A few months ago, I was invited to speak on a panel at our church regarding faith in the marketplace. The main topic was regarding how our faith manifests itself in our sphere of influence. Since then, I’ve received follow-up questions and have been approached by others wanting to learn more, so I thought it might be helpful to capture some of what I shared.
Among the many ways my faith journey has shaped my professional life, perhaps one area that’s been most influenced is in my leadership approach. In my earlier days as a manager, my focus was on building an effective team that delivered results. It wasn’t until an “a-ha” moment during the exit interview of one of my direct reports that I began to grow more aware of the importance of intentionally building culture.
It’s interesting how much we can compartmentalize our professional versus personal lives. Up until that point, I hadn’t really connected my leadership style in faith settings with how I led at work. But given that my husband and I had many years of leadership experience in ministry settings where cultivating a healthy environment was a priority, I began to consider how I could apply some of the lessons I learned along the way to the workplace.
Today, I’m humbled to share that the department I’ve built has a 94% retention rate with a 100% intent-to-stay rate, which I believe can be attributed almost entirely to our healthy culture. Though my team may not explicitly be aware of it, the roots of the healthy practices we’ve put in place are largely grounded in my personal faith. Here are a few of the specifics I’ve implemented:
Crafting a clear team vision that’s underscored by a larger purpose. There’s a proverb that states that “where there is no vision, the people perish”. While SMART goals are helpful targets for a team, they don’t provide the “why”. As human beings, we have an innate need to be connected to something greater than ourselves. As I built my new team, establishing a clear mission up front that went beyond numbers provided us a reason for why we showed up each day. It shifted us from getting lost in the daily grind to moving toward an understood target together. It also united us in a shared purpose, gave us clarity in our decision-making, and allowed us to better prioritize how we spent our time.
Co-creating a guiding set of team values. While culture can sometimes take shape on its own, I’ve learned over the years that it’s something we also have the power to shape. Defining a set of values – which referred to the principles that would characterize how we’d do our work, communicate, and behave – thus could enable us to define for ourselves the type of culture we wanted. So early on, we carved time out (away from the office) to discuss what a healthy culture looked like, what was important to us, what would motivate us, and what would be essential to our happiness at work. We then went through a process of prioritizing among that list and defining specifically what we meant by each word. The final result was a set of values that we could hold ourselves up to and point each other towards when challenging circumstances arose.
Making words of affirmation and appreciation part of our culture. One element within the church setting that has hugely impacted me is hearing positive affirmations articulated by others around me. There is something so powerful about verbal expression and recognition. It has the impact of helping someone feel seen, understood, and honored for their time and efforts. I recall that as a young professional, some of my more challenging seasons stemmed from feeling undervalued and unappreciated. Studies have also shown that for many people, recognition is more meaningful than even an increase in compensation. As such, creating a culture where it would be a norm to acknowledge one another was something I felt would positively impact our team. A few examples of how this comes to life is that we’ve established weekly “Friday Shoutouts” in a group chat where anyone on the team is able to call each other out for their awesome work, effort, or dedication. We’ve also made these shoutouts a regular practice in team meetings that anyone can initiate. Having these dedicated moments allows us to be intentional and make sure the appreciation and recognition regularly takes place.
Providing training on healthy communication. Having been blessed to have been a part of some emotionally healthy churches and to also have had the luxury of experiencing the benefits of individual and marital counseling, I am convinced that most conflicts in life stem from miscommunication. It’s hard enough to communicate effectively with our spouses and family members. When you consider that we spend more time in the workplace than at home, how much more challenging must it be to communicate effectively with our colleagues! Like marriage, working in a team requires partnership and that necessitates the ability to communicate well. So much can get lost in different communication styles and preferences. And given that 90% of communication is non-verbal, our increasingly virtual environments make it that much harder.
While it’s helpful to coach people one-on-one on communication skills, because communication is two-way, it’s much more impactful to have a shared language for working through conflict. As such, I’ve made it a priority (aka carving out budget) to bring in professional training for my team on healthy methods of having tough conversations. One tool we’ve also used is the DiSC workplace behavior model, that provides an eerily accurate framework for how individuals approach their work (Myers-Briggs tends to be about personality, Enneagram is about motivations, and it seems that DiSC is about preferred behaviors). Understanding our different preferred ways of working has allowed my team members to gain greater insight into why they might be missing one another, how to adapt to one another, and to take things less personally. I’ve also had my team trained on active listening skills, how to recognize their own triggers, and in turn, how to “respond” rather than “react”.
Images from our team communication training
Creating a sense of safety for team members to bring their authentic selves. Myriad research studies have shown that people are able to be more productive, innovative, and engaged if they feel like they belong. It’s also hugely correlated with retention. Belonging is distinct from diversity and inclusion. I like to think of the nuances as follows: diversity is the make up of the group; inclusion is giving everyone a seat at the table; and belonging is the feeling experienced by the individual of being accepted or that they matter. In other words, belonging would be a desired outcome of DE&I efforts.
A few things I’ve put in place to foster this are providing regular avenues of anonymous feedback, the results of which I openly share with the team and collectively discuss how to address. We have a quarterly team survey that asks for ratings across six areas: Belonging, Safety, Meaningfulness, Wellness, Professional Growth, and Future Outlook. There are also open questions to probe at the reasons for each person’s ratings. My team has shared that seeing their feedback acknowledged and addressed has significantly contributed to helping them feel heard and valued.
I also try to model empathy and vulnerability, openly sharing about my own experiences and lessons learned along the way, admitting when I get it wrong, and maintaining a posture of being willing to learn. I believe that this has enabled my team to feel comfortable sharing more openly.
Providing ways for the team to connect on a personal level and celebrate wins. To some, this may be perceived as a waste of resources and time; after all, it’s precious company time and money that could be used toward “work”. What people often forget is that your team is your most valuable asset. Finding ways to connect more informally builds connection and trust on both a professional and personal level. Said another way, helping your team develop friendships with one another increases affinity, a sense of belonging, and the feeling of being valued. And beyond just improving their individual experiences, cultivating these relational bonds also have practical business implications, as it enables better collaboration, communication, and retention.
A few ways we’ve done this are small practices like kicking off our Monday morning meetings with “Pits and Peaches” (a version of “highs and lows” I borrowed from my church community groups). We also have quarterly team social events where the objective is solely to create more organic opportunities for connecting with each other. I’ve also made it a tradition to host an annual team offsite, where the goals are to celebrate wins, bond as a team, and invest in their professional development. As a testament to the impact this has, one team member wrote in response to their post-offsite survey that the experience “has motivated me to work harder for my team and company, because I feel grateful for their willingness to invest in my growth”.
Team building events, including Paint & Sip, Wine Tasting, and our culture-workshop at our offsite
And finally, though this last practice doesn’t directly stem from my church leadership experience, it’s related to the notion of the importance of the company you keep in shaping your culture, and that is the well-accepted business principle of getting the right people on the bus. In the bestselling business leadership book Good to Great, Jim Collins speaks of the the importance of having the right team. He focuses on the importance of surrounding yourself with people who are high-performing and adaptable, which is crucial in a world where change is only accelerating. I would add to that though, that it’s equally important to have people who are collaborative, self-motivated, and just generally kind. As such, when I’m recruiting, I look specifically for examples that speak to whether the mentality and character of a person may already exemplify our team values, doing so through both behavioral and scenario-based questions.
These are some of the practices I’ve put in place to build a healthy team culture. As with any leader, I am still on a journey, and there are always new challenges that I am actively navigating. For example, the biblical concept of healthy boundaries is one that I’m currently figuring out how to weave in, as well as how to speak truth in love, particularly in moments of giving feedback (which is admittedly harder than it seems). In the spirit of our value of “staying curious,” I strive to remain aware of my own opportunity areas by maintaining a posture of humility and openness to learning, in the hopes of always continuing to grow.
Christina Peng 