The Two Things Your Organization Learns From You Every Day
Healthy Leaders | Issue 69
Welcome back to Healthy Leaders! In this issue, what you do when no one is watching the clock is the most revealing thing about you.
Hello friends,
In our last issue, we established that leaders are always shaping their organization’s culture whether they realize it or not, particularly through their prayer and their lives. The leader who intercedes for his followers and lives what he claims to value is already doing the most fundamental culture-shaping work there is.
But eventually, a leader has to make decisions. He has to assign finances to a project, respond to a crisis, choose who to reward, etc. In every one of those moments, the culture of the organization is written out for those watching.
A leader can maintain a convincing prayer life and a pretty consistent example, and still contradict both of those things with his practical decisions. The work tells the truth that words sometimes conceal.
Here’s Malcolm with more:
Every leader communicates values through two channels simultaneously: what he says, and what he does. When those channels conflict, your followers believe the work.
Consider what Malcolm describes as the most quietly powerful of these: how leaders deal with people. The clearest cultural signals in any church or organization are who gets promoted, who gets held accountable and for what, who is rewarded and why. If you as a leader say that you value collaboration but then reward someone who achieved good results through self-serving behavior, your people draw their own conclusions: results are what matter, and how you treat others on the way to them is irrelevant. No talk about teamwork will undo that lesson.
The same principle applies to how you respond to crisis. When pressure is high and things go wrong, your people are watching you. Crisis reveals character, and your character in that moment will become your culture’s character.
We could go on. Budget decisions, time investments, what gets funded and what gets cut — stewardship of your resources also tells your organization what is actually valued. This is exactly what one older sister responsible for church finances in East Asia discovered about herself. She was known for tightly controlling expenses, with goals to purchase property and prioritize building wealth instead of people. Her coworkers had long struggled to approach her with financial requests. But through years of engagement with our team, her perspective shifted.
“The value of building people has taken root in my heart. Now, if something is beneficial to people’s lives, I gladly release the funds.”
This shift from preserving resources to investing in people is emblematic of the broader transformation across their church.
This sister enacted culture change in her church by what she did, not by what she said. The culture of her church shifted not because someone gave a talk about generosity, but because the person controlling the resources began to use them differently.
Of course, our words still matter in a big way. As Malcolm said — the stories a leader tells and re-tells over time have a direct impact on an organization’s culture.
A leader who regularly shares accounts of how God came through in moments of need is shaping a culture of faith. His people take on that story, and it becomes the lens through which they interpret their own lives. They begin to expect God to move. They begin to look for His faithfulness rather than defaulting to panic or self-reliance. So choose your stories and heroes carefully, because they will have a deep impact on your culture.
What About You?
Leaders shape organizational culture through their prayer, their lives, their work, and their words. All four, all the time, deliberately or unintentionally.
Think about the last significant decision you made in your church, ministry, or organization (a budget call, a personnel decision, a structural change, etc.) What cultural message did it send? Was that the message you intended?
When did you last tell a story to your team, your congregation, or your co-workers about God’s faithfulness in a moment of difficulty? Who are the heroes in the stories you tell most often?
We’d love to hear your reflections in the comments.
Recommended Resources
Video Course: Shaping a Culture of Generational Succession
Video Course: Building Healthy Churches
For more resources, visit our website.
As always, we’re so grateful to our friends at Fifty-Four Collective for helping us create these videos and for providing top-notch leader development online training. Check out what they’re doing!