What it Takes to Be Successful at SpringHill
Every organization and team “culture” is different. The culture is the organization’s unique personality, its set of unwritten (and often unspoken) rules and expectations about how work gets done, and how people should treat and how relate to one another. And obviously, for a person to be successful within a specific organization, requires a unique set of personal qualities and competencies that fit that culture.
So because there’s no one right formula of personal qualities and competencies that work in every organization, with the help from an organizational psychologist, we’ve identified those qualities and competencies necessary for a person to be successful, over the long run, at SpringHill. The process we used included gathering feedback from a large number of our staff about the qualities they see in successful SpringHill staff. And to this feedback we added the best that leadership research says on the subject.
When we finished we ended up with 13 different, clearly defined “Leadership Competencies” that members of our team need to possess if they’re going to have a long-term impact within SpringHill. These 13 competencies have become the core to all of our “people” processes such as hiring and selection, performance management and appraisals, training and development, and finally succession planning.
Below are these 13 SpringHill “leadership competencies” divided into four categories:
Mastery of Self
Life/Work balance Personal Learning
Decision Making God Immersed
Mastery of Relationships
Community Focus Compassion and Sensitivity
Spiritual Leadership Customer Focus
Mastery of Performance
Leading People Resourcefulness
Professional Will Continuous Improvement
Mastery of Vision
Culture Bearer
Over the next couple of weeks I’ll share with you more details of each of the competencies and their importance within the SpringHill culture.
This is part 1 of 14 in a series of posts about what it takes to be successful at SpringHill.
4 Comments
Carly Jones
I’m excited to read your following series on this. One thing I always loved about working on staff at SpringHill was the process of identifying character and vision of the organization/ministry as well as the training and identity of the staff. It’s exciting to see continued commitment to excellence and personal/professional development of the ministry and teams. I know I continue to benefit from the training I received in my time there.
Michael Perry
Thanks Carly for the feedback. As you know there’s no more important part of the SpringHill Experience than the people who develop and deliver it. I hope my blog posts can continue to be a benefit to you as well.
Take care friend,
Tim Wilkins
I think your comment mentioning that a person’s qualities & competencies need to be a good “fit” within the company’s culture in order for the partnership to be a success is extremely important. I can tell you from my experience, this is true in many industries. For example, I worked as an engineer for Toyota for 2 years, and while they have been leaders in the industry for production efficiency, lean manufacturing, technology, and quality, they struggle with employee retention in the US. From my experience there, it was due to a misalignment between the company’s culture & values, and the culture & values in North America (specifically things like work-life balance, and communication techniques). It seems that high performance only leads to true success if it is sustainable. Very interesting reading, I’m looking forward to the rest of your piece!
P.S. I spent a few summers at SpringHill working as a TST crew chief – it was an excellent working environment and one of the best experiences I have had.
Michael Perry
Hey Tim, thanks for the comments and your perspective. The ability to match organizational culture with the greater culture is an interesting topic. Might have to think about that some more (and blog about it). Thanks for the comments as well on SpringHill and for taking a few of your summers to work with kids. Couldn’t do it without you and the hundreds of other people every year who make the same commitment.