Phil: We created these four, sort of, cultural markers for the way people thought about culture. One of them was you’re a culture builder - you know the future needs to look different, and you’re excited about building it - and then culture blockers, people who are actively resisting cultural change. Builders, they don’t think blockers exist, and blockers don’t think builders exist. And so, you sort of put the like ugly truth and the beautiful truth in front of them at the same time.
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Narrator: This is the Called to Flourish podcast, where leaders and cultures grow.
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Robert: Welcome to the Called to Flourish podcast, where leaders and cultures grow. My name is Robert Wachter. I’m the Vice President of Sales and Marketing here at Best Christian Workplaces. Today we have a special guest, Pastor Phil EuBank, with Menlo Church in the San Francisco Bay area. Welcome to the podcast, Pastor Phil.
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Phil: Hey everybody. Glad to be here.
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Robert: Absolutely. So, Phil has been pastoring Menlo Church since 2023. He’s also led churches in Colorado and Washington state - my original home state in Washington, he’s pastored there as well, and he’s been involved with navigating seasons of growth and change and renewal in these churches. Menlo is a multi-campus church in the San Francisco Bay area, as I mentioned, and under Phil’s leadership it’s intentionally focused on building a healthier staff culture and a foundation for long-term ministry effectiveness. Phil has been involved with Best Christian Workplaces in that sense. Today we’re going to be talking about why healthy churches start with healthy staff. Phil has experience in this work at more than one church, so I’m excited to glean insights from him. I know it will be useful to all of you listening to the podcast. Phil, just to kind of get this kicked off, I think church leaders – I was a pastor for 10 years at a church that I planted in Washington state and we spent a lot of time talking about church growth, maybe getting trained on church functions, preaching, discipleship, these important things, but behind all of that are teams, teams that are carrying the mission of the church. You’ve helped more than one church build a healthy, flourishing staff culture, and so, I want to just kind of glean your insights here. Clearly at some point, you decided to prioritize measuring and focusing on the health of your internal church staff. I want to ask you, at what point did that happen, or what was it that caused you or led you to decide: Hey, this is something that I’m going to prioritize and focus on in the ministries - beginning with the staff culture?
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Phil: Sure. Yeah. Well, thanks again for having me. Honored to be a part of the conversation. It’s been an honor to help communities of faith and church staffs to think differently about culture for more years than you would think at this point. I think sometimes the thing that gives us the spark for what we want is experiencing what we don’t want, and I had – I grew up in pretty volatile home life and knew some of the relational dynamics that I was going to try to change in my own future family system, and then I think stepping into ministry, similarly, early on I was in some dynamics that – you know, great people that loved Jesus and are going to be in heaven, but you know systems underneath what you saw that were really unhealthy. I would say that culture doesn’t mean bad people. It just means that there are people that are having to work out a lot harder to work together. Those became seed beds for me to think differently. I remember somebody framed it this way for me that was very helpful. They said, a lot of us, we want staff culture to work like a factory and everybody becomes sort of a gear inside of the factory, and you get your staff exactly where you hope they would be, and you hit a button as a pastor and you’re like, alright, nobody move, everybody just do your job. And then it works, and it’s amazing, and as he described it, I was like, that’s exactly how I want this to work. Then he said, well, the Biblical paradigm for staff culture is a garden. It’s not a factory. You are watering, you are pruning, you are weeding, literally every day, and rent is due every day on that garden. So, if you wait a week, you’ve got a week’s worth to do. If you wait two weeks, you probably have four weeks of work to do. And so, I stepped into multiple contexts where, for lots of different reasons, staff culture had been something that had been deprioritized in difficult transitions and so, stepping in, there were a lot of things that needed to be pruned, needed to be transplanted, needed to be weeded, in order to have a healthy snapshot of what the future reality could look like. BCWI, from the church that we were at in Colorado, had become a really trusted partner. I think BCWI is awesome, but in some ways it’s like you just have to have something. You have to some consistent standard that shows you, are you making progress? Because culture is one of those things, if you don’t have a trusted metric or a trusted tool, you end up leaning in on vibes, and the more growth you’re experiencing, the bigger you are, and the more complex you are, the easier it is to lie to yourself, and the more difficult it is to get actual true statements about what’s going on to you as a leader. So, BCWI has been this annual rhythm for us, where it’s like, hey, good, bad, or indifferent, it is part of the scorecard of how things are going and it’s an invaluable resource for us. So, I think part of it was, what did I experience that I knew I didn’t want, and then this vision of, hey, staff culture is not just how do you use people to get stuff done, it is actually how do you use stuff to help shape and grow people, because if you’re not doing that at a staff level, I promise you, you’re not doing that at the congregational level, and that call to equip the saints to do the work of the ministry, that includes our staff, and so I think culture is a big part of that for us.
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Robert: That’s - that’s amazing. I love what you first said. You mentioned how an unhealthy culture doesn’t necessarily mean bad leaders. It just means that focus hasn’t been prioritized. It’s not bad people. I should say not bad people. It could - it could be poor leadership. In fact, it is if there is a poor culture and there is no focus on intentionally improving your culture. That is not what we would describe as good shepherding or good leadership, so I love your context there. You were mentioning how we don’t want to go on vibes. I think that could be true for a lot of leaders who have not yet discovered, you know, the metrics around how you would measure the health of a workplace culture. We describe it like going to the doctor for an annual health exam and getting blood labs where you see actual data, actual numbers, and it takes the guesswork out of trying to understand your culture. I think we can get lost in a – like a needle in a haystack if we’re relying on vibes, kind of trying to take the temperature ourselves, or maybe even leaning into, hey, what is the Spirit telling me as a leader? I think that often times God wants you to go to the doctor to get blood labs to speak to you, right, and so we always say the data is your best friend. Once you know what the health profile is, you can take actionable steps. I love that at some point you discovered that. Did you always know that there was like a solution like this out there where you could sort of get metrics like that when you first started going down this path of focusing on culture? Was it – what was it that caused you to kind of go from, okay, I know that I don’t want a culture that resembled some cultures that I’ve experienced in the past? How did you get to the point where you understood what the right kind of solution was and that this even accessible to you?
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Phil: Yeah. I mean, when I was in Seattle, before we moved to Colorado, and I was experiencing culture as a second chair leader, as an executive pastor, there were definitely dynamics about, you know, organizational systems, staff health, that kind of stuff, that I knew we needed to improve, and I knew I could probably add some value to. I wasn’t totally sure how to do it, so I started digging into folks like Patrick Lencioni and just marketplace leaders that maybe were faith adjacent, but didn’t necessarily at the time offer tools, and just started trying to implement some of the thinking that was related to those culture improvements. And then when we moved to Colorado and I took on a lead pastor position there, where were a couple people on our staff who had been advocating for BCWI for years, and in the transition it was kind of like, hey, the score is going to be bad, so we’re not going to take it. So when I got there, I said, man, like we can’t – to your point – like we can’t know what the hill is that we have to climb unless we see it clearly, and so we took it almost immediately when we got there. Same kind of deal when I got to Menlo, and in both cases, we were toxic. Menlo had been taking it for upwards of 15 years, and every time we’d taken it we had been toxic as a church, but for our church in Colorado, that was the first time we had taken it, and it was toxic, and it was so helpful, not just the immediate results, but also the tools to say, hey, what are the things that changing this, this, and this, kind of Jim Collins’ language, is going to make the biggest change overall? Because there are some things I think in underperforming cultures that key leaders think, well, I think we can make a change here, and they are the easiest changes to make organizationally, but they can have some of the least impact culturally. And one of the easy ones is just like, well, let’s just pay everybody more. And nobody is going to say no to that. That’s great. You should pay people well. But that’s just not going to move the cultural needle. So we were like top 10% in comp response, but like bottom 10% in everything else, so it was the difficult work of inspiring leadership and clear and trustworthy communication. That stuff really needed to move, and it was going to be a multiyear move, and so I think the tool both become a great scorecard each year as well as something that gave us access to some prescriptive tools we could do something about for the rest of the year.
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Robert: Yeah, and that’s where leaning into kind of the IO psychology, industrial and organizational psychology part of it, so speaking about the tools that you’re talking about with BCW, we have a research-backed model so there are eight key drivers that we’re measuring against to understand the health profile of a church. You’d mentioned rewarding compensation. That’s one of those drivers that we’re measuring. Okay. Do people perceive that they’re being paid fairly and they’ve got a good compensation, but that’s just one variable, and often it’s – especially in the church sector, it’s not even weighted as the most important driver in terms of what does create a healthy, flourishing workplace environment that creates engaged staff. There are other drivers. Inspirational leadership, teams, uplifting growth, sustainable strategy, healthy communication, these are the things that we’re measuring. Pastors or leaders in general, you don’t know what you don’t know in the sense that trying to vibe it out, as you were saying earlier, is virtually an impossibility. You might recognize some symptoms, right, in your body, like Paul’s analogy of the body. I feel fatigued. I sense these symptoms happening. But then the question is, what’s the root cause of that symptom and what do you do about it? I think that’s what you’re describing. I’d love to kind of talk to you a little bit about your work, because you’ve inherited some cultures. As a pastor coming in and you’re – like with Menlo, you’re not the founding church planter there, right. So, I think with church planters they are sort of cultivating the staff culture from the ground up. I’d love to speak to pastors and leaders who are inheriting a culture, you know, and there is wisdom behind, I think, the way that you’ve done that in terms of resisting the urge to fix everything immediately maybe or spending time listening and learning. I would love to just kind of – anything you’re willing to share about what it’s like as a pastor to inherit a culture, and what advice, what wisdom, would you give to other leaders who are in that situation?
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Phil: Yeah. I think that to a certain extent in the next season of leadership in America most pastors are going to be inheriting a culture. And even if – I mean, I would argue – even if you are planting a church in an area, that area has a culture. And unless you take intentional steps to examine, identify what needs to be received as culture, what needs to be rejected as culture, what needs to be redeemed as culture, you will just essentially be a reflection of the area that you are. Nobody’s really starting culture from scratch. Everybody is sort of this archeologist trying to figure out what are the things that are good culture, what are the things that are holding us back, and I think for me, I walked into two situations that were in some level of crisis that needed significant change, and so, you know, in some ways people have said like, oh, that’s a really big deal. Wow. And it is. It’s hard, but I would also say there were great team members that just didn’t have the keys. They didn’t have permission to make the decisions that needed to be made. So I got to come in and listen and then frankly just activate good decisions that people were already ready to make, but put leadership behind them. And then there were some things with fresh eyes, having walked through this before, it was like, hey, I know, I know this is a big decision, and I know it feels like one you don’t want to make. What I would say early on, especially at Menlo, when I came in 73% of our giving was going to staffing. We were in the red $5 to $6 million a year. Financially every one of our campuses had been just decimated numerically. So, I said, hey, there are going to be some tough changes we need to make now, but we’re just naming reality. We can do this with a scalpel now, or we can do it with a sledgehammer later, but either one is going to hurt. I think naming what reality is as a leader, I think, is tremendously important, even if it’s a difficult reality. And I think as a transitions leader, somebody who steps in when there is pain or challenge, one of the things that really difficult in that is not scapegoating people. The leaders that were here before you, they did the very best that they could. There were circumstances they couldn’t control either, and so you stepping in, pointing back and going, oh, man, can you believe . . . ? No, no. Give the best, most charitable assessment you can of leaders that you took over for and say, alright – because some of them are still there and plenty of the people that are still there love and care for those people, and so, what does it look like to say, hey, this is where we are right now, I hope I leave it better than I found it, but some of that is beyond me. And I think once you get past there, then you can start looking more deeply, but I think for us, early on people understood, hey, we didn’t have to leave. Like we weren’t actually looking to go anywhere. We were recruited to this, and so it was a little bit like – we heard a lot our first few months, like thanks for coming, and then I think the difficult work of hey, we know you’re cleaning up a mess you didn’t make, and I think in terms of changing culture, that helps a lot, when you’re not scapegoating someone else, when you’re taking responsibility for something that isn’t your fault, and you’re being clear about difficult, but necessary, changes, I think it can supercharge cultural change, even without you going in and going like, hey, what are our rhythms of like staff feedback? And for us, we didn’t have consistent org charts, consistent job descriptions. There was no annual or midyear review period, so the system just wasn’t talking to itself. It was just survive to the weekend. We had a lot of ground to cover, and there was no way we were going to accomplish all of it in a day, let alone a year.
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Robert: Would you say that was one of the confidence builders among the leaders that you were working with was kind of taking that approach, or what would you say? What built confidence among your leaders that change was actually possible and that you were going down the right path?
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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.
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Phil: Well, I think two things happened. I think, one, our weekends started to grow again because of consistency. And so I think in church world, you know, it’s not the only metric, but it’s one that matters, and I also think we started shaping a simple strategy that was winnable. And so I think everybody in every job, church job, job job, it doesn’t matter what you do, you just want to know, hey, if I do my part of what’s being asked of me, and you do your part, are we going to win? Are things going to go up and to the right? Are we going to feel good about the job that we show up to do every day? And so I think even just early on, being able to see that in terms of people getting baptized or people saying yes to serving, or financial realities changing, or weekend attendance going up, all of a sudden it was like, oh, this is going to be different. And frankly, the people whose narratives were so locked that every room they walked into they could only talk about 10 years earlier and they could never get past it, honestly, those were some of the most challenging, but necessary, early conversations. We went from 95 staff members to 65 staff members in 90 days. And so, shaping part of how we figured out how we got there, some of that was, here’s what staff engagement look like, and it was bare minimum stuff, that some people didn’t even reapply for the reorg based on those metrics, and then on the same side for people that were just not ready to think about or embrace the future, we created these four sort of cultural markers for the way people thought about culture. And we didn’t put this one people. We said, I want you to think about this. One of them is you’re a culture builder. You know the future needs to look different, and you’re excited about building it. One is a culture bridger. You’ve existed in a past culture, and you know it requires sacrifices to cross the bridge and move into the new one, but you’re committed to it. You’re a bystander. You’re somebody where basically, your cultural temperature is just based on some of the people that are in your office or the people that you hang out with every day, and you’re willing to lean toward the future if people around you are, but you’ll also drift backwards pretty easy. And then cultural blockers, people who are actively resisting cultural change. We just said, hey, if you’re a blocker, your supervisor is going to see it. Culture will reveal it. And either that needs to change, or your employment is going to change. That wasn’t to be unkind, and we weren’t putting a time on it, but I think naming some of that stuff let people know there’s a path to win and there’s a path to a very different place to work, and I’m going to be on one of those paths, but I get to choose which one.
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Robert: Okay. If you’re a pastor listening to this, or any leader, rewind that and write those four measurables down. I’ve never heard it described quite like that. That’s absolutely amazing that somewhere you are sitting in one of those mindsets or attitudes, I guess. You’re going to either help build and get excited for the future. You’re going to block, be a culture vulture is what you might call it. Just be kind of blowing with the wind. Or somebody who’s a bridge. I think that’s absolutely incredible. I’m going to go back and listen to that again and take notes on that. I absolutely love that, and I’ve never heard those four categories described in that way. And it sounds like – we call it sustainable strategy. As they were seeing actual results in the ministry, it validated the choices and tough decisions and the things that you were implementing and that was ultimately, the confidence builder was, hey, this is for the benefit of the kingdom of God and we are seeing those results and we’re on board even more. That’s what healthy culture does. It helps things grow. As you are growing healthier and you become that soil scientist, as Pastor Phil is describing, and you’re making those changes, the outcome of that is going to be growth to the kingdom and to the mission. That’s what this is all about. Healthier internal staff generates more productive, efficient teams that then generates greater kingdom impact and people feel that and that’s what everyone wants to be a part of, something that’s working, something that’s growing, and that their work is meaningful in that way. Super helpful. Let me ask you this. Why do you think that some cultures change, can change, I guess, and some cultures don’t? You know, let’s bring it back to like, you know, the blood labs and doing an employee engagement survey. You can take a survey and get results, but ultimately the results aren’t going to initiate the change. The leaders are going to initiate the change. So, talk to us about like, you know, why do you think that some cultures can change, or do change, and some don’t?
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Phil: Yeah. I put out a thing on our staff chat just to say, hey, what are the parts of culture that you’re most resonating with and what are the parts of culture that you still see as needing some improvement? If you don’t feel comfortable sending these to like everybody, feel free to send them to me. And I think one of the things that somebody flagged that I think is really valuable is really this underlying idea of fixed versus growth mindset, and I think a lot of that starts with either a leader, senior pastor, or a lead team. I think if the idea is you have a fixed mindset and what a culture assessment is designed to do is just figure out, can we add another sticker of like, you know, Best Christian Work certified, or hey, this is a thing we do and we’re better because of it. If that’s the goal, your culture’s basically going to stay where it is. You might be able to add different words to it. You might be able to put a checkbox to say, we did a thing, but it’s not going to change significantly. I think if you walk into it with a growth mindset, and say, hey, even if we’re a good culture now, we could be a great culture. And no culture is static. Your culture is either improving or regressing, and no culture is improving without a leader who thinks about it, right. Somebody early on in ministry challenged me to think about my job as a senior leader as chief culture officer, that I may not necessarily be in every meeting, but that idea of fixed versus growth mindset, it really is, does my calendar look like that? Does my time look like that? You know, one of the lines, like kind of pastoral lines that I think is really valuable is, do for one what you wish you could do for all, and I think that the idea of how you show up as a leader with staff that really reflects that. Are you hard to get ahold of? Are you hard for people to say hello to? Do people see you around a campus, or in our case, around Menlo? And I think that if you as a leader think, this is somebody else on my staff’s problem to solve, you’re probably not going to solve it. If you think, I bet we’re 98%, it would be really great if we were 99% next year, you’re probably not going to solve it. But the goal for us is, I want Menlo Church to be the best place that anyone on our team has ever worked at. I want it to be the one that like that sets the bar for them, that when they work at their next church, or they take on a church, or they help plant one, or they go to the marketplace, they go, man, I remember a place where we prayed together to start meetings, I remember a place where we helped that staff member and their family move, I remember a place that when we were in a difficult situation financially my employer, who didn’t have to help, helped anyway, I remember a place that when I wasn’t sure what was going on, I knew where to go look for the right information, I knew what the strategy was, I knew what the update was, and so all that stuff, I mean, you’re spinning plates. Like none of that just keeps going on itself. I think if you don’t have a leader who understands the priority of culture and the amount of work it will take to continue to steward it well within the team, you’re not going to do it, but you’re going to set the tone for it. You’re likely going to hold steady, best case scenario, and oftentimes blindly move backwards and only realize it after you’ve made a lot of regression.
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Robert: What would you say is the biggest decision or change that you made that had the greatest result from going from insights to actual lasting change? If you could pinpoint, or if you had to prioritize, what’s the biggest thing that you saw, this is what really started this change?
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Phil: Yeah. We cheated a little, right, because I was having to navigate so much crisis leadership in our first 90 days and then I’m also, like I’m Enneagram 8. I joke around like I’m Enneagram 8, wing 8, so vulnerability is not always my easiest muscle to flex. But in my first six months at Menlo my mom died suddenly and then my brother died suddenly, and so I was grieving pretty publicly in the midst of navigating very major leadership changes, merging campuses, laying off staff, like big, massive financial decisions, so all that, I think people were like, oh, he’s not messing around, like whatever this idea of like we’re not really changing this was very clear, but I think that one of the things that made the biggest change for us was when I was in Colorado there was at least some trust for leadership. And so when we got the survey results it was like, hey, here’s the Reader’s Digest, high-level version that you sent to your team, and it covers themes, and then you meet with your consultant and all that stuff. When I got to Menlo, there had been this pattern where basically people felt like – and I wasn’t here – but people felt like, we took this assessment, and it went into a black box and we never heard about it and then a year later we were told, your feedback matters, take it again, we took it again, it went into a black box. So, it was like, this wasn’t a lot of trust that anything was being done with that feedback, and so I really felt like we needed to change that dynamic. So, I actually took all of the survey results, at the highest level, not for all of our campuses, but the total results, the qualitative and quantitative, like including open responses, and shared them with our entire staff. I did like a preview. Like here’s what we’re going to do, here’s what we’re going to do with it, and then we took it, and then I sent them all of that stuff, and was like, I just want you guys to know, I don’t have anything else that I’m looking at than you do. I’m looking at the exact same stuff. And I think what it really helped people do, across that spectrum of builders, bridgers, bystanders, and blockers, was I think that builders, they don’t think blockers exist, and blockers don’t think builders exist. And so you sort of put the like ugly truth and the beautiful truth in front of both of them at the same time. You know, it’s anonymous feedback, but they’re just reading like some pretty toxic responses in some cases, like wait a second, this is our staff? Woah. I didn’t know this, you know. Or reading something like, wow, somebody believes in it that deeply? That’s wild. But I think, at least for us in our context, I wouldn’t recommend that for everybody, but in our context it was a big needle mover, and we’ve continued to do it every year since. People know. Like, hey, just so you know, it’s anonymous, but like everybody’s going to get full transparency on where we are as a team, and then after we meet with the consultant we form what our action plan is based on that cultural assessment, and we communicate that to the team. So for us it just becomes this regular rhythm of like, here’s what we’ve done, here’s the assessment we’re about to take, then here’s the results of the assessment, here’s the plan based on those results, here’s what we are going to do next with it.
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Robert: Love that. One of the things I always say to leaders that are considering – and organizations that are considering going down this path of culture transformation, is two things. One is, is your senior leader the key leader, a champion behind this? And you already touched on that. If that key leader is a champion of this, then you can see results, versus maybe an HR person or somebody else that’s just trying to do you know pull the wagon without the support of the actual key leader, that’s going to be difficult. The second thing is it’s better to not go down the path of an employee engagement survey if you’re not going to do anything with the results because the next year you’re going to have lower trust and lower scores because you’re telling your staff, hey, we love you, we care about you, your feedback is important and valuable, and then they don’t see anything. There is not a true good faith effort or a competent effort, I guess, to actually make changes, communicate those changes where you can see, this is a genuine good faith effort to improve culture. If you don’t do that, then it’s probably better to just not survey at all. You’ve got to have senior leadership buy-in and a champion behind this.
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Phil: I don’t think it means . . .
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Robert: And also you have to have true commitment.
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Phil: I don’t think it means you have to do everything that everyone. . .
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Robert: You don’t have to do everything. Yes.
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Phil: There are times, especially in that first year, where people were saying, we want this, this, and this, and I was like, well, we’re never doing that. Let me just name it now. Clarity is kindness. I’m not trying to be unkind to you. I’m telling you, we don’t have the resources to do a hundred things. We have the resources to do two or three things.
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Robert: Yes.
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Phil: And we’re going to do those two or three things. Here’s what they are. I want you to be on the team. I think God’s going to use it and bless it. But if you’re here and you’re like, well, unless we do this and make this the main thing, which is what happens a lot when you step in after someone, everybody, especially if there’s a gap, everybody has a picture. When they say, we’re just looking for vision, what they really mean, whether they know it or not, is I’m looking for my vision, and all of my vision becomes competitive with our vision.
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Robert: Right.
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Phil: You as the leader have to discern with God’s people and with the help of God Himself, what is the call that God has placed on us? And let’s do that thing, and that is a . . .
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Robert: Yes.
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Phil: A blessing, but it is a sword that cuts both ways.
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Robert: Yeah. We’re not – you’re not talking about doing everything. People have their own vision. They have their own agenda sometimes, and what we’re talking about is a good faith effort aligned under a common vision of the senior leadership. That’s the formula for success, and I think that’s great. I love this. You’re so insightful with this. Truly, I mean that. You’re very, very insightful in understanding culture and the success you’ve had, and you’ve had success in more than one church, as we’ve mentioned, and that kind of leads to my next question here. You’ve seen this more than once. Even within the Best Christian Workplaces, you know, data, you’ve seen it more than one. So my question is, what have you learned or seen that never changes about building a healthy church culture? Because the data can be different, you know, depending on the season or the church or what have you, but what did you – what have you noticed that, hey, this is - this isn’t – this is consistent, this is what is never going to change about building a healthy church culture?
[0:32:15.5]
Phil: Yeah. I think in every church culture you have outliers, outliers that are devoid, like they are not related necessarily to the org chart, and you have to promote, not just like situationally promote, but like speak well of and encourage and spotlight the outliers on the culture builder side, like hey, let me tell you about this story with this person at this campus that’s doing this thing, and people are like, man, I’m surprised you even know about that. Absolutely, like I’m on the hunt for good culture, and I want to spotlight it. And then on the other side, I think one that I probably didn’t do as well in Colorado and learned – I call it the stupid tax, I paid some stupid tax for sure because my idea – I went to Colorado as lead pastor when I was 32, and I thought, in my pride, well, those cultural outliers, those sort of culture blockers, I’ll be able to fix them, so it’s fine, like it’s not a big deal. They’ll stick there. And I didn’t have like a timeline for that, and I didn’t have clear, direct conversations about it. I just thought, like let’s just continue to build some vibes, and this will be great. And it took me probably two or three years longer than it needed to to address some of that because I – what I permitted I promoted, and there were people that were in especially significant seats on the bus that I just did not address bad culture for and a lot of times it was if you have that quadrant, it was somebody who was like high output but low culture, and they were a misfit. I had to deal with that, and I didn’t do it. So I think coming to Menlo, I was much more intentional to go, hey, if the quadrant is high culture, high output, I call that like my vomit list. I’ve heard it described that way. Like who would come into your office and say, I quit, and you would be like, oh my gosh, I’m sick, like please don’t quit. And then who is low culture, low output, that person you free to their future tomorrow. Who is high culture, low output, that’s someone you coach, you really want them here but they need to get better at their job. And then who’s someone that’s high output, low culture, you put them on a clock to say, what does culture and coherence look like and what’s the time you have to achieve it. And I think when I got to Menlo both of those outliers got a lot more of my time a lot faster, and part of it was we were doing a reorg, but I was looking at people who are high cultural fits, and I was going, man, I’m willing to take culture and character right now almost over competency because of how big this swing needs to be. And then on the other side, even people who are pretty high in their capacity but were low in their culture, they were getting offboarded very quickly. And I think it helped our culture. It really did. I think the shadow of it for us, three and a half years in, is I do think that there is still a bit of a disconnect where we have like a lot of great culture people, but not all of them are the same caliber as leader, and so figuring out like who – you’re going to watch people now who are really high culture but eventually maybe have to find what’s next for them just because they can’t keep it, and we’re doing everything we can to help them keep up, but I think that’s what I would encourage is like when you step in, who are the outliers on either side and I think we’re so prone to sort of aim at the middle or aim at just one, but I think freeing one to their future or being very clear about what the path for them staying is and then really spotlighting the other was – has been very important for us.
[0:35:39.9]
Robert: You know, your – first of all, you are really good at this.
[0:35:43.4]
Phil: Yes.
[0:35:43.8]
Robert: This is another rewind for our audience. Go back and listen to that little segment right there because what I really like you describing, and I think sometimes this is overlooked in this kind of culture environment when we’re focused on measuring and culture and listening to feedback, right, because we want to listen to feedback. Sometimes what gets overlooked is the responsibility of the people, the staff, to align with culture, right. That’s why you have culture values. That’s why you – and so what I really like that you’re describing is, you know, not only, okay, we’re committed to building a healthy, flourishing staff culture, that’s our commitment as leadership, and we’ve got the tools, but we’re also measuring, how willing are you to be a person that is supporting the culture, right? It’s almost kind of – you’re describing like an assessment or a measurement technique to understand, okay, where is everybody on this? High competency but low culture, you want to see that reversed, if anything, right. Preferably both of those measurables are high. But I really like that, and I think it’s important because staff does need to be coached on hey, you can’t be a culture vulture here. You have to want to be part of the future and what we’re building here.
[0:37:02.6]
Phil: I think that one of the things people do, without necessarily realizing it, in transition, I’ll give positive intent here, but I think that there is – sometimes you’ll hear this line, you’ll hear, I just need clarity, I need more clarity, and I think sometimes that’s perfectly valid, like someone is lacking clarity. I don’t know what my job is. I don’t know what it is to be successful. I also think sometimes that misalignment in culture or in desired outcome that shows up here – and I don’t say this individually, like I’m not trying to put somebody on the spot, but I will say to our team, hey, I need you to be really intentional, super helpful, before you raise that with your manager, before you raise that with me. Ask yourself the question, do I not have clarity or do I not like the clarity that I have? Because those are actually two different problems, and I think as you start to set culture, sometimes people will go, I don’t like clarity. And whether they mean to or not, what they’re really saying is, yeah, there’s some clarity, I just like that clarity, and so I want some clarity I don’t have yet. And I think that is a part, as a leader, where you just have to recognize, cast compelling vision, but leave the best for the future, invest in people, and there are still going to be people that don’t like it.
[0:38:13.2]
Robert: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s a – that’s like a coaching element, good leadership because it’s, hey, I can come up higher as a person contributing to this culture and ask those tough questions. What’s my true motivator here? What’s behind all of that? I love it. Let me just – we’ve gone so quickly through this. I could keep going for another hour easily with you. But I want to encourage leaders who are listening to this right now, whether they are – they’ve been pastoring a church, or leading an organization for a long time, or maybe they’re moving into a similar situation that you did just a few years ago where they’re inheriting a culture and they feel discouraged about the things that they’re inheriting and the things that they’re seeing. Could you speak to those leaders that are listening that feel discouraged by the culture they’ve inherited, what would you want them to know?
[0:39:06.6]
Phil: I mean I think that the great news about bad culture I that there’s nowhere to go but up. I have friends that have stepped into really, really big, intimidating situations in the marketplace and in ministry, and they’ll sometimes say, well, Phil, you’re like doing this and that’s great. I’m like, man, you have a harder job than I do. You have a harder job than I do. And so when we make changes and improve, man, it’s really fun, like it really is. It’s hard, but there is a great opportunity for near immediate impact when you start to prioritize culture, and yeah, like I think that the assessment every year is a helpful scorecard, but there is also kind of like a daily scorecard that you get to see. Where somebody is trying to navigate something that’s about – in a certain ministry environment, program, service, whatever, and there’s a conflict, and you know, man, false harmony or ruinous empathy would have normally been the play we ran as a culture, and I just found out that like that team over there proactively went and talked to that team, they had a difficult conversation, they came up with a better solution and they’re navigating it, and I had nothing to do with it, that’s amazing. I want to spotlight that and celebrate that. That’s sort of this intermediate marker. And I think if you’re trying to navigate this turnaround, you don’t really need to wait. Every year that you take the assessment you’ll get a great snapshot, but you’ll get these snapshots if you’re looking for them all the time. So I’d say look for those and everything tells you something. If you see somebody where they’re showing you what their culture really is, and the culture that they want to build or that they’re willing to sacrifice for, and it’s not something you want to, I’d say, man, prioritize a conversation to spotlight it, to say, hey, when we talk about what good culture is, I just want to say out loud what you did there, how you modeled that relationship, what you did with that subordinate on the org chart, that is not what we’re trying to do and here’s why. Document it all. And then you just get to start building brick by brick the kind of culture you want, and it becomes easier for people to show up to work. It becomes easier for stuff to get done. It becomes more fulfilling. You retain staff better. You attract better staff. And we’re not there yet. Like if you go look at Menlo on Glassdoor, we are trying to climb out of decades of some dysfunction that just was a part of the culture. Nobody was bad. It was just a bunch of unhealthy systems that we’re still trying to put the pieces back together for, and I hope that one day, Lord willing, decades from now, we’ll leave here and we’ve left it better than we found it, but it’s going to take leaders who are willing to do that difficult work, and you are going to change culture, even if you’re starting it from nothing, but I – I mean, maybe I’m a glutton for punishment. I just think that the opportunity to navigate significant turnaround, bring out the best in who a congregation was, for us that’s a 150-year-old story of like, man, the men and women that invested 150 years ago that believed for the future, had no idea that Silicon Valley would look like it looks like today, and we get to help shape culture, that wouldn’t it be great if the good news of Jesus got smuggled into every AI product, into every large language model, into every big tech and startup that exists all up and down the Bay area, because we leveraged the influence that God gave Menlo 150 years ago through good culture, and we didn’t have to hold our nose to come to work every day. That’s the heart that I think when you do it well, it’s worth the work.
[0:42:34.9]
Robert: Amen. Amen to that. Folks, leaders, culture can make or break the ministry. It can make or break your church. It can make or break your organization. So invest in it. Listen to these insights. Find a way to measure and stay on top of – not just annually, like Pastor Phil was saying – to stay on top of this weekly, daily, and commit to that journey and intentionally building a healthy, flourishing culture, and you will see greater results and there is hope. If your culture is not doing too good right now and you inherited something, there are steps. The only way to go is up. That’s super encouraging. I think we’re going to end it right there. And I know our listeners are blessed. If you’re listening to this and you feel like there is somebody who needs to hear some of these insights, a leader, a colleague, another pastor or friend, please share this with them. Like and subscribe to the podcast as well, but share it out because we want to get this information into the hands of leaders who need to be equipped and inspired to improve their cultures because we know when cultures are improved and leaders focus on that, kingdom impact, it’s explosive, and we want to see every Christian-led organization have a great kingdom impact. So, thank you so much for being on the podcast today, Phil. We have to have you back sometime in the future and get more information and glean more insights from you, so thank you so much for being part of the podcast today.
[0:44:05.3]
Phil: Of course. Thanks for having me.