“How to Move Your Culture from Critical Moment to Flourishing“
February 24, 2020
Scott Gibson
Intro: Will you join us on our quest to see 1,000 Christian-led organizations with a flourishing culture by 2030? Imagine the impact. Well, today, listen to the practical steps a leader has taken to move his workplace culture from critical moment to flourishing.
Female: This is the Flourishing Culture Podcast. Here’s your host, president of the Best Christian Workplaces Institute, Al Lopus.
Al Lopus: Welcome to another episode of the Flourishing Culture Podcast, where our goal is to equip and inspire you to build a flourishing workplace. We are here to help you eliminate workplace distrust, improve your employees’ experience, and grow your organization's impact. And before we meet our special guest today, I urge you to subscribe to this podcast. As a result, you’ll receive our action guide. It’s our gift to help you lead your organization’s culture to the next level. To subscribe, simply go to bcwinstitute.org/podcast. Hit the Subscribe button, and receive our free action guide.
Also, if you could share this podcast with others, and rate it, it would really mean a lot to me. Thank you.
And now, let's meet today's special guest.
My guest is Scott Gibson, the superintendent of Toledo Christian Schools in Toledo, Ohio. Scott, welcome to the Flourishing Culture Podcast.
Scott Gibson: Well, thanks for having me, Al. I'm excited to be here.
Al: Scott, what you’ve done at Toledo Christian Schools is what every Christian leader longs for, and that's to create a workplace culture where people feel energized, engaged, unified, and even excited about coming to work every day. And I want our listeners to hear your story because I think they're going to find a piece of their own story and, thus, greatly benefit from what you have to say. So let's dive in.
When you became the superintendent of Toledo Christian Schools, tell us what you noticed about the workplace culture and maybe both the good and maybe a few things that needed attention. What did you see when you walked in?
Scott: Yeah, absolutely. So back in 2012 was my first year as the superintendent here at Toledo Christian, and at the time, I took over for a superintendent at that time that really ran the place more as a dictator. We've seen managers in our worlds that sometimes lead that way, unfortunately. And so the culture was really down; the morale of the culture was really down. And I noticed it right away. And so what I wanted to do was return to our mission, why do we do what we do, and start asking all those questions and just to make sure people could get reengaged and have one-on-one conversations of what happened and how we can get better. And it was at that time that I attended a leadership summit, and Bill Hybels was talking about the Best Christian Workplace, and he went through an example. That's how I got tuned into Best Christian Workplace. And I said, okay, for me to really know what's going on here, I'd love to have an anonymous survey. I just really want to know what is bothersome about the engaging culture that I really want to have that we can't have right at the moment. And sure, there were people that were really helping our school continue on with our mission, but the whole culture was not engaged like I wanted it to be.
And so we took that first-year survey, and I was delighted and surprised, actually, to see it as high as it was. Even though it wasn't Best Christian Workplace, we were starting down the right path of asking the right questions. What would be an engaging culture look to you? What would that look like? Whether it be a teacher or a staff member or an administrator, they were sharing openly with me, which I was delighted to have. And Best Christian Workplace really helped me hone in on the right questions. And so I was happy to get that started that way. But 3.99 wasn't a bad start, but it gave and really opened up and illuminated, I think, some of the directions for our strategic planning, Al, that we wanted to go down.
Al: Given all of your role, particularly as a superintendent and personally as a Christ follower, what's been your greatest desire, maybe your hope, your prayer, for your people and your workplace culture? What were you hoping to have and build as a workplace culture at Toledo Christian School?
Scott: Yeah. The key to it is—we hear this often—life-giving work. The mission was the reason that people were here. It wasn't because of pay. I mean, if we look at Christian schools or even any private school, for that matter, we're clearly paid at a lower scale than in the public arena. So I knew that long-term teachers and staff, people were not here for the pay. They were here for the mission. And the mission at Toledo Christian is to educate and disciple and prepare students to follow Christ and impact culture. And so the key statement in all of that is the end of it. So kids cannot follow Christ and impact culture unless we're doing our mission properly of educating with excellence, discipling them by modeling the way of what Christ-like behavior looks like, and then really preparing them to have conversations in the workplace and in the world that they can be a Christ follower and still thrive. That's the real reason. So if we boil that all down, we call it the why. And so the why of our school was to ensure that every child knew who Jesus was, and our prayer would be that they would make a commitment to pick up the cross and follow Him, as he talks about in Matthew.
Al: Yep, pick up your cross and follow Me. So, let's go back. You talked about that first time you had heard that it's good to survey the health of your culture. You did our survey. You measured the health. It was just shy of being a certified Christian workplace, not quite at what we consider the healthy level. You weren't surprised. But tell us what you were feeling at that time. What were the outcomes?
Scott: More encouragement than anything. And I knew that—I really did know—that pay was going to be a low mark. I already knew that. I knew that retirement benefits were going to be a low mark. But what I was really trying to hone in on was, what did they think about as far as did their leader believe in them? Where were the principals in this discussion? because it was the superintendent that resigned his position middle of the school year, and so it left the entire organization kind of in a lull period, if you will, from a leadership standpoint. There was a gap there. So I wanted to see, where were the principals thriving? Where did they need help, as far as that life-giving culture, breathing into that life-giving culture? And so were they given the feedback that they needed? because people want to know if they're doing a good job or not, and so, we’re we doing those things? A lot of that was shown in the first survey really clearly. And so we knew exactly what we had to work on, based on the survey, from a people perspective. It kept going back, Al, to the why. It really did.
Al: Back to the why, yeah. Let's stay with the story, and tell us a little bit about, then, what happened. You got the results. You kind of, we say, walk through the front door. You really moved things forward. You had a positive reaction after that first year. So what happened after that initial effort?
Scott: Yeah. The interesting thing to note is that the principal of the elementary, principal of the junior high, high school, were in the latter stages of their career. And so I knew that they were beloved by the staff and the faculty, but they were pretty much handcuffed by the superintendent, or the leader, at the time. So now they could open up and give back that love some more and really reassure and encourage their staffs. And they started to do that right away.
So what we did was we started to do more engaging things. So we started devotions up again on Wednesday mornings. We started to celebrate, which is really important, celebrate the wins. They were small wins, but they were wins. I even celebrated the fact that we had a 3.99, and we were only one-tenth away from Best Christian Workplace. And at the time, that's a win. That is a really big win. I thought we'd be a lot lower. But we also shared the trend—not the trend comparison yet. That was later—but what were the areas that we could see improvement, and what did they tell us? So we shared that back with the staff because it's important to say, “I hear you, and here's what we’re going to do about it.” And so we wanted to make sure we communicated all that.
Al: In the last five years, your culture has moved from that nearly healthy to, now, flourishing. Just remarkable. The percentage of your staff that are engaged, it’s now 80 percent, eight out of 10, which is probably up from less than 50 percent when you started. That's a great improvement. So as the head of the school, what positive difference did you see as you even walk around the halls, as you think of your culture and the way you even feel it on a day-to-day basis? What are some of the positive differences?
Scott: Yeah. People are smiling. You can tell, when you walk into any culture, whether it be a business or a school or anywhere you go into, you can get the feeling of what that culture's like just by looking in the eyes of the workforce. And so you can tell, do they walk upright? Do they lean over, and they don’t make eye contact? Well, there’s a lot of smiling going on. I've had coaches come into our building and say, “Wow, this place is different.” Just recently, just in the last week, we had a parent come through and say, “I visited a lot of private schools, and when I walk into your building, it's so different than the other places.” Well, the difference that they're talking about is really the culture. It's, to me from a faith standpoint, it's the Holy Spirit that is active in this place. We're all on the same page. We're on the same ship, going in the same direction, and that matters a lot.
People feel as if they are giving life-giving work, as I keep saying, but they also feel as if they can trust their coworker, trust their supervisors, and can operate with freedom within that trust. And so they're not worried about looking what's behind them or the decision that they made or maybe they failed. I often talked, in the beginning and I still talk, about failure in that it's a learning lesson. It's not something we should look negatively upon. We should look positive upon it because we tried. So in order to move forward, you've got a risk and you will fail. And when we fail, we get better because we're going to learn from the failures. And so people weren't afraid to fail.
Al: Wow, that’s great. Yeah. Learning from failures. And that's particularly good in a Christian-school setting, particularly. So that's great.
Cary Humphries, on our BCWI team, has really enjoyed working with you these past few years. And he’s highlighted—
Scott: He’s been great.
Al: Yeah. —he's highlighted tremendous progress. You've mentioned life-giving work, but he's also highlighted outstanding talent and inspirational leadership. And finding significant purpose and meaning in that job is what life-giving work is all about. How do you and your staff experience a greater sense of life-giving work? How do you foster that?
Scott: Well, I think it's pretty purposeful intention. And so what I mean by that is every year, the expectations of what we want to accomplish are very clear for each person in their job or maybe in their role, but then as a whole. And so we're moving towards the same strategic plan, and those things are identified and clearly conveyed at the orientations every year. We always have group team-building projects that we do. Things like that. And the staff and the faculty have been working together as a unit for a very long time.
We do have turnover. There is employee turnover, but it’s really low and for reasons other than the workplace. It's a pregnancy or it's a job change where they've had to move; it's things like that. But it's very rare. In fact, I can count on my hand maybe two or three people that have left because of our curriculum change, for example, or a change in the business strategic plan I talked about. So it's purposeful intention.
Al: You’ve just brought it up, but one of the biggest improvements has been employee commitment. And you now have a staff that really wants to work at Toledo Christian Schools, where five years ago, that commitment question was on your bottom 10. And today, you're clearly flourishing. So what are a couple of the things that really helped fuel the commitment and building that commitment of your employees to transform your culture so dramatically? Anything come to your mind?
Scott: There’s two things. First of all, it's making sure that the right people are here. And so I think that's super important. You've got to be able to evaluate your employees and then understand their weaknesses and help coach them through that. Now, if there are people on your staffs that are not coachable or they're not moving in the right direction, then you've got to be willing to move them on. We've had a little bit of turnover in that arena, but I got to tell you, that's been wonderful. Your employees already know way ahead of time who needs to stay and who needs to go. They know that. And when you finally make that decision, they're like, “Well, it's about time.” So because you do have people maybe on your staffs that are not helping your culture, they don't see the vision that you have, and so we've had some changeover in the past probably four or five years with that, and it's really helped us because now everybody else feels free. And so managing your people, I think, is super important in that and key to moving forward.
And then also, just making sure that everybody understands their role within the team and understands the expectations.
Al: Yeah. So having the right people on the bus, and then role clarity, that's also a key. Great.
Scott: And I think, too. One thing I've noticed, Al—just a further comment on that—is that I noticed in the survey that our teachers really love to collaborate and work together. Now that number has gone up significantly. And when you say people, you know, they were offered a job at another place, I think is one of the questions, would they stay or go? They want to stay. That has changed over the years because people are committed to each other now. The bonds in between each employee has grown tighter and tighter.
Al: Scott, you mentioned, you talk about loving to collaborate, and you also mentioned that you do group team-building experiences on a regular basis. What are some examples of those group team-building programs? What do you do?
Scott: One of the interesting things we've done is well care, and we have a great team that's handling that for us. And it really is, we separate teams. People sign up for a weight-loss challenge, for example, and they'll be on the blue team versus the gold team. And so we compete against each other, and weekly weigh-ins, and then we go back and forth on who's doing what. And so that's been fun. It's kind of brought us together a little bit closer.
One of the first years that I began really looking at culture, we went to the triple-A baseball team, the local Mud Hens, Toledo Mud Hens, and had a cookout for family and celebrated our end of the year. That was a big deal because it brought families together, brought our employees together in a different setting. We've gone bowling together. We did that last winter for our Christmas party. And so those kind of things that just getting us together has really helped, off-site. And then internally what we've done is we've put the teams together, as far as elementary and junior high and high school. They're working more closely together, collaboratively, across the spectrum of the school. That's not just the high school working with high-school faculty. They're now working with elementary faculty and junior high. So we're getting a better flavor of what we're doing from preschool all the way through 12th grade.
Al: I trust you’re enjoying our podcast. We’ll be right back after this brief word about a valuable tool that can pinpoint the true, measurable health of your culture.
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Al: All right. Now, let’s hear more from today’s guest.
I bet you've got a before-and-after story of how the health of your workplace culture has improved, and, actually, how you've moved the needle to advance the mission of your school, kind of as you described the why. What would you say is a good story that reflects how things have changed?
Scott: I think it's really in the culture itself, the people itself. When you look from the beginning, if we go back to multiple leadership changes that have really fed into a culture that was just not healthy, we had retirements from people early that we didn't expect, teachers we thought would teach another 10 years, but because the culture was so toxic that it was just time to go. And so we went from that to a stage where we said, okay, what's our why? We talked about that. Why are we really here? Let's get together on the why. If we're not together on the why, then we can't move forward with a vision. So it's really important to get on the same page, from a mission perspective.
And we went all the way back to the founding of our school, 1975, and the founding was it was four people in the basement that prayed the prayer that said, we want the church and the school and the family to all work together, to come together, in spiritual formation of our children, with academic excellence as the umbrella on that, too. So when we look at that, that's where “educate, disciple, and prepare” came from. And so we went right back to that mission, and we talk about that all the time. We iterate what we're doing and why we're here.
And then we were able to build upon that, Al, the vision. And when we start to talk vision, people get excited. So they say, “Where are we going, and can we agree on where we're going?” So we put together the outcome of a student, the expected student outcomes, and those really helped us take a look at what do we want the children to become when they graduated Toledo Christian? And so through educating with excellence, we are breaking that down into bullet points of what that looks like. And then disciple, what does that look like? And then prepare. What does that look like? And then we look at graduates that have fulfilled that. And so over the time, we've been able to really focus in on vision.
Another vision item that I think really changed for our school was prior to me coming here, the teachers had not had a raise in eight years, eight years, and they didn't even move up one level on their step charts of their faculty pay. And so we put a strategic plan together. And now for the last five years, we've increased the chart as well as increased their pay because they had one more year experience. We’ve done that now for—committed to that—for the last five years. So our goal is to really get within 75 percent of the local market. That's our goal. We're right now at 71 percent. And so but when we started, we were at 63 percent. So that was a big jump as well. And it proved to them that we're going to hold to our commitment of our strategic plan, and so they could see the vision unveiling in front of them.
Al: Boy, that’s great. So your strategic plan has really been another key part of this process. Is that right, Scott?
Scott: It has. That's correct.
Al: And just quickly, give us a sense of how you've developed that plan. What are the key fundamental underpinnings of the strategic plan?
Scott: Well, it's multiple-stakeholder involvement in the beginning. And what we did was we put sub-teams together of past board members, teachers, parents were in the first strategic plan. It was called Vision 2020, and here we are at 2020, so it’s pretty amazing to watch that unveil.
And many of those things, it's interesting. In a strategic plan, when you set the strategic initiatives and the action plans, some of those things will change quickly because you’ll achieve them quicker than you thought. Once people start to get on board, there's an upswell. And so we were starting to check boxes a little faster than we thought. We thought it would take until 2020, but it didn’t. And so now we've realigned, and that's what happens with the strategic plan is you start to see new targets. And so we've realigned, and we've kept the same target for faculty pay and incentives because I want to be able to hire, train, and professionally develop the best talent. That's what our parents expect, when we look at value of the proposition of what we do. And so I want to be able to do that. So that stayed within the strategic plan.
An additional effort is from a budget standpoint, we want to be able to reduce our unrestricted requirement, which is really important, I think, in private-school world is that you don't rely upon unrestricted dollars to fulfill your budget, from a development standpoint. You've got to move that out and then have your development all towards building and operations and other things that you need to do other than the budget. So a lot of those things have been hallmarks of our strategic plan, and we've updated our facility significantly over the last five years.
Al: And so you mentioned you want the best talent. I’ll bet you, culture, or having a healthy culture, is part of your ongoing strategic plan. Maybe what's next, Vision 2023?
Scott: Yeah, exactly. We’re working on that. We’re actually working on that. Facilities committee’s working on projects and all kinds of things that’s going to come up into the next capital campaign.
Al: You've had really strong, across-the-board improvements in your workplace culture over the past five years, but we really notice trust, transparency, and compassion are three measurable strengths that you currently have in your workplace culture. And in your mind, how has trust, transparency, and compassion really helped to fuel a stronger culture overall?
Scott: Well, to begin with trust, Al, once you set a promise, deliver. Don't not deliver. And if you don't deliver, then be transparent on why you didn't deliver. And I think people can handle transparency. They can handle when things aren't going well. They expect that. But it's when you don't tell them why it didn't go well, that's when it becomes an issue. And so I've been very open with right where we're at and what we're working on, ever since day one. And I think that's really helped a lot from the trust and transparency category.
Al: You talked about, even that first year at a 3.99, celebrating the survey results. How do you communicate those now with your staff overall, your faculty and staff?
Scott: This last one, we had a big party in the summer time, which was wonderful, and did a cookout, did all that kind of stuff, right here at the school. We really encouraged that they look at the survey, that they check the results on their own. We have all that available to them from a transparent standpoint. But also, we read through things that still need to improve. Even though we're flourishing, we still got to work. We're not ever going to arrive. We're always going to have stuff to work on. And so we celebrate it. Absolutely.
Al: And you even read those comments about how you could still improve?
Scott: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
Al: I think that’s good for all of our listeners to communicate: what can be improved? What isn't the best, yet? That really does draw people to you and improves trust. I agree. Thanks. That's great.
At Toledo Christian Schools, employee engagement is also big, because your employees feel like they're listened to and their suggestions are acted on. So I'm interested in a few of the creative ways that you've asked for and received valuable employee feedback. You've mentioned multiple-stakeholder involvement in the strategic plan, but how do you get your faculty and staff involved in what's going on?
Scott: Well, the question comes around, do they have a voice? And so we early on wanted to make sure that everybody had a voice. And I would encourage the faculty and staff to come to my office if they had a question or a concern, whatever that may be.
But over the last four years, four or five years, we've been transitioning into classical Christian curriculum. To give them a voice, we've been running through book studies and getting their comments and getting their feedback on what are good books to read at certain levels. And they really enjoy that. They enjoy having input as opposed to just saying, “Here's the curriculum. Teach it.” This is what we want to do is make sure we get into a circle and multiple meetings and consistency with that is important as well. It's not one and done. And so monthly, we sit down and we go through material. We've got a meeting coming up. We're reading a poem that we may include in the 10th grade literature next year. And so we get a whole group around the table, that includes a lot of different teachers, that they get feedback and they're like, “You know, this material would fit really well,” or “It would not,” or “Here are our questions to follow up and ask.” There's a lot of feedback back and forth. And then we do multiple, surveys as well, where we're trying to get feedback on certain things, like how did this professional development session go? Give us your input.
We had a safety training in orientation we do every year called ALICE, which is ALICE training for active shooter and things like that. We get their feedback: How’d the training go? What do you think could be done better? So they really feel like they're involved and have a voice in all those discussions.
Al: Yeah. And that really is making a big difference.
I love to see how your flourishing culture has come about, and I know it resonates with scripture as well. So, Paul, who tells in Philippians, speak whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable. If there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think of these things. I'm curious, where do you find yourself giving thanks for what's excellent and worthy of praise at Toledo Christian Schools?
Scott: Oh, it's in a lot of places. There's not an area that I wouldn't—and we constantly are so grateful to God, and we pray about that. We talk about that. We celebrate that. It's compassion. So when you look at a teacher that's done well in a, say, a meeting, that we just had a meeting for sixth graders going into seventh grade. And I had a couple of teachers speaking at that with parents. And they did such a great job. And I went up afterwards and said, “Awesome job. Way to go. You hit the concise points that you needed to hit.” And then we also talk about how we can make it better. Make it better is a common phrase around here. We want to continuously improve. But it's that compassion. When you say “think on these things,” we're constantly looking at what are our core values? Our core values are all about that verse you just read. And so it goes all the way from preschool through 12th grade. And we talk about the fruits of the Spirit and all of those things around our culture. We want to make sure that we're always emphasizing.
We just had a chapel service with our high-school principal that was about mutual accountability. And so the reality is, if somebody is stepping the wrong way, we want to hold them accountable one on one right away. So it's not something we let go. So it's our culture that we're protecting. And it's also that brother or sister in Christ we're trying to help.
Al: You mentioned core values, and I have to think, Scott, that that was probably one of the things that you really started focusing on when you came on board after you were assigned there. Is that…?
Scott: That's exactly right.
Al: Okay. And we run into this so often, where an organization, a Christian organization, doesn't really have a set of core values. How did you go about developing those?
Scott: Yeah, it's an interesting journey that we had, actually. We got into a room, and I had my core leadership team together with me. There’s eight people on that team at the time. And we went into a room with big Post-it Notes and said, let's just go through and whittle this down to what we think are the main core values. We came up with eight, which is a little bit more than I would recommend, by the way. But it really worked out from a godly perspective, and I'll tell you why.
So the eight core values that we have—respect, responsibility, commitment, courage, we go through the whole list—each of those core values are named after one of our House Mentoring Houses in the high school. And so we've tied core values into the high school, we’ve tied core values into the elementary, and we talk about the core values everywhere we can. When we go through the core values, there's a Bible verse that's attached to those. The elementary start to memorize those early, and that way, it continues to unfold throughout the school as to what we're doing here and what we expect here. And so excellence—there's eight of them, as I said—but they tie in perfectly. And I would probably, if I could, go back and hone that down into six or maybe five, but eight’s a good number right now.
Al: Well, I like the number eight. We have eight drivers for a flourishing culture in our FLOURISH model.
Scott: There we go. There we go.
Al: I also understand that people say five or six. That's a good number, too.
Well, Scott, I really enjoyed everything we've learned today in our podcast. Just going back to really the key that you've described as life-giving work and how, particularly in education and Christian education, people love the fact that they're able to teach in a Christian environment, and that's the why that you talk about and that you continue throughout. You've really talked about the why is very clear, and how, at first, you really became encouraged and encouraging to build the culture, and that people are really smiling and that you really encourage people to smile. But I really was taken by the fact that people now feel freedom, freedom to do their job. And particularly after a previous autocratic type of a leader, I can imagine that really has brought about this sense of freedom that leads to commitment and people just want to be there. But you're coaching for us is really important, that you need to have the right people there to start with, and then, once you have the right people, you focus on role clarity, and then create an environment where people can collaborate and learn from each other to do the best they can do. I mean, it's just the whole—the involvement, the way you've got multiple-stakeholder approach to strategic planning and this focus on excellence, boy, it's been a great conversation.
And given everything that we've talked about, is there a final thought or encouragement you'd like to leave for our listeners, one bottom-line thought that you’d like to say?
Scott: I would end with this. I’d say God called us to love. He said to love above all else, love our neighbor as ourself. And so if we can do that, if we love kids, then it's going to show in our work. If we love people, it's going to show in our work. And so we want to be able to love. And we do that here, and we do it well. We think, sure, we fall down, but we get right back up because we're that kind of environment that says you can keep going; you can do this. And we’re together in it.
Al: Yeah, somebody said that the most-important thing is to love God and love our neighbors, which includes our students, our teachers, those around us. Yeah, love. That's great.
Scott Gibson, the superintendent of Toledo Christian Schools in Toledo, Ohio, thank you for sharing your wisdom, insights, and stories, and thank you for investing yourself and everyone who's been listening and benefiting from all you've shared with us today. Thanks, Scott.
Scott: It’s been my pleasure. Thank you.
Outro: I want to thank you for joining us on the Flourishing Culture Podcast and for investing this time in your workplace culture today. If there's a specific insight, story, or action step you've enjoyed in these past few minutes, then please share it with others so they can benefit as well. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please be sure to show your support by rating, reviewing, and subscribing wherever you listen. You can also share this podcast with friends on social media.
This program is copyrighted by the Best Christian Workplaces Institute. All rights reserved. Our writer is Mark Cutshall; our social-media assistant is Solape Osoba; and remember, a healthy culture drives greater impact and growth for your organization. We'll see you again soon on the Flourishing Culture Podcast.