336: Top Reasons to Ditch Culture Gimmicks for Honest, Reliable Data

Are you a leader who's trying to improve your workplace culture? Trying different gimmicks will not dramatically improve your workplace culture and neither will paying your people more by itself improve the health of your culture. Kevin East is the president of Mentoring Alliance and he figured out what's most important when it comes to creating a flourishing workplace culture. 

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In this episode:

• The challenges and opportunities that Kevin saw when he became president of Mentoring Alliance (02:36)
• "I just really stressed from the beginning health. The problem, though, was, Al, as you well know, even though I talked about it, not much happened for quite a long time." (03:37)
• What Kevin loved as a leader about working with Best Christian Workplaces is that it gave him data (04:58)
• Kevin told so many  pastors, CEOs, and ministries about Best Christian Workplaces because he firmly believed in it (05:19)
• Mentoring Alliance took their first survey and came under the unhealthy range. The organization tried different gimmicks that didn't work. Instead, they had to make leadership changes (06:25)
• How Kevin began to build a team that enables flourishing (07:40)
• Being an intentionally multiethnic ministry (10:10)
• Steps taken to make sure that Mentoring Alliance's values and vision and the core of the organization stay intact as growth happens (11:35)
• "We talk about our culture often. We might be flourishing right now, but in my experience, culture can just shift overnight. Like, it's not guaranteed it'll be flourishing next year. So it's like a small plant that you're constantly nourishing. I would emphasize a small plant because they're so fragile. It's like your workplace culture can be so fragile, where something’s done wrong, a wrong hire or things like that, it can just make the whole thing start wobbling." (12:10)
• Talking about culture often (12:42)
• Mentoring Alliance's compensation philosophy (16:02)
• Understanding of the importance of diversity (18:36)
• "I purely speak about it to people because I believe in it, and the reason why I believe in it is to me the process gives us data that's actionable." (24:28)

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