Your Organizational Culture Has Your Fingerprints on It
Healthy Leaders | Issue 68
Welcome back to Healthy Leaders! In this issue, we ask an uncomfortable question: what is your organization’s culture actually learning from you?
Hello friends,
It has become popular to claim any number of things about the culture of your church or organization, whether it’s trumpeting your values or talking incessantly about your identity.
The trouble is that what you say your culture is actually has very little to do with what your culture actually is. The actual culture of your organization isn’t posted on the wall or written in a document. It’s defined by a thousand small moments, like the way you as the leader respond when things go wrong, what you laugh at, what you ignore, what you pray about (or never pray about). Your people watch all of it. Over time, without a word being spoken about “culture,” they know exactly what is valued and what is not.
You’re always shaping your culture. What kind of culture are you shaping?
Here’s Malcolm with more on this:
In almost every organization, there’s a gap between the values a leader announces and the values that he or she lives.
The official statement may say, “We value prayer.” But does the leader pray? Visibly, fervently, and not as a last resort? People are not reading some statement, they are reading you, their leader.
As Malcolm says, the leader himself is the vision statement, and the leader’s life is the values statement. A leader who says one thing and does another produces a very clear culture that believes that words are cheap and that the real values are what you see in the room.
This sobering reality cuts both ways. It means that a leader who is genuinely growing, praying, and putting people before programs can shift an entire organization’s culture simply by being consistently, visibly, different. Culture will follow the leader!
One of our leaders in Nigeria discovered this when he looked honestly at the shape of his ministry:
“I now know where we have missed it. This training is an eye-opener. The problem is the ‘mold’ that gave the ministry the shape we were running and building with. Once the mold is defective, every other thing that comes after it takes on the faulty shape, with all its defects. We need to return to the way of the Lord! … This is a call to re-tune the mold of our ministry, for it to be more effective.”
This brother’s ministry had taken on the shape it had because he had given it that shape — not through deliberate design, but through the assumptions, habits, and blind spots he carried into the work. The culture of his organization was, in the deepest sense, a portrait of its leader.
If a leader’s life is the primary instrument through which culture is shaped, then what a leader does in secret matters enormously. This is why prayer is not merely one item among many in a leader’s toolkit. As we see in the lives of Jesus and the apostles throughout the New Testament, prayer is the foundation.
Active prayer requires coming before God, being honest about ourselves and our organizations, listening attentively to the voice of the Spirit, and asking urgently to see God work in power. Prayer gives us a realistic picture of reality, and it expands our vision of what could be.
A leader who does not pray is a leader who is shaping culture entirely from his or her own resources. But a leader who prays looks to God, who can transform both leader and organization into His image.
Sister W, one of the church leaders we worked with in East Asia, found this to be true in her own experience. First, she turned to God in dependence on Him to make the culture changes her church desperately needed. Then, leading up to a pivotal training on how to build healthy churches, she mobilized the whole body to pray every day for four months. With this as the foundation, she turned to shaping culture, starting with herself. She began to intentionally love and serve her brothers and sisters in Christ, seeking to support and equip others, and practicing affirmation and encouragement.
“Over time, what started as a conscious effort turned into an unconscious habit. The atmosphere became lively, passionate and sincere! … Participants later said, ‘What we see most here is prayer — everything is soaked in prayer.’”
This is the trajectory of genuine culture change — from intentional, to practiced, to lived. Sister W became the new culture, and her church followed.
What about you?
Your organization has a culture. You gave it that culture — through your prayer life and your lack of it, through your example and your inconsistencies, through what you celebrated and what you let slide.
But the fact that your culture starts with you as the leader means you have an opportunity. If the culture came through you, it can be changed through you. You can become the leader God is calling you to be, and it will transform your organization.
Reflect on these questions:
If the people you lead were asked to describe the culture of your organization, what would they say?
What would it look like to begin shaping your organization’s culture more intentionally, starting with your own prayer life?
We’d love to hear your reflections in the comments.
Recommended Resources
Video Course: How Leaders Shape Organizational Culture
Tool: The Four Perspectives Model of Organizational Capacity Building
Teaching: Building a Healthy Organization
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!