The community I live in was settled on the banks of the Fox River in northeastern Wisconsin. In the 1700s, this area was still largely undeveloped and sparsely populated, but by the mid-to-late 1800s, Fox Valley became home to paper barons and transformed into a vibrant hub of industry for generations to come.

What was critical to the success of the papermaking industry was identifying the right conditions to accomplish their mission of mass-producing paper. In this case, the current of the Fox River was ideal for helping paper entrepreneurs achieve their mission.

To achieve your mission, the conditions matter. As a leader, you have to create the climate that will most effectively help you achieve your mission. You have to choose the environment in which your team can thrive. In essence, the culture of your organization is the river that is carrying your mission forward. Culture envelops and flows through everything you do.

Is your culture a stagnant pond, a slow trickle, or a rushing river? Are there dry spots in your riverbed? Are people lazily floating along, drowning in the current, or confidently navigating the waters of your culture?

Okay, maybe I’m overworking the analogy a bit, but my hope is to help you comprehend the importance of culture. Your culture carries your mission. If you are passionate about achieving the mission, vision, and goals of your ministry, getting intentional about culture is essential.

Several years ago, I was recruited to an organization to help chart the vision for the future that the senior leader had defined. This organization had gone through some significant changes and there was great hope for a new vision and direction. I was compelled by the opportunity and, after thoughtful evaluation, accepted the job. Unfortunately, what I quickly discovered is that we were trying to drive a speed boat through a stagnant pond. We had an extraordinary mission and vision for the future but a culture that wasn’t ready for it.

You can have a great vision. You can be a phenomenal leader. But if you don’t understand and value the significance of the culture, your greatest vision and your best leadership are only going to get stuck in the muck of poor culture.

The environment we work in matters. The people we work with matters. So why do so many leaders struggle to build thriving cultures? Why are employees leaving faster than we can hire them? Why do those who stay seem to be working against us rather than working with us?

A key part of the problem with analyzing organizational culture is that we don’t fully understand its place in the success of our organization. For many, culture seems like a luxury we’ll get to when we have margin for it. We confuse culture with employee perks that feel frivolous and non-essential. Frankly, we don’t understand culture’s place and purpose, and therefore we relegate it to a function of the human resources department and underestimate its role in being the current that carries our mission.

The challenge of making culture a priority is not an uncommon one. As leaders, we are expected to focus on vision and strategy. We don’t have the luxury of cultivating kumbaya moments. The demands of congregants, tithers, elders, and growth metrics create an urgency to focus on the tactics that will help us meet these unending expectations. And yet, for all your focus and intentionality, you will hit a point where your strategy just isn’t working. No matter how powerful the vision, it feels like you’re operating in quicksand. You’ve heeded all the best practices and gone to all the right conferences, but you still feel like you’re struggling to get traction toward accomplishing your vision.

There is nothing more frustrating as a leader than to have a vision burning in your heart but the inability to see that vision become reality.

We are wired to grow things. I don’t think this desire is wrong. In fact, I think it’s in our nature.

Play blocks with any toddler and they will default to building as tall as they can as quickly as they can. If you want to be a witness to a tantrum, stay long enough to see their haphazardly constructed tower come crashing down.

We tend to throw tantrums too when the plans we’ve built don’t meet our expectations.

In order to manage our expectations (and our tantrums), we need to understand the bigger picture of organizational life and the essential building blocks that support the health of our ministry and our vision.

The Building Blocks
The life cycle of an organization is often depicted as a bell curve. We all aspire to go “up and to the right” as quickly as possible and do everything within our power to resist the backside of the life cycle, which depicts decline and ultimately death.

As a Certified Scale Architect of Predictable Success working with organizations on their strategies for growth, I repeatedly see two key areas that are often overlooked in the pursuit of growth. These two key things are foundational for organizational growth to occur.

1) Purpose
2) Culture

These are the foundational steps that support growth up and to the right. I picture it as a set of stairsteps undergirding the curve. Each one of these steps is a key facet we must attend to in organizational development. If the first two steps of purpose and culture are given appropriate attention, the third step of strategy becomes a more natural overflow of our effort rather than an elusive target we can’t hit.

This graphic gives us a visual of the importance of these two steps that precede strategy. While strategy is important, a consistent focus on purpose—why we do what we do—coupled with a commitment to our people is essential for us to build the strategy on.

3) Critical Considerations
Let’s look more closely at the relationship between these building blocks.

1) Without a keen sense of purpose, you will be crushed under the weight of responsibility as you scale up.

Most ministries start with a strong sense of purpose. You painstakingly craft your mission and vision. Purpose is the only thing you have at the beginning, so you do the initial work to define it. This step is mostly below the surface. It’s foundational. It is the biggest step and shoulders the most weight. It’s the “why” behind everything you do.

The problem emerges as the ministry grows. Demands of congregants compromise your clarity of vision. New staff members bring new ideas. Opportunities emerge that sound like a good idea, and before you realize it you lack clarity of purpose.

2) If your culture is not healthy, your strategy is irrelevant.

You may have heard the quote, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” We even subscribe to axioms such as “People are our greatest asset.”

We often give lip service to the importance of culture but in the pursuit of organizational growth, we focus our efforts on strategic plans, setting audacious goals, and implementing the systems and structures to support them. The busyness of these efforts often causes us to neglect the development of our teams and the creation of environments in which the very people we need to accomplish our vision can thrive.

The second step, culture, is the heart of the work I do with teams. It starts with our personal growth as a leader and extends to how we cultivate the development of our team. This step builds upon purpose in that you’re helping a team of people personally and collectively act in congruence with the purpose of the organization.

3) Strategy only succeeds when it’s aligned with purpose and culture.

It’s not that strategy isn’t important. It is. We need to know how we’re going to accomplish our mission and vision, but this is often where I see leaders spend disproportionate amounts of time and energy. Eager to identify outcomes and accomplish audacious goals, we quickly pursue the strategies that will make those goals possible, only to have spent significant budget to build a strategic plan that sits in a binder on a shelf.

Leaders often call me when their repeated attempts at strategy are not resulting in growth. Their eye is on the top of the bell curve—that pinnacle of growth (however growth is defined for your ministry). Unfortunately, I’ve heard story after story of leaders who have invested in strategic planning year after year with only unmet goals and frustration to show for it.

Where culture and strategy collide is where we see extraordinary outcomes, but we must give disproportionate time to culture development in order for strategy to be successful.

The weight of success will be crushing if we are not attending to our culture. If you trace the trajectory of an organization that has imploded, I’m confident you’ll find a compromised culture beneath the rubble.

I was recently speaking at a conference and asked the attendees the following questions:

“How many of you have spent time, maybe even hired someone, to help you write your mission and vision statements for your ministry?”

Nearly all the hands in the room went up. Then I asked:

“How many of you have a written strategic plan?” Again, nearly every hand in the room went up.

Finally, I asked, “How many of you have a plan for your team culture?”

This time only a few hands went up. I wasn’t surprised. In fact, research tells us that while 90 percent of leaders believe that an employee engagement plan will help them achieve their mission, only 25 percent of them actually have a plan.

Why is it we fail to give the time and attention to arguably the greatest resource we have—our people?

Another way to think about culture is the stewardship of people in pursuit of a purpose. As a leader you are simultaneously juggling these two mandates: 1) to accomplish the purpose of your ministry, and 2) to build and retain a great staff who make that purpose possible.

We live in an era of organizational leadership where employees have greater expectations of their work culture. They have more flexibility and more options than they’ve ever had. Work and life collide like never before, and employees want to be a part of a culture that reflects the values they hold and connects them with work that has purpose and meaning. They are less fearful to change jobs and will prioritize seeking out work that provides fulfillment and purpose.

When we’re intentional about designing and building our culture, great team members will clamor to be a part of it, and more importantly they will want to remain a part of it. This dynamic creates a unique opportunity for leaders to build cultures in which purpose is clear and team members can find meaning in their contribution.

As leaders who are shaping the culture of our teams, it’s our responsibility to bring clarity to who we are and how we work to achieve our mission. Culture isn’t just a nice idea that you’ll get to if you have time. It’s the very linchpin that ties your purpose and strategy together. You can’t achieve your purpose without a team of people to make it happen. Whether it’s two people or two thousand, you have the opportunity, privilege, and responsibility to be intentional in leading culture!

*This article is adapted from Jenni’s forthcoming book, Culture Matters: A Framework for Helping Your Team Grow, Thrive, and Be Unstoppable releasing February 11th, 2025. You can pre-order at www.culturemattersbook.com.