Ask Your Team Better Questions to Reinforce Better Behaviors

Your staff and volunteer culture may be the most crucial aspect of your organization.

That’s what Peter Drucker believed. When he said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” he believed that your values, beliefs, and norms drive behaviors. As strategy, model, systems, and methods are behavioral, your culture ultimately determines if your model is followed.

I’ve seen this play out in my leadership journey time and again.

One of two things happen in organizations:

1. Values Remain: Well-defined values that are consistently reinforced keep desired behaviors in place. How people work and act remains consistent with the values.

2. Values Drift: The other option is the inverse. At a minimum, every organization has values written on the wall, on their website, or printed in a brochure. But if these values aren’t consistently reinforced, the associated behaviors give way to personal and natural behaviors. Worse, these new and potentially undesirable behaviors begin an inversed process, creating new (and unwritten) values, beliefs, and norms.

It’s simple, really.

Values create beliefs that drive behaviors. Since behaviors are more tangible, the values remain in place when they are reinforced. When behaviors are not reinforced, new behaviors form and eventually establish new beliefs and values.

Reinforcing desired behaviors is the secret to keeping your desired culture in place.

In this NEW POST, I give you a simple exercise you can do in your organization to test the values to behaviors connection.

How to Execute a Strategic Plan at Your Church – Values and Culture

You can’t begin designing a “HOW you’ll do it” strategy until you understand the “WHO you are culture.”

This is an often skipped step in the strategic planning process.

Attempting to design a new strategy without first understanding your current culture results in 1) a plan that cannot be executed or 2) a plan that creates a new and potentially unwanted culture.

In this NEW POST, I outline the steps to evaluate your current culture and define new aspirational values.

This is the second post this week on Strategic Planning. Make sure you look at the previous post for the full context.

You Can’t Win Without The Right Teammates (Just Ask Matthew Stafford)

KEY IDEA: If you are a leader, that means you have followers, and they hold the secret to success.

Just ask Matthew Stafford.

In 12 seasons playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions, Stafford only played in three playoff games. And he lost all three games.

Detroit traded Stafford this past off-season to the Los Angeles Rams. He and his team just went 4 – 0 in the playoffs and finished with a Super Bowl win.

Think about that. This same guy spent 12 years losing and, in one single season on a new team, won it all. 

Football is a team sport. So is organizational leadership.

Leaders lead teams, and the team determines the success. No leader can overcome a bad team.

What leaders need is a team that complements their competencies and contributes to the organizational culture.

In this post, we’ll talk about how to do just that.

If you’re a leader, I hope this helps you evaluate your team.

5 Strategies to Better Reach Your Unchurched Community

As a church leader, I know you desire to reach more people.

You can grow your church without reaching the unchurched in your community, but that’s ultimately just swapping (or taking) sheep from another church. And that doesn’t grow the Kingdom.

The only way to grow a church and the Kingdom without taking people from surrounding churches is to reach the unchurched.

In this article, I present 5 suggestions to better reach your unchurched community.

Five Thoughts on Including Culture in Your HR Process

NEW POST about culture, HR, and hiring mistakes:

Like you, I’ve made a few hiring mistakes.

What’s frustrating is that they could have been avoided IF I would have first defined and documented our organizational culture.

My hiring mistakes were almost exclusively created by a cultural mismatch. That’s on me.

We’ve tried to fix this by creating cultural interview questions based upon our cultural description document.

In this post, I give you several of our questions along with some helpful advice on incorporating culture into your HR processes.

This should only take you about 5 minutes to read. And it may save you from making another hiring mistake!

The Consequences of Breaking Unwritten Cultural Rules

Every organization has a culture, including yours. You can feel it. At times you can see it.

Unfortunately, if the culture isn’t well defined and documented, personal trial and error is the only mechanism for staff to learn it. And those experiences are costly.

When your staff learns the unwritten rules by accidentally breaking them, they pay a price. After all, unwritten rules are still rules.

If you are a leader who has never defined and documented your organizational culture, your staff wants you to know a few things about their experience.

In this article, I unpack three specific ways your undefined culture is affecting your staff team.

It will take you less than 5 minutes to read this…and I think your staff will appreciate you for it.

Two Steps To Define and Document Your Culture

I believe it’s completely unreasonable and unfair to expect your staff to follow your organizational culture’s unwritten rules.

After all, they are unwritten!

In too many organizations, leaders convey what to do (mission + job description) without ever defining or describing how to do it (culture).

That’s what culture is — how we do it around here. And it’s the unwritten rules of the organizational culture that make success and failure unfair for employees.

In this article, I discuss how to define and document the organizational culture to set everyone up for more success (and less frustration).

Three Simple Steps to Improve Your Organizational Culture

I love considering the effects of organizational culture on the people within the organization.

It’s amazing how many people struggle to succeed in an organization because of the culture. Culture represents how we do what we do.

In this article, I talk more about culture, and more specifically, how we need to define and document our culture to help those working within it be more successful.

Does Your Team Really Believe They Belong?

Have you ever felt you needed to prove yourself? Prove your worth? Prove you deserved to be at your company, church, or organization?

I guess that’s more of a rhetorical question, right?

We’ve all felt the sense of performance-based acceptance at play in our heart. It’s part of the human condition. We’ve all wondered if we really belong. If we are worthy of our role.

As leaders, we have to look outside of our own experience to see the bigger problem: The internal battle to belong isn’t isolated to us. If we have felt it, most likely everyone in our organization has felt it — or is currently feeling it. And it’s a problem on several fronts. I know, because like you, I’ve been there.

The Internal Battle to Belong Creates:

1. Sideways energy: When people are trying to prove their worth, their misapplied motivation moves their energy away from the good work and toward a good pat on the back. When people are focused on being noticed, their efforts cannot be fully dedicated to something bigger than themselves.

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