Leadership - Part 2
If you missed part 1, you can read that here.
I want to start a conversation today about the role leaders have in being the guardians and champions of their organisations culture. The culture of any organisation will tell you about where the organisation will be in 5, 10, or 15 years far more than an vision or mission statement will. A healthy culture will create a healthy future. I think too much time is spent by leaders thinking about vision and not nearly enough thought given to the culture. When people ask me where I think Mosaic (the community of faith I lead) will be in 5 years, I can’t tell them. I can’t tell you where we’ll be, but I can tell you what we’ll look like; the type of community we will be. Vision constantly needs to adjust to the world around us, but an organisations culture needs to be constant and largely unchanging.
Creating a healthy culture in an organisation is all about having clear, understandable values that everyone buys in to and embodies. Having values is becoming pretty common place in all kinds of different organisations nowadays, but simply having them is not enough. A value is only useful if it is actually valued. If it’s just a few sentences on a wall, then it’s all pretty meaningless. One of the leaders primary roles is to truly live out the values that they want everyone within the organisation to value. If leaders don’t model the way and demonstrate that they truly value the values themselves, then it will actually breed mistrust and skepticism within the organisation.
In my leadership role at Mosaic, I see creating, modelling, and championing healthy values as one of my primary leadership functions. This isn’t some optional extra. This is at the heart of everything I do. Healthy values create a healthy culture which creates a heathy all round environment for people to flourish and become all that they can be. And leadership is all about creating an environment where everyone can soar.
What do you think? Does your organisation have a healthy culture? Are there values that you really buy in to? If you are a leader, are you intentionally focussing on creating a healthy culture?
January 29th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
Great thoughts Sam… I’m not sure I’m intentionally focusing on creating a healthy culture. I do sometimes, but ultimately I bring simply who I am. So in that sense, at the root of it, maybe it begins with us becoming extraordinarily healthy people…
January 30th, 2007 at 10:17 am
Sam, there are two points I want to share, which back up what you say . 1.The comment you made “I think too much time is spent by leaders thinking about vision and not nearly enough thought given to the culture.” That statement is so true. The reason why we leaders tend to think more about vision than about culture is….we already believe that is the “culture” or can I say how “culture should be. ” I have been guilty of this and I’m slowly seeing things in more of a healthy way. We leaders need more support in this area. Its a shame that I have had to learn it through a book rather than within the community of other leaders that are open and transparent.
2. The whole aspect of modelling it Sam goes even deeper for me. We as leaders tend to get new ideas (vision) and rush in to it. The implimentation becomes more important than what we are going to produce. Last night I had a fantastic idea and I was already working out how I could start it. However my wife gently said ” Have you fully understood the idea? have you let it sink in deep to the point that it becomes your everyday ethos/personality?” She was right! In the past I’ve had vision, and six months down the line it hasn’t worked and even worse than that, I don’t even “believe” in what I’ve produced. The main reason it fails, would be my narrow thinking. Just because 3 people benfit from my vision, doesn’t mean the other 80 will.
The presure to have a great vision that is built like an iron wall doesn’t come from the people your leading. It comes from other leaders and our own belief, ego, self importance and insecurity. The pressure to prove our vision is going to work is the reason why we fill a whole arch folder with paper that has ideas, planning, formulas etc etc. Sometime we forget that we are creating communities and organisations that envolve people but rather we tend to think we are creating the next apollo 13. I agree if your a rocket scientist you HAVE TO BE RIGHT. However community is a little more organic, lighthearted and evolves.
Sorry for my rant! oh and sorry for the amount of spelling and gramatical errors. Dyslexia can let you down now and again.
have a great day
Adam
January 30th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
I think you’re looking at some crucially important things here.
Have you come across natural church development (NCD)? Amongst a lot of other things, NCD focuses on what it calls quality characteristics of churches - eight of them in all. The aim is to grow healthy churches and healthy churches, in turn, grow and reproduce.
The eight characteristics found in all churches are: leadership, ministry, spirituality, structures, worship-services, small groups, evangelism, and relationships.
The thing is, these can be healthy to unhealthy. What really makes the difference is what kind of leadership, what kind of ministry, etc. So a healthy church has: EMPOWERING leadership, GIFT-ORIENTATED ministry, PASSIONATE spirituality, FUNCTIONAL structures, INSPIRING worship-services, HOLISTIC small groups, evangelism, and LOVING relationships. (For more on this go to http://www.healthychurch.co.uk or read ‘Natural Church Development Handbook’ by Christian Schwarz).
You can probably see how these can be looked at as being values to live out; you’ve made me return to think some more about this.
Perhaps a better way of connecting vision and values is to see visionary leadership as a means of exploding potential for living out the values.
But what about unhealthy values? What might we name as such?
January 30th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
I’ve seen this demonstrated both ways.
I’ve worked for an extremely progressive corporation where Company Culture was everything. There were two weeks orientation on culture and process alone, and then two weeks orientation for your specific job role.
That created no room for questions about the corporate expectations and values. The culture carried people through even without them being very gifted (at times).
Secondly, I worked for a smaller company where the owner was extremely bright, educated and well read. He had plenty of ideas for creating phenomenal companies. Unfortunately, he did not live out those values for his staff to see and emulate.
A leader’s ability to articulate the vision MUST include the expectations of the culture. Any community built will be stronger when common values are shared, tested and stretched.
Thanks Sam!
V.
January 31st, 2007 at 10:19 am
Lon, you definitely hit the nail on the head with need for healthy leaders if healthy leadership is going to happen. I hope to talk about this some more in a future post in this series.
Adam, you share some important thoughts. Perhaps it would be helpful to think of culture as the foundations and vision as the building. Building foundations is far less fun for visionary leaders but is essential if the building is going to last and not collapse. I was speaking with a few of our core people at Mosaic recently just sharing how I would rather us spend too long laying foundations than too little. The healthier and deeper the foundations, the more that can be built on top of it.
Geoffrey, I haven’t heard of the NCD. You’re right though about those 8 things only being meaningful if they are healthy though. And many church leaders have developed a bad habit of taking something like that and structure their church so that it includes the 8 things that a healthy church has (or a Willow Creek, Saddleback, model) and sadly, it isn’t actually a value…they just saw that it was successful somewhere else. Values need to be deeply embedded.
Maybe a word to describe unhealthy values would be woodworm. It eats away at your house without you knowing its happening and then, before you know it, you’re house is collapsing.
Vivian, I think one of the challenges of leadership is fostering an environment the builds buy-in to the values without people feeling like it’s being forced upon them. I think, ideally, organisations should aim from moving people to the place where they go beyond saying these are my organisations values to these are my values.
February 10th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
I find it difficult to discuss leadership without defining important terms like vision, values and health in the context of the size and type of organisation and where power lies-
I think we are talking about Christian churches or groups. I was interested to get hold of Growing Healthy Churches -expressing the life of Christ through the local church by Canon Robert Warren and Dr Janet Hodgson. They developed a checklist based on a study of a range of churches across the country and came up with 7 marks of a healthy church
Energised by faith,outward-looking focus, seeks to find out what God wants, Faces the cost of change and growth, builds community, makes room for others, and does a few things and does them well, They provide church packs apparently (www resource-arm.net.
With regard to leadership they say this is more about identifying the questions to be addressed than providing answers and about supporting the whole ministry of the church than going it alone ‘Healthy leadershipspots people’s gifts and calling is pleased (rather than threatened) by skills in the congregation and gives people responsibilty for making things happen–’etc
I am passing this on not havinganswersmyself!
March 9th, 2007 at 10:08 am
[…] This strong internal genetic code would be alternative language really for what we typically talk about at Mosaic in terms of ethos and culture (which we see as being formed though our 5 core values). We want to have a healthy ethos that permeates every aspect of who we are, wherever we are. This is critical when thinking about organic, spontaneous growth. When a cell multiplies, that’s only a good thing if the original cell is healthy. Having a healthy organisational culture is critical to a healthy, reproducing movement. (You can read a previous post on the leaders role in shaping an organisations culture here.) […]