Welcome to The Flourishing Culture Podcast! When Dr. Jo Anne Lyon, General Superintendent of The Wesleyan Church, was tasked with leading the charge on her denomination’s restructuring, she knew she needed to start with listening to her staff at a grassroots level. She then used that feedback to reshape the culture and bring about unity during a time of extreme change.
As we’ll see in today’s interview, that unity and clarity around vision, mission and goals can lead to some truly divine outcomes. In the 8 years since The Wesleyan Church distilled their efforts into three clear goals (to increase attendance, conversions and baptisms), the number of worship attendees, new followers of Christ and baptisms has increased 30 percent in North America.
Prior to being elected as the General Superintendent in 2008, Jo Anne founded World Hope International, an organization to alleviate suffering and injustice through education, enterprise and community health. As she travels the world, Jo Anne serves her denomination and several boards. Plus, she is sought-after as an advisor to world leaders including visits to the White House.
Tune into today’s episode to hear Jo Anne’s strategy for successfully navigating a restructuring.
Listen to the Audio
Listen in iTunes | Listen in Stitcher Radio
In this episode, you’ll learn about:
- How listening to your team at a grassroots level can inform a restructuring
- Living out a restructuring after the plan is in place
- How the BCWI Employee Engagement Survey helps you tap into what’s working, bring about unity and keep employee discontent from spreading
- Sharing stories that celebrate your mission to help your employees find meaning and ownership in their work
- Establishing an open door policy to encourage collaboration
- Optimizing your workplace for prayer in tangible ways and developing a systematic, focused prayer emphasis
- Clarifying and simplifying goals to energize your employees and give them clear direction to make powerful gains
- Modeling trust in your leadership and confronting it when it’s broken
- A leader’s role is to discern people’s gifts, call them out, and inspire them to use them to serve the Kingdom.
Explore Additional Resources
- Learn more about The Wesleyan Church: wesleyan.org
- Find The Wesleyan Church on Facebook and Twitter
- Contact Jo Anne on Twitter and Facebook
- Read The Speed of Trust by Steven Covey
- Read more about Jo Anne’s strategy on last week’s blog post: 5 Ways to Accel (and Excel) Your Culture at “The Speed of Trust”
Read the Transcript
Download a complete, word-for-word transcript of the episode here.
Share the Love
If you enjoyed this episode, please rate it on iTunes and write a brief review. By doing so, you will help spread our podcast to more listeners, and thereby help more Christian workplaces learn to build flourishing cultures.
