Issue No. 514 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting highlights a new book (published today) that asks, “PICK ONE: Life-Giving Work or Life-Sucking Work?” And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies), click here for over 500 book reviews, and click here for my new blog, Pails in Comparison (PIC), with shorter book reviews of my latest “PICs.”
In one organization in Road to Flourishing, “…when compensation became the last remaining complaint and nothing was done about it, it stuck out like a sore thumb.”
PICK ONE: Life-Giving Work or Life-Sucking Work
Right now. Clear your calendar. (Really!)
Next, order multiple copies of Road to Flourishing and schedule a day—or an offsite retreat—with your team members. If “collaboration is the secret sauce of a high-performing culture” and “eating together is a sacred thing,” as Al Lopus notes, then use this powerful book to assess and enrich your organization’s culture.
Unlike any book you’ve ever read, this practical, practical roadmap oozes with both best practices and worst practices from the trenches—and you can learn from both!
EXAMPLE #1: “THE LAST 10 PERCENT.” Lopus writes, “One of the best conflict-resolution principles for teams that I’ve heard comes from Rock Point Church in Arizona. They call it ‘the last 10 percent.’
“As lead pastor Bill Bush explains, ‘When we’re in a tough meeting, we always ask around the room, ‘Hey, did everyone say the last 10 percent?’ Because I know there are a lot of people who will say 90 percent of what’s bothering them. And the problem is, that last 10 percent is usually the real problem. And so you keep having meetings that sound so good. We high-five each other—‘Hey, we got through. We communicated so clearly. That was great.’ And then everybody walked out of there with the real problem still tucked away.’”
As the CEO and Cofounder of Best Christian Workplaces Institute, Al Lopus has seen it all! (Oh, my!) BCWI launched in 2002 as an employee engagement ministry dedicated to helping Christian leaders and organizations achieve their full potential by creating flourishing staff workplaces. BCWI helps measure and improve the health of organizations through surveys, a unique 360 Leadership Review process, and consulting services. (Visit their website here.)
Road to Flourishing is no pie-in-the-sky, trendy book from academic idealists. On the contrary! Research-based, the book delivers what Lopus and the team at BCWI have learned from “the most widely used Christian-based engagement survey” across the globe. And get this! They have actually inspired more than 1,000 churches, ministries, and Christian-owned businesses to measure the health of their workplace cultures.
Using the helpful “FLOURISH Model,” Road to Flourishing goes deep on “Eight Keys to Boost Employee Engagement and Well-Being” (the book’s subtitle). So…how would your team members rate these eight factors—and have you ever discerned an objective, quantifiable way to measure overall engagement at your shop?
• Fantastic Teams
• Life-Giving Work
• Outstanding Talent
• Uplifting Growth
• Rewarding Compensation
• Inspirational Leadership
• Sustainable Strategy
• Healthy Communication
EXAMPLE #2: COMPENSATION CONUNDRUMS. I don’t need to urge you to read the chapter, “Rewarding Compensation,” because you and your team members will skip to Chapter 6 first (like I did!). Lopus describes two Christian organizations that “committed the same classic error in opposite ways.”
• Classic Error #1: Sore Thumb! Seven of the eight “FLOURISH” factors improved in one organization—“but when compensation became the last remaining complaint and nothing was done about it, it stuck out like a sore thumb. Despite how far the organization had progressed, poor compensation yanked employee engagement back like a bungee cord around its waist.” (Memorable metaphor!)
• Classic Error #2: Bribed to Cause Mayhem! In another organization, employee pay and benefits did receive high marks—but the staff “gave their employer low marks on most keys to a flourishing culture.” The problem? “…there was a disturbing number of disengaged employees, people who weren’t just unenthusiastic at work but were actively pumping toxicity and dysfunction into the culture.” Lopus notes that “…they were being paid so well that they were sure never to leave on their own. They were being bribed to keep causing mayhem, and they were not about to kill the golden goose.”
EXAMPLE #3: “CULTURE IS A BUCKET OF PURE WATER.” The book shines well-deserved spotlights on healthy organizational cultures, including Joni & Friends, where Doug Mazza, the former president and CEO, used a “bucket” metaphor (nice!):
“Culture is a bucket of pure water,” says Mazza. “If it’s polluted, dropping in a great strategy is not going to clean it. Great strategies flourish in clean water. Get the culture right, point to it constantly, and new strategies will evolve and are invented in healthy cultures.” Lopus adds, “Put another way, while a sustainable strategy nourishes a flourishing culture, a flourishing culture irrigates a sustainable strategy.”
(Note: Chapter 8, “Sustainable Strategy” mentions why the Joni & Friends team followed Henry Blackaby’s approach in Experiencing God.)
Click here to listen to Al Lopus interview Doug Mazza on The Flourishing Culture Podcast, “How Flourishing Workplace Culture Fosters a Thriving Mission,” (Season 7, Episode 16).
Lopus doesn’t mince words when writing about the toxic work cultures he’s observed. But Road to Flourishing is also upbeat—you can create “life-giving work” for every team member. You have two options: (1) continue to apply inappropriate Band-Aids to your sick workplace, or (2) go deeper and discover how your organization’s culture will flourish with God-honoring and intentional best practices. Reading this book with your team members is a no-brainer.
PICK ONE:
[ ] Life-giving work.
[ ] Life-sucking work.
To order from Amazon, click on title for Road to Flourishing: Eight Keys to Boost Employee Engagement and Well-Being, by Al Lopus with Cory Hartman. Listen on Libro.fm (6 hours, 52 minutes). BULK PRICING: Use the discount code BCWI at ivpress.com to receive 40% off 10+ books or 50% off 25+ books.
YOUR WEEKLY STAFF MEETING QUESTIONS:
1) In the foreword to Road to Flourishing, Peter Greer, president and CEO of Hope International, urges organizations to invite BCWI to assess and measure their organizational cultures. “You can’t fix what you don’t know is broken…” writes Greer. How are we measuring employee engagement and well-being? (Note: Watch for my next eNews with my review of The Gift of Disillusionment, by Peter Greer and Chris Horst.)
2) Of the eight factors in a flourishing culture, Al Lopus notes that “The strongest overall influence on workplace culture is inspirational leadership, closely followed by life-giving work.” List the eight factors (see above) in F.L.O.U.R.I.S.H. and discuss: What do we do well? What needs dramatic improvement? And…what’s our plan?
The Culture Bucket Core Competency includes this zinger: “We invite those who won’t live out our values to exit.”
Buckets Countdown:
The Culture Bucket (#8) Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook: Management Tools, Templates and Tips from John Pearson, with commentary by Jason Pearson (2nd Edition, 2018) - Order from Amazon.
The Culture Bucket Core Competency: “We strive to create a corporate culture with core values that are crystal clear. We yearn for a God-honoring workplace where grace and trust are alive and well. Because we are human we will always have relational conflicts, so we are zealots about resolving conflict early. We invite those who won’t live out our values to exit. We experience true joy at work.”
QUESTION: Why do you think that more than 1,000 churches, ministries, and Christian-owned businesses invested time in measuring the health of their workplace cultures? What would be the upside of achieving recognition as a Certified Best Christian Workplace? Check it out here!
The 20 management buckets are perfect content for the lifelong learning segment in your weekly staff meetings (you do have weekly staff meetings, right?). Visit the 20 buckets webpage here. For more, visit the Culture Bucket here.
10 BIGGEST TAX AND FINANCIAL MISTAKES! Do you know the “10 Biggest Tax and Financial Mistakes Made by Churches and Nonprofits?” Read the short reviews of the 2022 tax and financial guides from ECFA in John’s new blog, Pails in Comparison (PIC).
JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. “Outstanding Talent” is one of the eight factors on the “Road to Flourishing.” We can help you identify, recruit, train, and inspire the right people for the right spots on your communication and marketing teams. Contact Pearpod Media (Design, Digital, Marketing, Social).
Your Weekly Staff Meeting is emailed free one to three times a month to subscribers. We do not accept any form of compensation from authors or publishers for book reviews. As an Amazon Associate, we earn Amazon gift cards from qualifying purchases. As a Libro.fm Affiliate, we earn credits. PRIVACY POLICY: Typepad, Inc. hosts John Pearson's Buckets Blog. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform for Your Weekly Staff Meeting eNews. By clicking (above) to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy policy here.
Comments