Transcript: From Crisis to Culture Change: How Prairie College Reversed a Downward Spiral // Mark Maxwell, Prairie College

Flourishing Culture Leadership Podcast

“From Crisis to Culture Change: How Prairie College Reversed a Downward Spiral“

August 11, 2025

Mark Maxwell

Intro: Hi, I’m Al Lopus, and welcome to our summer encore series. We’ve pulled together the episodes you’ve loved most over the past 10 years, conversations packed with timeless wisdom, practical tips, and the kind of encouragement every leader needs. Whether it’s your first listen or favorite worth replaying, these episodes still hit home and might just be the spark you need this summer. So, let’s jump into this encore episode and see what insights await.

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: We believe Christian-led organizations should set the standard as the best, most effective places to work in the world, and that includes Bible colleges that prepare workers for Christian ministry.

We have the pleasure of talking with Mark Maxwell, the president of Prairie College in Three Hills, Alberta, Canada, outside of Calgary. From its founding in 1922, the heartbeat of Prairie College, which originally was founded by Mark’s grandfather as Prairie Bible Institute, has been, “To know Christ and make Him known.” Over the years, Prairie has prepared 17,000 students to serve God in 114 countries around the world.

In BCWI’s 15-year history and the 900-plus organizations we’ve had the opportunity to serve, Prairie College has made one of the greatest single before-and-after improvements of its culture of any of those organizations. It continues to be an incredible culture transformation.

Hi, Mark, and welcome to our podcast today.

Mark Maxwell: Warm greetings, Al. It’s a delight to be with you, so thank you for this time.

Al: I’m looking forward to it very much. You know, you’ve a great message to share with us, Mark. Help us to get to know you a little better. Would you tell us a little bit about your unique background, and tell us a little bit about your current role?

Mark: Well, I didn’t land here through normal paths. I was born a missionary kid, so my parents were SIM missionaries in Nigeria, West Africa. Born and raised there through my first 18 years. I went into business, got an MBA from Baylor University, and went into finance: investment management and investment banking. I spent about 20 years in that industry, and in that time had the enormous privilege of working with some tremendous people on what we call Bay Street (kind of the mini Wall Street in Canada in Toronto). Loved my time there, loved the people there, enjoyed the work. At some point in there, my wife said that she thought it would be nice if I knew the names of our daughters, so I said, “Okay.”

I also had the privilege of building two firms with some partners. One went to $4.6 billion in assets under management, and another one $4 billion. Each of those was sort of a two- or three-year exercise, and then we sold the companies.

Then I came home, and we built another company, my wife and I, and that was an entire delight. That does not sound like normal preparation for someone who’s going to look after a Bible college.

Now I’d always been interested in the Bible-college movement, always been interested in helping out here. We were donors to this school, and I was on the board.

The school was having… We weren’t sure what was going on, but my wife said finally, “You know, maybe you should go out there and see if you can give them a hand.” We decided we would do that on an interim basis. I would come out, she would join me a few months later, and we would see if we could help. And so we came to be interim president, and we’re still looking for the right person to take over the job.

Al: Well, Mark, you know, everybody’s in an interim role.

Mark: Yeah. Eight years an interim president. There you go.

Al: Well, great. You know, as you became president, tell us about the challenge facing Prairie College, you know, you and your leadership team. What were the things in your culture that needed attention? What wasn’t working?

Mark: The most obvious was we were losing a million dollars a year and had been for probably nearly a dozen years. Now the coffer was depleted, treasury was empty, and it was right on the brink of needing to be closed. One of the first questions that the board asked was, “In your first month or two, would you take a look at whether or not we should be closing the school or give it another try?” So we were right at that very end. My first board report was entitled, “Crossing the Red Sea or the Sea of Red?” because we were losing so much money. It still took us a year to turn around the losing part of it. So we still lost a million dollars in my first year looking after the school, and then, we began to climb out of that to where we were more break-even. In the last year, we made over a million dollars of profit, which is helping to restore our balance sheet and give us room to rebuild some of our buildings.

Al: I like that. Crossing the Red Sea or Crossing the Sea of Red. That was clearly a huge challenge, and I know all of us who have been in leadership roles, we know the way that that impacts really everything that you touch in the organization.

Mark: Let me tell you this also, Al. There was an imbedded, endemic, deep-seated hostility to leadership. I was at the fulcrum of that hostility because I’d been chair of the board. And so there was very little trust in me. There was siloing and division among the different groups on campus. This is not new in the academic world. There is sort of this propensity to that type of structure.

And then, the other thing that bothered me, maybe more than it should’ve but it did, and that was this sort of use of the word just. “We’re just this. We’re just that.” It was kind of this, “It’s acceptable to be mediocre” attitude, which was something that was, in my mind, not what we should be as Christians nor as academics helping bring along the next leaders. That’s kind of the quick thumbnail of where we were.

Al: Yeah, not a great place to start. Again, you had history as the chair of the board, so they were pointing fingers already when you show up. Wow!

Mark: I was guilty. Yeah, I was guilty.

Al: You know, as you know, the BCWI Employee Engagement Survey measures the true health of your culture by pointing the accurate measure of eight factors we measure that every culture needs to flourish. In February of 2015, five years after you came to Prairie, your employees completed our Engagement Survey. What caused you to want to know the true, as we call it, measurable health of your faculty and staff culture at that point? Did you know your predecessor had even Surveyed with us seven years prior?

Mark: Oh, yeah. We knew where we had been prior to my arrival. I was also sure when I arrived, if we measured it there, we would probably be at the same or at a lower spot. Probably I should’ve—in fact, you might even advise me that I should have marked that spot so that we could watch the progression, but I was so sure of where we were, and it wasn’t pretty, that I didn’t want to remind everybody how hopeless our case was. So I didn’t at the beginning.

Five years in, we had implemented several things. By that time, I thought, “Okay, now I think we may be on the cusp of seeing some encouragement.”

Some of the things we’d done: we brought harmony back to front and center. I began saying, “We got to pray for a miracle. It’s called harmony, living well together.” We did it with a tool called prayer. I’d gone to the first year to our weekly prayer time, and with 180 people on payroll, we were having between 8 and 12 people show up for our weekly half-hour prayer. I was like, “I think there are some people missing.” I began mentioning it. I didn’t want to make it required. That is too low a motivator, but I wanted to let people know this was the war room. This was maybe the most important half hour for the whole school in the week. So we began turning up that as a priority. We began making it more meaningful.

We passed leadership around throughout the school, so I will only lead one prayer time a year. After that, other people, heads of departments or areas, will bring us a five-minute devotional and then 25 minutes of prayer. We have someone pull together a prayer list. It’s very, very elegant. It’s good information, and I think those have been important.

Then, we identified our mission and vision. We said we’re preparing people to meet the greatest needs of the world. We went back to our core business originally of, “To know Christ and make Him known.” We reemphasized our core values of Bible-based, Christ-centered, discipleship-living, and mission-mandated, not in the term of missionaries but in the term of missional.

I began telling all the bad news up front. My decision on that was, “Maybe they won’t believe me.” If I tell them the bad news, they weren’t believing the good news anyway. But no. In fact, I was sure that if I came clean on whatever ugly there was, they would trust me when I came up with good news.

I remember one month our accountant handed me our financial statements. We began also with this monthly meeting. So every Wednesday afternoon, 4:00 on the first Wednesday of each month, we would have a family meeting we called it, because in family, you can fight, and you’ll still stay together, you hope. In family, you will be honest with each other. In family, you’re not necessarily cooking the numbers. If the soup tasted badly, you’re going to talk about the fact that the soup tasted badly.

So I was walking into one. It was in February. Our finance director had just handed me our statements. It said we lost $500,000 in the month of February. Now I knew that couldn’t be true, but he had handed it to me. I later figured out what had happened was he had finally caught up on entering all of the backlog of statements.

I don’t want to admit this to anybody who is outside of our school, so I certainly wouldn’t put it on a radio podcast, but here we go. I walked in, and I’m going, “Well, okay. Joe just handed me our statements, and it says we lost $500,000 in the last month. No one head for the door. Sit tight. I think there’s a better explanation than we lost $500,000, and that’s our run rate for the year. Annualize that, and you’ll lose $6 billion. Not likely.”

However, it showed where we were at on our financial reporting. It was honest. I also figured if people in the room heard that we had lost $500,000 through the rumor mill, it might turn out to be $750,000 or $1 million by the time the rumor’s done. And if they hear it separately, somehow I had broken a faith with them. So I simply began telling them what the bad news was.

In that case, I think that year we did lose $300,000 on the whole year, but clearly what happened was we had a better month the previous several months, and then all of a sudden, he caught up on his entries, and it’s like, “You can’t do that, Joe.” That’s not his name. “You can’t do that. You got to keep this current.”

So we began sort of allowing for people to make mistakes, allowing people to have gaffes and mess-ups. And it’s okay because everybody is trying. And then, when we went to celebrate the wins, it wasn’t disingenuous.

So those are some of the things. I felt like we were coming together as a team, so I thought, “Okay, maybe now is the time.”

Now I don’t know if you’re going to give our score, but I want to just do it just for the fun of it because I figure someone on your staff nudged our number because that was in 2015. We qualified by the skin of our teeth to be a Best Christian Workplace. I thought, “Someone must have been kind to us at Best Christian Workplace” because our score was 4.01.

Al: Yeah.

Mark: And I’ll take it, you know, because it was such a big improvement for us. You can tell how important it is, that 4.0 number.

Al: Yeah, well, 4.0 is where people are certified as a Best Christian Workplace. Again, considering where you were, what was that?, seven years before, that’s just a remarkable increase and remarkable improvement, which truly reflects the things that you’re talking about. You know, this transparency issue is one that’s huge. Again, what you were doing is building trust. Again, you walk in; people are pointing their finger at you. “You’re the problem. Now where are we going to go from here?”

I love the idea of harmony and inviting people to live well together and have family meetings. I mean, that’s the body of Christ and the way we would hope the body of Christ would function. In fact, there you are working with students, which will be the leaders of the faith tomorrow. I just have this passion, this belief, that it’s in Christian colleges and universities where I believe the imprint of Christian community should be made in the students’ minds that they can live forward and say, “I’ve seen Christian community in my Christian college and university experience between the students, the faculty, and the staff. That’s what I want to carry forward.”

Mark: Yeah, I totally agree.

Let me talk about our payroll if I may, Al. When I arrived, we had 250 students. Not a big school, little school. We had 180 people on payroll. Let me do those numbers again. We had 250 students, 180 people on payroll. Our full-time equivalent of students was 250—it was similar to the headcount—but our full-time equivalent of payroll was 128. We really had two students for every person on payroll.

That is unsustainable, but it’s kind of un-Christian to lay people off. So we began, I, almost all of them, laid them off myself. Okay? I walked through each person, identifying those we wanted to keep, and then, I had to let the rest go. Didn’t do it all on one day. I did not try to do a Black Friday. Instead, one-by-one individual conversations, one-by-one over 18 months. And by the end of that, we were at 100 people, and we finally got down to 80. But we reduced our headcount almost by 50 percent in the first 18 months. We kept going at it. We’re still at 80 eight years later, and our FTE (full-time equivalent) employment is 60 people.

Now, there is a truth among business textbooks that says whoever does the cuts… Do you know where I’m going?

Al: Yeah, right.

Mark: …can’t stay for the rebuild because they have no capital. Whoever comes in to do the cuts spends their capital. They can’t stay. Bring in someone new to do the rebuild. Okay, I want to be on record. Maybe I’m the only one—I doubt it—who disagrees with that truth. It is absolutely and categorically false. Whoever does the cuts has made the decision who’s going to be on the team and playing the next game. They’re perhaps the only person who understands the chemistry of the people that remain. Every person that remains actually has a vital role to play. The rest of the people are not worried about job security. They know they’re secure. See? That’s another truth. If you start cutting people, then all of a sudden the people who are left think, “Oh no!” They’re going to worry about if they have jobs at the end of the day.

Actually, every time you lay off the right person, the one who should go, then the rest who stay go, “Okay, I actually know I’m needed. I have a real job to play, and I have a leader who is going to look after me.” Very interesting, but it’s not normal truth from the textbooks. So that’s a different flip on it.

Al: That’s a great example, and that’s kind of how you do it. You’re showing, I’m sure, you’re creating and demonstrating compassion along the way as you’re talking with each of these individuals.

Mark: You’re right. I tried to do it where they would understand our logic, our reasoning, our mission. See, quite often to keep two people put our profitability in jeopardy. Therefore, our mission was now in jeopardy. The question you and I would ask of anybody is, “Does your mission matter?” If it doesn’t, keep everybody. If it matters, keep only the best people who are going to help you achieve your mission, because it’s too important for the future of the Kingdom, for the future of the church, for the future of businesses.

Al: In 2015, your Survey indicated that you’ve already made significant improvements, as we’ve referred to already. In fact, your culture had taken a huge jump. I mean, it was a huge jump from toxic to this 4.01, slightly higher than healthy. The math was all there. We didn’t help it at all.

Mark: Oh, thank you. I did feel you cheering for me, Al. Thank you. I really did.

Al: You know, for instance, your Survey results reflected really great improvements in healthy communication. We’ve already started to talk about some of those areas and how you’ve really focused on that. Your faculty and staff indicated you sought their suggestions. You involved them in decision-making. You communicated decisions effectively. And the trust. You know, “There we are.” They’re not pointing fingers anymore, but trust was really building and strengthening between leadership and employees. So that had dramatically improved. What were some of the other, maybe two or three initiatives, that you put in place that brought about that significant improvement to that 4.01, that healthy level, that Certified Best Christian Workplace level?

Mark: I’m sure the one thing that contributed most to that was listening. You can already tell I don’t necessarily follow the company line of whatever is… I don’t believe you have to take everyone’s advice, but you do have to listen to everyone’s advice carefully. If I can hear someone, if I can repeat back to them their point and convince them of their point… I’m not saying I agree with them. I’m not saying I’ll take their advice, but I’m saying, “I get it. I hear what you’re saying. Here’s what you’ve told me. I have to weigh this out against two or three other things. I will let you know where we come down. It might or might not be where you want us to be.” But I don’t believe hearing someone’s advice means I have to take it. Therefore, listening, listening, listening… I am probably very good at oral recall, so if someone says something, I will typically remember it quite well. This isn’t to say I remember their name. That would be a bridge too far. No, I probably will remember their name, but the point is I listen carefully.

Then, we begin doing feedback groups where I would talk with them, get their advice, ruminate on it for a week or two, sit with the management team. We use a lot of the word we with our management team. There are actually very few decisions I would make alone. If I’m going to make a decision, then I’ll typically take it to the management team and just test it.

If I’m the most informed on the decision, then they might take my advice. They might not. If someone else is the most informed, we’ll probably follow their lead on it. You might say we have a weighted vote. We don’t look for unanimity. I know some churches, some Christian organizations, believe unanimous is the right Christian posture. No. Harmony is actually the ability of two or three different notes to sound good together. In our case, we might have two or three different opinions. We want to encourage the freedom of those opinions, and then, we want to make a reasoned decision. That means one person who is closest to the fire may have the strongest input and have the vote that trumps all the others.

Also, if you require unanimity, if you say, “We’re going to wait until we have everybody together,” then what you’ve actually done is you’ve abdicated control or you’ve abdicated the decision to the one holdout. And that’s sort of one form of anarchy.

If I have a divided room on a decision, then I’ll typically say, “Well, let’s pause for a couple of weeks. Two weeks is not going to make a difference in the long run. Let’s see if those of you who disagree with each other can convince the other people to come across into your side.”

When I was an analyst of publicly traded companies in Toronto and looking after investment portfolios, we as analysts had this kind of truth among us: the most-scarce resource in corporate America is good judgment. You can always find more money. You can always generate new revenue. But man alive, good judgment is a very, very scarce resource. So people began to believe in our decision-making process.

There were some things we did for fun. When I was first in town, someone followed me around town trying to catch up to me. I guess I was running stop signs or stuff. I saw this car following me. I was like “What is that guy?” I was new to this town. I’d come from Toronto. I wasn’t used to someone following me like that.

I pulled into my driveway. He parked across the back of the driveway. “Oh man. I am in trouble.” His name is Troy. He comes up. He says, “I’ve got this for you. I don’t know why, but here it is.” It was a nice, big, probably 30-pound rock, petrified wood. He gave it to me. It was beautiful, and I was like, “What is that for?” “Okay! Thanks, Troy.” Brought it in, set it on my floor, kind of looked at it every once in a while.

About a year later, we were talking about someone who had done more than you could’ve ever expected. Someone on the management team said, “Man, they just rock!” You can see where we’re going, right? So once a month now, we give the “You rock!” award to whomever it is we think is standing tall in their area. It’s a chance for us to sing the praise of someone who maybe others don’t know. It’s a chance for us to recognize someone. And people love it. Then, we take it back, of course, because we’re going to do it again next month.

So that’s kind of fun, and that’s an important part of our monthly routine now. When we go to family meeting, more people show up because they might get the “You rock!” award. Right? That’s one of the things we’ve done.

We’ve tried to get everyone to go to the Global Leadership Summit. I have not succeeded in that, but we might run at 50 percent. That means we cover the cost. We have been a host site for them, so it’s low travel cost and that kind of thing for us. Then, if we’re only paying whatever it is, $100-150 a person, that’s not a bad deal for that amount of training for two days. That’s worked.

We have done Crucial Conversations with the whole team. Everybody on campus has been through Crucial Conversations training. Well, they all participate in the Best Christian Workplace Survey. So now they’ve done it twice.

At the beginning of every family meeting, I try to do some corporate culture talk. It’ll only be 10 minutes. It’s not that big of deal. I talked this Wednesday this last week about how the foundation of our organization is to put the core business together. That means our Bible is in place. Our prayer time is in place. Our teamwork is in place. Our core values are in place. Our mission and vision are in place. These are the core foundational things. If you don’t have those, you don’t have a good foundation for everybody to understand.

So then, how do you become valuable? Well, this came from Goldman Sachs when they were visiting our school and graduate school. Someone asked, “What do you do better than all the other investment banks on Wall Street? Why is it that Goldman has this cachet?” They said, “We’re available.” Wow, that’s interesting. I would have thought it was money. I thought it was advice. I thought it was connections. But it was availability as their way of standing taller than their competitors. So I wanted to talk to our people about becoming valuable to our clients; that is, available to our students, available to whoever it is that’s important to them.

For me, my client is our employee. Okay? I’d like to say it’s our student, but in fact, if I look after our employees, then our employees are going to look after our students. So my job is to look after our employees. So that means as much as possible I have an open door for all of our employees. If they want to see me, I will do my best to see them as quickly as possible.

Then, I went the next leg up. So if you thought of these as steps on a ladder, there’s the core at the base. Then the next step up is when you become valuable. Becoming invaluable. Someone asked Goldman, “How do you become a partner at Goldman? How do you become the leader among this group of elite people?” What they said was, “You become so valuable to your teammates that they never want to lose you. That’s when Goldman makes you a partner.” I don’t know if that’s really true, but to me it was a lesson on the value, the importance, of being valued by your fellow colleagues.

That’s kind of some of the things we talk about and run through.

I could tell you also about our use of four Cs, which is from Bill Hybels. You know, he’s got them character, competence, chemistry, and then cultural fit.

Now for us, we use calling as the fourth. I think calling is the right fit for us, one, because of our business; two, because of our mission; and three, because of our location. If you wanted to work in our business, you could do it in Vancouver or Calgary. We’re stuck way out in the sticks in Three Hills, Alberta. You need to be called, feel like this is something God wants you to do.

Character. Hard-working. Transparent. Available. Learning. That’s character. Attitude is really important. That’s all part of character. The saying I have on that one is, “There’s no accounting for attitude.” Now, this is from a friend of mine, a guy named Wayne Prescott, so give him credit. He says, “There's no accounting for attitude.” What that means is a bad attitude is infinitely negative for your revenue stream and your profitability. I want to say that again. A bad attitude is infinitely negative for your revenue stream and your profitability. A good attitude is reciprocally infinitely good for revenue and profitability.

I want to say this to you, Al, and have it go through you to all of your listeners. If you’ve got someone with a bad attitude on your team, you as the leader need to deal with it. I beg of you, deal with it. Either get it corrected—do a course correction with them—or get them out of there, because the cost factor is large for your revenue and your profitability. So that’s character.

Competence. Are they good at what they’re supposed to do? Chemistry. Are they nice about it? And then, calling. Is this something they show God wants them to do?

I think of it as a three-legged stool, not four. Three-legged. The three legs on the stool are character, competence, and chemistry. What’s interesting about it is some people who are really hard workers (good character) and they’re competent (very good at what they’re supposed to do) are kind of prickly. Their chemistry sucks, and they treat people badly because they want to say, “Well, I am so valuable, they can’t afford to get rid of me.” I would beg to differ, and I would say you can’t afford to keep them. You need all three of those legs on the stool equally long and strong, or the stool goes tilted.

Now, the cushion on top is the calling. All three of those legs are good and strong, but if a person isn’t called, it’s going to wear thin because your pay grade isn’t going to be enough to make them last.

Al: Yeah, I like that description, Mark, very much. You know, the three-legged stool (character, competency, and chemistry) with the cushion, the top of it, being calling, that’s a very graphic example. You know, when I look at your Survey scores and I look at Christian higher-education institutions, I always look at the engagement of faculty. You know, that kind of gets to your last comment about attitude, but today the engagement scores amongst your faculty are fantastic, well into the flourishing level. What have you done to help create such robust workplace engagement amongst your faculty?

Mark: I’d love to take some credit, but actually I think God has given us that as a gift. I just really need to give Him the credit. I truly love our faculty. I truly love our faculty. They know I’ll go to the wall for them. My job is to clear the road in front of them to make their lives easier. It’s not my job to completely pay for all of their wishes, and that’s unfortunate. I wish I could do that. But if they know that if I’m making a decision they disagree with, I will have thought about it carefully and probably had them in the loop somewhere along the way so they have an understanding of where we’re going and why I’m—usually it’s something like letting someone go. But they know. I think they know I love them. And when they want to complain about something, they’re welcome here. Not only is the door open, but the ears are listening. And I might be wrong. So if they can come in and yell at me about something where I might be wrong, they’re saving us from making a mistake. Man! Prove me wrong. Just save us the agony of a mistake.

Al: You know, that’s interesting, Mark, because, you know, you made a significant statement when you said you felt your clients were your employees (your faculty and staff), not your students. For a college president to say that is really stepping out. You use the Goldman example. Is that where you felt like you learned that example?

Mark: Not on that one. I don’t know where I learned it, but it’s the multiplier, I suppose, just the logic of a multiplier. If I were to focus on our students… I do know most of our upper-class students by name. I do know part of their story. We’ve got them in our home, different ones of them, one, two, or three times a week. Every week we’ll have some students in our home. That’s the benefit of being in a small community.

So the students know that they matter, but I know if I look after the faculty, they’re going to look after the students in spades. I can’t do it for the students. If I’m going to look after 50 or 60 people, let’s make them the faculty and staff who will, then, multiply it for another 50 or 60 each. Pretty soon, you’ve got that factor.

Al: Yeah. Mark, tell us one of your favorite before-and-after stories about how your culture has changed and improved for the better.

Mark: Well, okay, I’ll do a colloquial one—the only thing you can do in a small town—potlucks. You know, who does potlucks anymore? We arrived and came to potlucks. They were painful and agonizing. The people who came were the ones who felt most guilty about it. It was horrible. The only reason my wife and I went was we felt guilty. Right? We’re no better.

I remember the bottom of that curve was, when we arrived at a potluck, the pickings for the meal were desperately slim. Someone had brought a half-bag of potato chips. That was their contribution. Much better would have been buns from the local grocery store, which isn’t a big stretch either. My wife turned to me, and she said, “Mark, never again. We are never again going to do a potluck. That’s it.”

She was disgusted and angry. “We’ll buy chicken for everybody. We’ll take them out for meals. We’ll do it once a year instead of four times a year, or whatever, but we’re not going to do this again. This is an insult to everything we believe that is valuable.” So I quit calling potlucks. I didn’t worry about it anymore.

Six months later, we were driving through Montana to visit one of our outdoor programs. It’s out in the beautiful Montana mountains. And we’re driving by an antique store. My wife likes antique stores, so we went in, wandered around there for an hour, and then headed on. There was a cowbell in this antique store. It was a beautiful brass square cowbell, and I wanted it. I just couldn’t figure out what for. I said, “Let’s get the cowbell.” My wife’s going, “What for?” I said, “Potlucks! Whoever brings the best dish, we’ll give them the cowbell.”

Then, I’m looking around, and she’s going, “Well, that’s good for the main dish, but what about the dessert?” Then we found a soup ladle. We made that for the main dish and so on. We ended up with three antique awards. One is an antique pair of wooden salad tongs, another is this wooden soup ladle—beautiful, old—and then, one is this cowbell. We began saying, “You know, if you bring the best dessert, you get the cowbell. If you bring the best main dish…” and so on.

And so now there’s become this friendly war among everybody in our potlucks. I mean, people talk about them for a week afterward about how amazing it was. They had a lot of fun. They vote for the best dish. Then they get to keep the cowbell, or they take it to ballgames to show off the fact that they had the best dessert. By now, of course my wife is thinking it would be nice if she won something because she has… That’s one before-and-after.

Another, of course, is prayer time. We have gone from that 8 or 12 to now 50 or 60 showing up in our weekly prayer time. You’ve seen it in the metrics. It’s such a happy time to get together now.

Profitability. We’ve talked about from a negative million to a plus million. I’m not sure we’ll run at a positive $1 million forward, but my guess is we’ll run more like a half a million profitable. Then, we’ll spend the rest reinvesting in the plans and that kind of thing.

Al: You know, at the Best Christian Workplaces, we believe a healthy culture is a true and worthy end in itself. We also believe a healthy to flourishing culture leads to organizational growth and greater ministry impact. How has growing your culture influenced your organizational impact outcomes? What would you say, Mark?

Mark: Oh man, Al. I wish I could tell you that we had a jump in student numbers. We don’t. When Elaine and I arrived, we had 250 students. We now have 270. I’m hoping that’s next year’s story, but we have not grown in student numbers. I thought we should have by now. In fact, I initially thought we would double in five years because we would do all the right things. Maybe God knows we needed the time to build the right foundation to grow on. I’m okay with that.

You know, I was just driving across the prairies this morning. While I’m driving, I was praying to God about filling our halls with students. I’d like to see us with 750 students on campus. I’d like to see us with 7,000 students online. I’d like to see us with 500 students in prisons. These are all different things that I was asking God for.

So far, none of that, but I will say this. The students have responded to our culture. I think what we’ve seen is a revival of an organization, I think is what I would say we’ve enjoyed here at Prairie. We do this survey once a year of the students. Last year, 98 percent agreed or strongly agreed with our core theme, “To know Christ and make Him known”—98 percent, “To know Christ and make Him known.” They agreed with us on that as our mission.

There were 96 percent who said they had come to love God more deeply while at Prairie—96 percent! There were 94 percent who said it is an enjoyable experience to be a student at Prairie. These are things that should generate more student numbers, but qualitatively we’ve seen this amazing gift from God, and we can only say, “Thank you, Lord, for what You’ve done on the campus and among us.”

Al: This year was your first experience with our new reports in the FLOURISH Model, you know, our eight measurable factors that drive a healthy to flourishing culture. I’m curious to know what it means to you as president to see specific culture improvements come about at Prairie, the ones we’ve talked about, for example. You know, what has your amazing culture turnaround meant to you personally, Mark, your faculty and staff, and ultimately your students who are the face of Prairie? What would you say to that, Mark?

Mark: I’ve been thinking about the change, specifically in thinking about having an opportunity to talk with you, Al, and talk about this. What I’ve been intrigued with is the change. I think we used to be quite professional. Now I think we’re quite effective. I think those two may track inversely.

Now, I know there are some people among your listeners who will just have willy fits about the fact that I just said, “Professionalism doesn’t matter,” but I did. I also think professionalism is one of the mechanisms used for control and mechanisms used for shutting down innovation. I think, while we need a certain amount of professionalism, we have to be careful about allowing it to become too important. We need effectiveness. We need influence, not control. These are things you preach from your pulpit, Al.

I think influence and control do work at odds with each other. The more control I have, the less influence I have. If I’m willing to give up control, I will gain influence inversely. I believe they track at odds with each other. If I give up control to someone else, I should have influence. But if I don’t have influence, if I’ve lost control and not been given the reciprocal respect of influence, then I have a problem in whoever that is that I’ve given the control to. I need influence, and I need just a certain amount of it. But I don’t need control. It’s important that we as leaders give away our control. It’s important that we gain the respectful influence that should come with that.

The other is the inversion or reciprocal nature of importance and availability. One of the first things I did was unlock the doors here at the school. Now, we live in rural Alberta. We do not need high security. That is not true of all of your listeners, by any means. Unlocking doors, having an open-door policy, is a way of telling people they’re important. That’s back to that Goldman qualitative thing of saying, “My clients are valuable. They’re important. If I’m available to them, I’m communicating that with them.”

Those are some of the things, I think, that answers your question about this turnaround from and to and the priorities we’ve had on it. I don’t think we have it figured out, Al. I think we need to keep learning. Quite often, I’m surprised at how colleges and universities are not learning places. That’s not intended to be hard on anybody. It’s just we need to keep learning wherever we are.

Al: Yeah. Let’s be effective, have influence, and be available. I love that lesson. Thanks, Mark.

You know, I’ve really enjoyed what we’ve learned today. It’s been a lot as we’ve talked about these various things. I appreciate so much what you walked into: the lack of trust, the mediocrity that had just become the way of life there at Prairie, and how through just the transformation that you’ve seen using harmony, really giving people the vision of living well together in prayer. Being transparent. Having those monthly family meetings that are meaningful. Having prayer times that were poorly attended now to are well attended. The importance of listening that you focused on. Listening, listening, listening. We’ve heard just how you do that regularly. The importance of we and not me in the process. Where your clients are your employees (your faculty and staff), not your students as the college president. The four Cs that you work on. And faculty health because you just love your faculty, and that just came through loud and clear. Just a great discussion. Thank you very much.

Mark, given all that you’ve experienced in the ongoing transformation and the greater health of your culture, give us one final thought that you’d like to leave with other leaders today.

Mark: A crisis—and all of us will face different crises—a crisis is an amazing, I believe, God-given opportunity. One, it’s an opportunity for us to express our faith, our step into God, and leaning on Him, jumping from the ledge into His arms. A crisis gives us that opportunity. And number two, a crisis gives us an opportunity to clarify our priorities. And then, the third, that I would say is a crisis gives us an opportunity for quick and crucial change.

So often we work in organizations where it’s hard to make change. People say, “People resist change.” I actually don’t believe that. About half the people resist the change, and the other half love it. The ones who resist it are a little more vocal at that point, and so you end up thinking everybody resists change. I don’t think that’s true. I think change is a good thing, and it’s welcomed by at least half of the people. So I think when you get into crisis, you have this opportunity.

Let me illustrate with one thing about the college here. When I arrived, we were in a crisis. There’s no doubt, I’m sure, among your listeners. It was very clear to me, crystal clear to our board. I rolled off our board to become president. That’s important just for arm’s-length-type governance. I rolled into this office, and my question was, “What is our core knitting? What is the business that we should be in?” To me, the answer was I think from God. But we should be teaching Bible. So I said, “What do we teach in Bible? Do we teach the whole of the Bible?” And the answer was, “Yes. Of course!” “Really? Let’s check off the books.” Very quickly, we realized we didn’t teach the whole of the Bible. It was kind of like, “What should we leave out?”

So we made it our first step to cover the entire canon, and the second step was for all students. So we did it in seven courses. And I invite all of your college listeners to do a similar pattern. We chose to do it along the same pattern as Dallas Theological Seminary. They have four Old Testament courses and three New Testament, so seven courses, that all students take who are getting a degree.

So we first divided up the Bible into seven courses and got it into our curriculum. Then, we moved those seven into our core that all degree-earning students would take. That became one of our hallmarks, one of our distinctives. We don’t want to be distinct. We just want to be focused on what is our core knitting, and that took off with our students. They loved it! It was a little more of a careful conversation with our faculty, who each had to give up a little bit to get those seven courses into the core, but they did it. By the time we were done, they leaned in and said, “This is actually very good.”

Now, I can’t tell you how much pastors and parents loved it. Right? You can see it.

Maybe this is a good point to end on: what was a lovely inadvertent benefit was our donors. And our donors are coming in with really encouraging donations. Our donations last year kind of doubled. I think it was from an artificial low to an artificial high, so there was some timing in there. Really, I think our donations are up about 50 percent from a normal run rate to a normal run rate. That’s huge. You can fix a lot of roofs, you can improve the quality of your program with that. So it paid off to do this, but we did it for the reason that we wanted to give our students the best possible preparation for a long-run career, 40-year assets. Our students are walking out of here. If their compass is rightly focused—and that is through the Bible—we’ve got ourselves a win. That’s kind of what I would say as concluding, Al.

Al: That’s great. Yeah. A crisis is an opportunity.

So, Mark Maxwell, president of Prairie College, thank you for sharing your wisdom, insights, and stories with us today. Thank you for extending your ministry to the leaders who have been listening and benefiting from all you’ve shared.

Mark: Thank you, Al.

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.

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