Hey everyone, welcome to the Vander Bloom and Leadership Podcast where we help you build, run, and keep great teams. Thanks for being here. Let's dive in.
SPEAKER_02Well, William, today we're talking all things culture. To start off, what are would you define culture as and what why is it so important to success in an organization?
SPEAKER_00Well, there are a lot of great definitions of culture. The one that I uh coined, and it's not the best one, it's just one that works for me, is if we've got a vision from God about what we want to do, we want to help here, we want to help the church, and that's gonna be schools, nonprofits, for-profits, and the local church. If we we want to help the church go farther and faster by solving their people problems, yep. So, like helping them with their culture, helping them find the right staff, helping them with succession planning, making sure you're paying people right. Those are the that's our lane. And if we can do that right, I I don't think there is a bigger perennial issue in Christian teams than people problems. Yeah, funding might be second. Oh, but but those two are the two, a lot of things come and go, but people problems. I mean, where they say Jesus picked 12 and one of those didn't work out. So, like even from the beginning, you know. Yeah, uh, yeah. So that's our mission, right? So for me, our cultural values, what we value culturally, if mission is what God's called us to do here, then our culture is how we're going to behave while we get the mission done.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's almost like family rules. Okay. I I don't know, you know, if your family has, hey, here are the rules, this is out of bounds, this is inbounds, like very clearly defined rules. And and for some families, you don't even have to write it down because everybody just knows. That's right. Because you just know where you sit in the car. Where you sit in the car. The the thing, the difference between families, and we we actually had a rule. We had three boys, and it was who got to ride in the front. This is before airbags, and you know, so you could ride in the door. And uh it we just had weeks. It was my week, so I got to sit in the front all week. Okay, and there was my brother's week, and there was a and there was a chart. Now, the week also meant you had to take out the trash and you but you get the good, bad, and the ugly. So, but most families just have unspoken rules. That's right. You know that if dad's sitting in that chair when you walk in the house, he ain't in a good mood, and you want to like sit. You know that if moms do it, like here's the difference with the staff faces change a lot more than in families.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And you get people that uh enter the game and don't know the inside rules. A great example of this, we were uh we did a study of uh when we when we were winning all these workplace awards, I've mentioned it before, our team came and said, You need to write a book about culture. I'm like, why do I need to write a book? Well, because we're gonna quit winning awards one day. Thanks for the optimism, but it was actually realism. You know, those things you know kind of come and go. They were right. Turns out all the culture books at the time, everything I could find was about a particular company. Nordstrom wrote about the Nordstrom way, um, Mercedes wrote a Mercedes book, Google wrote uh work rules, but it's all about working at Google. Um, the new gold standard, my favorite, is about the Ritz-Carlton. Um, and I'm like, I we don't have enough material or history or virtue to be a whole book. So we set out to find 150 different companies, churches, organizations that were winning these same kinds of awards, and we started looking for common threads. One of the most common threads among those who were winning awards was at some point they realized those unwritten rules that we all know, if dad's sitting there or if mom's doing that, or it's my week to sit in the front. As you grow, there's no transferability of unwritten rules. And you have to sit down. And the maybe the best example of those 150, we studied North Point Church, which Andy Stanley started quite a while ago now. It's been a great church for a long, long time, very tight culture. And when, you know, I was talking to their exec pastor, he said, you know, William, when you get to where your staff's like 400 or so, and I'm like, Rick, we're talking about churches. Like you just ruled out 99.9% of all churches on the planet. But he laughed. He said, Well, okay, when the organization gets to a large enough number, all those little things that that we all knew when we started the organization, that they didn't transfer.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And so we had to stop and we went through a long process, which we can talk about later. But uh the it it's realizing that you've got to codify those uh family rules about how we're going to behave while we accomplish the missions God's called us to. We really shouldn't be filming it here in our main conference room. Maybe we can walk back there and uh put a little B-reel on. Um the wall to the conference room where most of the meetings happen here in the office has literally the nine cultural values plastered to the wall. So they're there. And uh we we talk about them incessantly. It's that how are we going to behave? And then how do you drive those rules of behavior into the team every single day?
SPEAKER_02Yep. Yep. You know, a term that's been thrown around a lot on social media and a bunch of different platforms is a toxic workplace culture. And so many people are saying, you know, these are the signs that you need to um leave a leave a toxic workplace if your manager does so and so, or if your if your coworker says this. What are just some of the commonalities amongst some of those more negative workplace cultures that we've noticed in research?
SPEAKER_00Well, in the research, we studied uh workplaces that did not have toxic culture. In fact, there's the book, Culture Wins, and uh we can talk all about it if you'd like at some point. It's been out for gosh, seven years now, and it's still selling just like it was the second year. First year's bigger, but um yeah. The the toxic work cultures, let's talk about that for a second. Um toxic workplace, it's is almost a word that is as common as people talking about their trauma. Okay. Now, I am a bit of a linguist. I've took a bunch of different languages, so I take words seriously, and I know meaning of word shifts around, and I'm old and don't understand and all that. But those are really strong words. Like when the kids were little and he's stupid, Adrian would say, stupid is a strong word. We don't use that word. Hate. Hate, strong word, we don't use that word. And people throw things around now, but like trauma is is trauma is like not, oh my gosh, my boss wants me to get something done by Friday. That's not trauma. Yeah, toxic workplace culture is not we had to work hard, we didn't get a bonus. Uh, I don't like everybody here. Like there are a lot of toxic workplace cultures. When we studied for culture wins, we found uh something like two-thirds of all Americans hate their job. Wow. And that's in 2017. That's way before there was a COVID. And I'm I working remote or not remote and all that. I mean, that's it's gotten two-thirds. Not I mildly dislike, I'm not engaged. They hate their job. That doesn't mean two-thirds of all workplaces are toxic. I I go back to, you know, what I am trying to learn is uh just to remember to get the log out of my own eye before I start. Like, where am I part of the part of the problem? And uh I think we've strayed a little too far into a bit of victim mentality. Well, it's just toxic around here. So I know a lot of you are in places where you say, but you don't understand it really is toxic. There are some basic um uh indicators. We found eight of them as we studied all these companies of whether or not you're toxic or not toxic, healthy or unhealthy. And and we actually put it together in um, I think there's a freemium version. It's theculture tool.com. The culture tool.com. About 10,000 Christian organizations have gone through this. So you'll have a baseline of where you feel your workplace is and where the normal is. And it's things like trust in leadership, communication. You you'll see it if you go to theculture tool.com. Um I I will say if you're if you're out there and you're saying I'm in a toxic workplace, hear, hear this very clearly. I firmly believe, and I'm not the first person to say this, people join a church staff, a school staff, a nonprofit staff, people join a team because of a vision and a cause. They leave a team because of a manager. So if you are the senior leader of your team and you've got a manager who keeps losing people, that might not be a hiring issue. It might be the manager issue. People leave bad managers, they don't leave causes. Yeah. And let sometimes maybe they have a shift in what they believe or whatnot. But uh I I would say drop back before you say I'm toxic and I'm having trauma at work, and like ask yourself, what am I doing that's contributing to this? Is it really as bad as I think it is? Maybe even get a baseline, go to something like thecultura tool.com and just understand okay, this is what's normal and this is what's not. And you know, um, I was watching the Tom Brady podcast not too long ago. Okay. And uh he referenced when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame and at the Patriots. Yep. And he said, I wish everybody could play football. It's a pretty famous speech. Have you seen this? Uh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, why? Not because everybody needs to play football, but because football is hard and life is hard, and you need to do hard things. Work is hard. Ask Jesus' disciples. Every one of them were put to death. Yeah. So like all of them. So it's hard. So make sure you're not uh over-dramatizing or over-victimizing yourself. Make sure it's not you, make sure you're not being a little too extra, and and get a baseline for what's real. And if it's a manager issue, you know, then then there's a conflict resolution conversation that needs to happen.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. What would you say for the maybe the manager or the team leader perspective of noticing like, well, I maybe have a team member who's not in line with the culture, or maybe even I've watched this culture drift from what was originally set to we look at our present reality of what we say versus you know what the team actually looks like. What would you say is a kind of tips for realignment into Yeah?
SPEAKER_00Well, unfortunately, um this happens. We talked last week about the cultural values of trust and integrity that were at Enron here in Houston. That's almost comical, right? So that's just a joke and a sham. Uh I I think this is where the senior leader sets the pace on this. And if the senior leader doesn't, it's almost impossible for us people underneath to have a cultural revolution. And so if you're a senior leader, do not just go on a retreat, write down your cultural values, and then put it in a drawer and leave. That's what 99% of everybody does with a retreat. No, it has to be a long process. North Point took over a year to come up with six cultural values. I asked Rick, the exec pastor, I'm like, you know, Andy's pretty good with words.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00You could have just sent him off on the mountain for a week and he could have come back and he's like, no, it doesn't work that way. Uh defining your cultural values. If you're a leader and you don't have these defined, most people don't. If you, if you don't have them defined, don't just go do it. It's more than it's not going up on the mountain to see what God says the values are. Actually, it's more like getting at the bottom of the mountain and doing an archaeological dig. When we're at our best, what do we do that's common to us, that's uncommon to other teams around us? How do we behave that feels normal to us, that's abnormal for other teams around us? Then you'll start to see, okay, here are the distinctives, or as we've talked about before, here's our kind of crazy. Yeah. And you can hire around that. But unless the senior leader takes time and invests, we interviewed one business uh that was in the software, they shut down for two weeks. Wow. Closed the business for two weeks to just work on culture. I said to the CEO, what? And they did they do some kind of algorithm and output for stock market stuff. Okay. And they're only like four companies that do this. Yeah. And he's one of the four. And they invested a, I think they were a $10, $15 million company, and they invested a million dollars and they closed two weeks only on culture. I'm like, why? That's crazy. Yeah. He said, well, our four companies, we have an annual churn rate, like we lose people, about 60%. It's a hard business, and about six out of 10 employees leave every year. So we're always hiring. Now, how much would it cost me to have you, William, do 60 searches a year for me every year? Well, that's a big number. Yeah. Never mind the fact you got to onboard the people and all that. He said, I spent a million dollars, we closed for two weeks, and now we're down to about a 15% churn. Yeah, that's amazing. So just like forget the oh, it's a good thing to do and it feels good and people are happy, just the finances of it make it worth it. But he had to take time to do it, and the senior leader had to do it. If the senior leader is not the champion of the cultural values, um, it's it's not gonna work. And I I wish there were another way to say that. I I I really, really do. But I will say the older the organization is, that is, like when was it established, yeah, the more entrenched those values can become and they can uh eclipse the values of the senior leader. Okay. Like you go to some churches, uh the church I served here, First Press during Houston, it was founded before Houston, uh before Texas was even in the state. So it's Texas was a country when First Press Houston, like the Senate met at First Press Houston. It's amazing. Right. So it's a pretty cool place. Yeah, and Sam Houston went there. I and if you're from Texas, you can understand this. We've been reaching lost people for a long, long time. Uh he was something else. Yeah. But uh you know, it those cultural values, when I walked in, I thought, well, I can just name values in it. No, no, no, no, no. This church has been around long enough, it's bigger than me.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00If it's a new church, a new team, a new organization, usually the senior leader or the top four or five people set the culture, and then it's just the job of the senior leader to start to articulate what that is. And if you can do that early on, well, then you've got a shot at driving the culture well. I I don't know a single team that doesn't go through seasons of misalignment with their cultural values.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And anyone who lived through pandemic and shutdowns, and even now, like today, five years later, we're still still dealing with uh a pretty hard big heartache from people where a whole lot of businesses are saying, okay, everybody's coming back to the office now. And everybody's like, Whoa, that's not our culture anymore. Yeah. So you're not gonna have an organization that doesn't go up and down, but the only way I know for it to stay up is for the senior leader to be bought in. And if I can have one more thing, the senior leader appoints someone on staff to devote a certain number of hours a week only toward culture. I call it in the book the culture whip. Like in the in the house, you know, when they're trying to rustle up the votes for whatever, whichever side of the aisle is voting. There's a whip for each party, and that's the person that gets all the votes lined up so that everything there needs to be a culture whip. Somebody who's like, I'm gonna own this. And it doesn't have to be a senior leader. If the senior leader is a champion of the values, when we started, we had an admin give five hours a week toward culture.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And by the way, she loved it because it was five five hours a week that she wasn't having to do admin, and she was fantastic at it, and she didn't cost a lot of money. But but had we not had somebody who was waking up every day saying, Part of my job today is culture. And and that also requires some part of your budget being given over to culture. Didn't have to be a million dollars on a $15 million organization, but yeah.
SPEAKER_02What would you say for the establishing the culture? You know, you talked about how the senior leader should be the champion of that. How collaborative of a process does the leader of a team organization do they allow that process to be? Um and involving other team members, but also understanding the balance of like, hey, these are the values I'm choosing to build this organization upon.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, uh the cultural values, unless you're just starting your church right now, you you don't get to just say what they are. Yeah. You the team God's given you is sort of you can understand where he's using that team and kind of dig it out through a long process, but name those values and and then from there, really release it. Release it as far down the org chart as you can. Uh, we have a culture team here. Yeah, I'm not on it. Everybody knows I'm all about the values. We try and drive values through a lot of different parts of what I call the employee life cycle from the day they come to work to the day they launch out into whatever their next wonderful thing is. And we put those markers in place, but but then the culture team that's in charge of actually driving cultural events, and I'm not a part of it. It's all delegated down.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's amazing. That's amazing. And just as we close today, um, what are just when a when a when a leader is considering maybe altering something in their culture, adding something maybe to they realize, oh, you know, when we established these things, we didn't have this and we should have. What are what are some uh ways that they can go about looking at their team and and realizing, oh, we we missed the mark on this, and now we need to go and have everyone, you know, change or an adapt to meet this mark?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, uh changing cultural values. I think I I ask myself all the time, we've had the same nine for 16 years now. Is it time we'd change them? And they're nine. I'd much rather there be 10. Then I could have two tablets of stone, I could write them on there and like the it was nine. It might be worth every so often dropping back and redoing the exercise. Uh, it might be that it's worth asking if you're trying to build something in and you're calling it cultural value. Is this about this is how we're going to behave as we achieve the mission God's called us to, or is this um a strategy? Yeah. Is it how we're gonna behave, or is it a strategic initiative? Because that's not culture, right? We have had people, uh, for instance, when we wrote Be the Unicorn, and one of the big difference makers in people who are the best versus everyone else is they get back to people quickly. We've had a number of pastors, uh you know, uh very, very large church here in the United States, probably second largest in the country, took just that chapter of the book and took the entire staff through it for six months. Wow. And a pastor said, I feel so strongly about this. This needs to become part of our culture, and we're gonna take time to learn it. So if you just have an edict, that's not gonna do anything. It's back to this top-down leadership versus collaborative. Do you take them through a process, read something together, work through it together? How do we integrate this together? It it will cause uh some ripples. Yeah. I asked, I was with uh a group of exec pastors, about 30 of them last week, all the larger churches, and uh I got a chance to go speak to them. It was really interesting talking to them ahead of time. All their churches are growing really fast. Oh, wow. That's not normal. No. Uh 85 to 90 percent of the churches in the United States are stagnant or in decline. These are all growing really fast. Wow. Uh, was it they're smart enough to get coaching? I don't know. But what was interesting was um when the question got asked, uh, how many of you have staff cultural values, not not values for the church? Almost all of them had them written down. That's wildly different than before we wrote the book. Wow. A lot more take time to write those cultural values down. And as I talked to them about uh, you know, hiring for culture, a lot of them have an interview solely devoted to does this person fit our cultural values? I flip it around and say, Do we fit you? We might be the problem, we're the weirdo. Um, but as they talked about that, I asked a question, and I don't know the answer to this. Can you change a culture of an organization without having a changing of the people? Can you change the culture without inherently causing some shake up in who's on staff and who's not? And the answer that they all gave me around the room was no. No, if you really change the culture, some people are gonna choose to leave, they're gonna self select out, doesn't mean you go fire everybody, but like, no. So if if you're thinking. Thinking of making a change to your cultural values, yeah. Just hear that clearly. You you might lose people over this. Uh, you might gain some people to it, it might be exactly the right thing, but it's not a small move and it can't be done suddenly or by edict.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's great. Well, as we close today, we want to go ahead and give away a few copies of this book, Culture Wins. So, what we're gonna ask you to do is comment down below in the YouTube comment section some questions that you'd want William to talk about and bring his expertise to. And we're gonna choose a few people who ask some really great questions and we're gonna give them free copies of Culture Wins. William, will you sign them for him too? Absolutely. Okay. We'll give you some signed copies for that. Well, thank you so much for listening today.
SPEAKER_01We hope that your team culture gets better this year. Thanks again for joining us on the Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you're looking for more leadership resources, you can find us at VanderBloomen.com and on socials at Vanderblumen. We'll see you again next week where we continue discussing how to build, run, and keep great teams.