If you’re watching closely to what’s going on today, it doesn’t take you long to realize that there is a lot of unhealth both with leaders as well as the organizations they lead. It’s not a pretty picture to say the least. Cary Nieuwhof shares 4 keys to creating healthy leaders and organizations.
Guest Post by Carey Nieuwhof
Guess what’s impacting your leadership more than you think?
Culture.
Specifically, the culture you’re creating as a leader.
Often I hear leaders complain about the toxic people they have in their organization (staff, customers, volunteers, attendees). Of course, that happens.
But if your culture always has toxic people (or a lot of toxic people), the problem may not be them nearly as much as the problem is your culture.
Here’s the truth about culture:
Create a healthy culture and toxic people will leave. But let your culture go flat or get toxic, and the healthy people will leave.
Why? Because:
- A healthy culture spits out toxic people.
- A toxic culture spits out healthy people.
Here’s the surprise. No one gets kicked out. They just leave when they can’t get traction or validation.
This truth runs deeper than you realize.
I agree that people who leave organizations quit their bosses more than they quit their jobs.
But people also quit cultures. Healthy people quit unhealthy cultures, and unhealthy people quit healthy cultures.
As a result, the staff, volunteers, and overall culture you create as a leader have a great deal to do with the long-term success or failure of your organization.
Pick whatever cultural values you want, but fundamentally, your culture will either be healthy or slide into unhealthy or toxic.
You either decide to create an organization in which healthy people thrive, or you experience the inevitable slide into malaise, unhealthiness, or toxicity. That’s just how human nature works.
What’s the Difference Between an Unhealthy Person and a Toxic Person?
While there are nuances, here’s the bottom line:
Unhealthy people want to get better. Toxic people generally don’t.
Your organization should always have room for unhealthy people on the road to recovery, but toxic people who resist all efforts to help are a whole other thing. As Henry Cloud argues, you really don’t need to keep them around, unless you want them to destroy everything.
So what do you do about all this?
If you want to create a stellar organizational culture that attracts and keeps healthy people, there are four keys you need to focus in on.
1. Focus on your personal health.
I have been in senior leadership for over two decades. As much as I don’t want to admit it, it’s still true: My organization will only ever be as healthy as I am.
Ditto for you. Fight it all you want, but your organization will only ever be as healthy as you are as the leader.
Even if you’re not the senior leader, that’s true of the team you lead, the department you run, or the crew you manage. The health of the leader tends to be the health of the team.
Your organization will only ever be as healthy as you are as the leader.Share on X
I think of the health of a leader in five categories:
- Spiritual
- Emotional
- Relational
- Physical
- Financial
While health in each category is nuanced (I write about the personal health of a leader in detail in my best-selling book, Didn’t See It Coming), one thing is true; health in each category means margin in each category.
A healthy leader has a fairly full spiritual, emotional, relational, and physical tank. They’re not exhausted all the time, constantly irritable, or so consumed with giving to others that they’re almost bankrupt themselves.
You may wonder what being financially healthy looks like. A simple definition is to live within your means.
There are leaders who make $30,000 a year and have a bit of money in the bank. On the other hand, there are leaders who make $130,000 and are always strapped and out of money.
When your personal financial situation causes you to stress, that stress just leaks out all over the place.
Healthy leaders tend to lead healthy organizations because they end with reserves to help others grow, and they also have a lower tolerance for toxicity.
Finally, healthy people are attracted to healthy leaders.
2. Invest in people, not just results.
I’m naturally a results person.
But I’ve also come to realize that results-driven leaders focus on what they can get from their team, while healthy leaders obsess over what they can do for their team.
Strangely, if all you think about is what you can get from your team, you always end up with diminishing returns. People feel used, and they eventually lose heart, start going through the motions, or even leave.
But if you focus on what you can do for your team, people lean in and give you way more than you imagined.
The longer I lead, the more I realize that if you have competent people, the best thing you can do is care about the team as people.
I’ve found a few things really help:
- In your 1:1 meetings with staff, ask how they’re doing, not just what they’re doing. People want to know that you care.
- Invest in their growth and development.
- Do off-sites together.
- Take them to conferences, events, and seminars.
- Invest in courses, books, and resources that grow them and their skill set.
- Get them coaching and counseling as needed.
- Give them what they need to do the job. Everything from slow computers, and bad WiFi to a crappy work environment all demotivate people and create unnecessary barriers. Cheap is always more expensive in the long run anyway.
If you have a small budget, start with free. There are literally hundreds of thousands of free articles, e-books, podcasts, and courses you can take together to grow as leaders.
(I have a free Leadership Podcast you can listen to and share with your team. Each episode comes with show notes, transcripts, and discussion questions.)
The bottom line? Create an environment where the people working for you become better people, not just employees. Grow them, not just their skills.
When your team grows personally, your progress grows exponentially.
3. Get rid of “us vs. them” thinking.
In any health organization or church, there’s no us and them, there’s only we.
If you have multiple locations, it’s easy to talk about, “Them.” Ditto with departments, divisions, management, leadership teams, or any other way your organization is structured.
As soon as someone begins to say that “they” won’t let us or ‘they‘ want something different, the end is near.
In a really unhealthy culture, organizations blame their customers or members.
- They’re so demanding.
- They just don’t get it.
- How can they be so dumb?
Seriously? The very people you’re trying to serve, reach, encourage, and engage are the brunt of your frustrations?!
Trust me, as a leader, I would love to live in a world where I could blame people for everything. And on the inside, I still want to.
But I also know that ultimately, I’m responsible for everything I don’t like in our organization because I’m the leader.
That doesn’t mean you ignore real problems or put lip gloss over all the problems you encounter as a leader.
I love how Craig Groeschel frames it. When there’s a genuine problem that needs to be fixed, be that with teams, divisions, locations, or departments on the people you serve, instead of blaming them, say:
- “We haven’t led them to be less demanding.”
- “I haven’t been clear enough for them to understand the situation, so let me work harder.”
- “I have to figure out what the real problem is and solve it.”
If you eliminate ‘they‘ and ‘them‘ from your leadership vocabulary and replace them with “I’ or “we,” great things start to happen.
First, you take responsibility. If you’re the leader, you’re responsible.
Second, your heart shifts. You no longer see others as the problem; you realize your job is to serve and help them.
Third, you’ll likely solve the problem.
Blame is the opposite of responsibility. When you stop blaming and making excuses, you start making progress, because you can make excuses or you can make progress, but you can’t make both.
4. Create firm boundaries.
Once you have a healthy (or healthier) organization, the key is to stay healthy at the top. That means at the senior leadership levels.
If you find yourself getting unhealthy, call it out and seek help.
If someone else on the team gets into a bad season, come alongside them and see if they want to get well. If they do, embrace them and stand behind them. If they don’t, don’t let their negativity infect your organization.
And when you spot a toxic person, don’t let them step in. Don’t hire them. Don’t let them serve or volunteer. You may not even want them in a small group if they’re really toxic.
Before you push back, remember that the distinction between an unhealthy person and a toxic person is the desire to get well. If someone has no desire to get well, you won’t be able to help them.
Don’t let the ill-health of one person destroy the health of your team.
With a firm boundary in place, usually toxic people give up and go elsewhere. And in a healthy culture on the rare occasion, you need to ask them to, that one awkward conversation and firm boundary is completely worth it—for them and for you.
How A Healthy Church Culture Perpetuates Itself
While there’s a lot more to creating a healthy culture, I find that even focusing on these four produces huge gains.
First, when the culture is healthy, unhealthy people who want to get well find that they do.
Because so many workplaces have an unhealthy culture—and so many families do as well—people first are startled by health, but eventually, a healthy organization becomes a magnet for people who get healthy or want to get well.
And for toxic people? Well, because they can’t seem to get a toe-hold, and the culture won’t change to meet their dysfunction, they move on looking for less healthy places to belong to.
This virtuous cycle will keep going as long as you stay healthy as a leader and surround yourself with a healthy, growing team.
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