know of any organization that it happens overnight or that it stays as good as it is without continuing to stay on that journey and investing intentionally in culture. I just want to commend you guys for your leadership, and I hope this is inspiring to listeners who want to be where you are, right. We want to be in the 100^th percentile. We want to be in the 95^th percentile. We don’t want to talk to culture, and so, if there is one thing I can say, it’s what you said earlier on Peter, I think it was you, Peter, that said that you’d rather ask the questions upfront and get the feedback, you know, firsthand upfront rather than it coming out in some other way, and like you said . . .

Peter: It actually takes less time that way.

Robert: Yeah. Yeah. I haven’t heard it said that way. You’re going to get the feedback one way or another, whether it’s turnover, whether it’s this or that, you’re going to hear the message loud and clear, so it’s best to just ask upfront, and Lord knows what the feedback is. God knows what’s going on with the culture, and so we always say that data is the best friend to leaders. You know, it’s one of those things of that curiosity and that courage of, hey, I want to see what’s going on and look at the data and see how we can move the needle in the positive direction because ultimately, I think that your growth as an organization, maybe it wouldn’t have been as possible had you been an unhealthy culture, right.

Tom: Right. Without question.

Robert: The kingdom impact is directly correlated. We know this from the data and the research. Kingdom impact is directly correlated, among other correlations and things, but also to health and engagement of the culture, right. You guys have seen and been blessed with both of those things going on a parallel track, and I don’t think that’s by accident. Thank you guys.

Peter: God has been so good to us. Yeah.

Robert: Yes, please share that.

Peter: So good to us, Robert. I appreciate your commendation, but I also have to say one of the most important things is that we have worked hard to hire the right people. I wish we could get more of our staff on this call with you because we have amazing people who have made this culture happen, and it’s a thrill to lead them.

Tom: Yes. Yeah.

Robert: Maybe that’s a podcast idea. Maybe we can get a group call.

Tom: Get our staff team on here. Yeah.

Robert: All 120.

Peter: We can have you come to one of our staff conferences.

Tom: That’s right. Yeah. You could have a whole panel discussion with everybody. It’d be great.

Robert: I would love to do that. Well, I’m going to throw out some rapid-fire questions. I hope this catches you off guard because I want honesty in the feedback. Okay. Peter, let me throw this one to you. Okay. Rapid-fire fun question.

Peter: Oh.

Robert: What is your preference, small group discussions or large group gatherings?

Peter: Large group gatherings. I’m too introverted for small group discussions.

Robert: Fair enough. Tom, I’ve got one for you.

Tom: Alright.

Robert: What’s your preference, Bible on your phone or a good old-fashioned hard book print Bible?

Tom: Oh, definitely the print.

Robert: Definitely the print.

Tom: Too many notifications that pop up on my phone and I’ve got to – it’s just like, no, no, no, stop, stop.

Robert: Yeah. Okay.

Peter: But it’s the ease of it, right there, Tom.

Tom: Oh, it’s the ease of everything right there, that’s the problem.

Peter: That’s true.

Robert: Wait, Peter, are you the digital Bible guy?

Peter: I’m a digital guy. Yep.

Robert: Are you? Okay. Fair enough.

Tom: He’s got the whole Logos thing and everything going on.

Robert: Yeah. When the YouVersion gets you that Scripture of the day, it’s from the Lord, right. You’re like, oh, that was - I needed that this morning. Okay. This is for either of you. College football Saturday or March Madness?

Tom: Oh, football.

Peter: Do you still – do you still trust the outcomes of college sports?

Tom: We’re both near the college. We’ve got to be Penn State fans. You’ve got to do the college football.

Robert: Yeah. Okay. We’ll go with that. We’ll go with that. Beautiful. Well, hey, Peter and Tom, thank you guys so much. You guys are just fun. It’s no wonder to me that people are having a great time and so productive and effective with DiscipleMakers and just God bless you guys. Thank you for the work you’re doing for the kingdom of God. Many blessings upon you and we hope to have you back on the podcast soon, but for all of you watching and listening, if this has been an encouragement to you, if you think that it would encourage anybody that you know, a friend, a loved one, a colleague, please share this episode with somebody you know who you feel would be inspired by this and follow and like the podcast so that you can catch us next time. God bless you. We’ll see you soon.