Leaders can harm or heal.
Whether you’re a pastor, parent, coach, or CEO, creating organizational cultures where people thrive, rather than simply survive, is our calling.
Here are four ways to create a thriving organizational culture:
1. Have a compelling, clear, and challenging vision.
God has deposited within the human spirit a passion to live and do things that are bigger than themselves, and that will outlive them. The echoes of eternity are tattooed on our hearts.
Question: Does the vision statement for your family, team, or business cause people in your organization to wake up excited about making the vision a life-transforming reality?
And with every great vision, the people who carry out the vision are then themselves TRANSFORMED by it.
2. As it pertains to people, follow the advice of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:
“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.” Encourage people to fulfill their potential.
3. Resource your team.
Does the team you lead have the resources to accomplish what you’re asking them to accomplish, and give them the responsibility to do it. Nothing communicates “I trust you” like giving someone responsibility. Give people the opportunity to fail. And in the midst of some failures, true innovation and genius will emerge.
4. Thrive on the inside.
Leader, only when you’re emotionally healthy can you create an organization where people thrive, because you’re thriving on the inside. The glue that mends and heals our wounded hearts–making them healthy–is God’s grace.
