Leading Through Change: An Interview with Jimmy Draper In 1991, Jimmy Draper moved from a Texas pastorate to become President and Chief Executive Officer of one of the largest Christian organizations in the world, LifeWay Christian Resources (then known as the Baptist Sunday School Board). During his tenure, Lifeway has experienced a major reorganization (including a name change) as well as a dramatic expansion of programs and products. Michael Duduit, editor of Leader Links, recently visited with Dr. Draper in his Nashville office to talk about leading a major organization like LifeWay.

Leader Links: You are leading one of the largest Christian organizations in the world. What are some of the leadership challenges you have faced during the years that you've been serving as CEO of LifeWay?

Draper: For 35 years I was a pastor. I came here out of the pastorate and I've probably brought a lot of my pastoral experience into the position here. Your biggest challenge is building trust, learning how to give real responsibility to people where they can have something to do and be responsible for, learning how to hold them accountable, learning how to encourage risk without continual failure, learning from failures, learning how to build a team that can communicate well — that really tries to strive to make each other a success. I think the key in any large organization like ours is that if everyone of the entities truly strives to make every other entity successful then you build a strong organization. Obviously building teamwork.

I'm a people person — I like to be in contact with people. I came from an office on the 11th floor and it was like living on a dead end street — people were just told never go up on the 11th floor! I said, "Get me out of here! Get me down to the first floor where the people are." So I moved down here within four or five months after I came here. We cleared out this space and have just completed bringing all the vice presidents.

It's getting down where people can see you, where you can relate to them and speak to them and encourage them. I write birthday notes to all our employees. When I get an email saying somebody's mother is sick or father died or whatever, I immediately contact them. You have to build a sense that this is a caring organization. It's the kind of thing I want to be a part of.

We're now in our sixth year of taking our employees overseas on mission trips. What we do is witnessing. They don't go over there to preach revivals. They go over there to do one-to-one witnessing in streets, and we do it with pastors and leaders in the countries. We've had over 500 of our people go the last five years. We've had somewhere around forty trips. We've seen nearly 50,000 people saved, started 125 churches. What it has done is make the people who do busy work here realize the extent of what they're doing. It's easy to get bogged down in what you're doing — going to and from work, you're stuck in your office with your assignment — and sometimes we never realize the impact and the extent of what we're doing. So it has created an incredible sense of anticipation. We just had our missions banquet here about four weeks ago, and we had 282 people at the thing. We've got our trips this year and we can take 146 people — we've got 141 people already signed up. So it's generated a lot of excitement, a lot of pride. Knowing that we have over 1600 licenses all over the world — our material being translated into other languages — they realize when they do something here that it has the potential to touch people in the Ukraine or Brazil or Ghana or wherever.

These are the kinds of things that I try to do. Of course, the key is to just surround yourself with people better than yourself. If you hire people better than you are, you'll do well. And then let them do the job and encourage them, support them and give them credit. I think part of leadership is not taking credit for everything. You need to let people who really do the work take credit. These are the kinds of things that I've found have served me well.

I think you need to build an attitude of gratitude. Grateful people are happy people and if you dwell on what you don't have you'll be unhappy and ungrateful. But if you thank God for what you have and realize that everything's in His hands, you'll build a spirit of gratitude that results in happiness. Happiness is not something you can find — it's a byproduct of something else. So when you're doing what God wants you to do and you're grateful for what you have as a byproduct you say 'hey I'm happy.' If you try to be happy you never are. So gratitude is a big thing — being kind to people.

Convictions don't have to be brutal. You don't have to beat people up. You can stand firm for what you believe and hold high standards but do it with compassion. My dad used to tell me to be kind to everybody because everybody's having a hard time. And they really are, so find ways to encourage people. Let them know that how they feel and what they're doing is important.

Obviously we have to be fair. We make hard decisions in an organization this large, and you're going to have problems that develop. You'll have everything from ineffective employees to unethical, even illegal employees sometimes. We need to deal with those issues fairly and yet consistently. You need to be consistent, and I've always felt as a pastor — and I feel in my position here — that I need to set the example. I can't ask people to do something I'm not doing. We can lead people where we haven't been but not where we're unwilling to go.

We have a really good team, and that requires good communication. When I came here there were a lot of things we didn't talk about. Little things like who gets sales credit. If someone sells a book in the store but it's a scripture resource book that sold here in this area, who gets credit: the book store or church resources? We couldn't even talk about things like that — it was too sensitive. It had whole decades of concern over this. We're building a team where we can talk about anything and nobody gets offended and nobody's threatened. That's important. In any organizations you have to be able to deal with conflict and deal with disagreements in a way that moves toward solution and not just toward venting.

It's been good seasoning. The average CEO and executive officer in corporate America stays four years — by the way, that's about how long the average pastor stays — so there are a lot of similarities. Our team has been together here — two of my vice presidents and I have been together over twelve years, my COO and I have been together ten years, our youngest staff member has been with us four years. So our average is probably eight or nine years for the eight of us on the senior executive management team. That's good because we've been together long enough to trust each other and build relationships. I think that's important. I think any business — church or otherwise — would do well if it could build tenure and longevity into its staff and into its ministry. We've been able to do that and it's been helpful.

Leader Links: I know that you were the pastor for a number of years — you pastored some significant churches — so obviously you've had major leadership experience. As you made a transition from a local church to this setting — it's a Christian organization but also a large corporation — what are those things that surprised you?

Draper: Just the responsibility. As a pastor you build consensus. You hold up a banner and you challenge people to follow and you have the Bible and this is what God wants us to do. But as a pastor I didn't feel like I exercised absolute authority. I could lead the people but I didn't make all the decisions for the people.

I came here and all of a sudden I woke up — it's my decision. I have to make the decisions. There's the sheer responsibility of making decisions without the necessity many times of having consensus. You try to get consensus but there are times when decisions have to be made in split seconds almost. So I think that was a surprise.

The second surprise for me was that I thought I could kind of pastor this organization and that was a real shock. I'll do a lot of pastoral things — I'll stop and pray with people in the halls, I'll write them and call them and spend time with them in crisis — but really I had to realize that they need a president and not a pastor. They've got pastors. Being a pastor was all I really knew. I grew up in a pastor's home, my granddaddy was a pastor, so all I'd ever known was a parsonage. I started pastoring when I was 20. I always said a pastor is not something I did, it's something I was. Then all the sudden I woke up and I wasn't what I'd always been.

For instance, one of the huge adjustments is that my life had always centered in a church. I pastored a church and that was my world. Now I preach every Sunday. I preach as much as I did as a pastor but I'm a stranger everywhere I go. I belong everywhere and I belong nowhere. I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody. That was the biggest adjustment.

We'd been here a couple of months and we joined out at Two Rivers, and one Sunday morning we had a guest musician — a wonderful young African-American man named Marvin Mackies. Marvin and I knew each other back in Texas and he led the music. And we just had a wonderful day. It was just one of those days where the music was great and the sermon was super. We get in the car, I looked over at Carol Ann and she looked over at me and we both start crying. After we blubbered a little bit, I said, "What are we crying for?" And we tried to figure out what was it that made us cry? Then it dawned on me: we had just been in a wonderful, spiritual, warm, refreshing, challenging, inspirational service and all my life I had been the one responsible for providing the leadership for such a service. I realized that never again would I be the one responsible to do that. It just killed me.

I go into services now but I'm a guest. To be the one responsible for the ongoing culture and worship and feeling and the emotion and the blessing and the worship service would never again be my responsibility. That was a big, big adjustment. It's been very difficult. The thing is, we never doubted God sent us. I never wanted it. The trustees actually tricked me into talking to them. They asked me to come and talk to them and give them some ideas about who could be the president. When I got there they said, "Well, actually we want to talk to you." And God used that. We never questioned through all of this that God sent us.

Carol Ann had always been the pastor's wife. Taught all ages of Sunday school — adult ladies and everywhere she went they'd just follow her like the piper. Two out of three phone calls at home were for Carol Ann and not for me. Then all a sudden we come up here and she's totally shut out. Nothing for her to do here. She can't sit in on budget meetings, personnel meetings and strategy meetings. There's no reason for her to. She could have stayed here and said, "I won't travel with you; I'll just build my nest at Two Rivers Church," but if she'd done that we'd never be together. So she travels everywhere I go but that means that she's not connected at church either, so the disconnect between the local church and our lives is huge and its not pleasant. I've said I don't like what I've become here in that sense, because I always wanted to be in a church — not just church in general.

Those were the biggest adjustments for us. Our kids were grown so that was good and we love the time we'd been here, we love what we're doing but it's not been easy.

Leader Links: As you look back now on the time you've been at LifeWay, are there some things you've learned about being a leader that you wish you'd known when you were a pastor?

Draper: You know, I think we all ought to be learning things like that. There are a lot of things that I've often said I wish I could go back — you know I don't regret any move that I've made. People say what would you change? I really wouldn't change anything but I sure would like to go back and have another shot at some of them. I wish I knew some things when I was in Kansas City — it was a mission church that grew rapidly and we were a very prominent church quickly — but I wish I'd known then some things I learned when I was in Del City (OK) and Dallas.

I don't know if I've learned anything new as much as had some things reinforced. I think the importance of dealing with people honestly and with integrity and being fair and sensitive with people, helping people succeed in their jobs. I see it as my role to help my vice presidents to be successful. If they fail then I've failed. And I think I knew these things and I always tried to practice that as a pastor but these things were really reinforced. As I go from church to church — there's so much turmoil in churches around the country, so many power struggles. There are a lot of pastors that go in like an 800 pound gorilla demanding that they have their way — you follow me and my way or the highway — and they run right into deacons that say, "Hey, you'll be gone in 18 months or 2 years and we'll have to pick up the pieces, we're not going that way." The reinforcing of how to deal with people and how to bring out the best in people and make it possible for people to succeed — I would like to have done a better job of developing my deacons and helping my staff realize their greatest potential.

I always was a good delegater. It didn't take me long. I didn't know how to run a 200-million dollar business — soon to be a half-billion dollar business. I don't know how to run a business like that. I'm not a businessman. But I surrounded myself with people who do know how to run it and people who love the Lord and have a commitment to soul winning and missions in their churches, so you surround yourself with good people. These things have all been reinforced.

Leader Links: You mentioned teams earlier. Obviously with an organization of this size there are all kinds of teams that work in the building. Tell me about your approach to team building and working with the teams.

Draper: We do have a lot of teams. I think the key is that you've got to have the right mix on a team. For instance when we reorganized in 1992 we had four main teams or task forces of about 25 people each — about 100 people. We didn't have any of our upper management on there. We had middle management and down because they were the people closest to the work. We asked them to consider how we were structured, what about our resources, what ought we be doing we're not doing. They all had their assignments and then we made a consultant and our executive staff available. Those were not LifeWay consultants; they were outsiders to make sure they stayed on track. My philosophy is let the people closest to where the work is being done have the greatest input. It's easy for me to sit over here and tell them how they ought to be distributing stuff in North Carolina but the guy out there in the distribution center who lives with it everyday is in a better position to make a decision like that. So I think that teams have to representative of what you're trying to accomplish.

We just started a new effort of developing a new type of curriculum and we had a cross divisional team of about eight people representing the stores, the technology area, the church resources. We had someone representing each of those and they did a fabulous job. None of them were vice presidents or anything like that but it was a good mix. We had people who understood technology, which is very important now in any project you're going to do. We had people who understood marketing and understood some theological issues — we had a couple of bi-vocational pastors. You have to get the right mix on teams and then you need to give them a real responsibility and reward them. When we have a team like this we not only thank them if they do the job they're supposed to do but we'll maybe give them a little gift, something to express appreciation. You have to have the right mix, you've got to give them a real job, give them an opportunity to make real recommendation and then reward them and celebrate their accomplishments. If you'll do that, you'll get good work out of them.

Leader Links: In an organization like this, obviously one of the things you're dealing with all the time is confronting change — cultural change and organizational change. How do you as a leader go about preparing, guiding, and motivating an organization through change?

Draper: This is true at churches as well as. In fact, I think much of the problems in churches is that church members are comfortable. They have a big comfort zone and they don't want to change. So I think you first have to build a culture for change — you have to help people understand that change is not optional. We have done reorganizing many times over the last 12 to 13 years that I've been here and I'm sure that they'll keep doing that but you have to create a climate for change and to do that you need to show people the reason.

Right now there's a huge change taking place in the emergence of short-term Bible studies times, like Rick Warren's 40 Days of Purpose. That is wonderful material. I've given those books away to people and you know we didn't publish it at all! It's a six or seven week program and we're used to everything being 13 weeks. Well, we've got to change the way we think. We can't just assume that everybody's going to want a 13-week quarterly. So we must build a sensitivity to the swings of the way churches do business.

For instance, people used to buy for enrollment. I can remember as a young pastor we would deliver the Sunday school quarterlies to all our enrollment and it was a visitation contact that would maybe encourage those who hadn't been coming to come back. We'd hand them that — we'd go by and give them their quarterly. Now churches buy for attendance. The church I was in Sunday — the Sunday school teacher came running into the pastor and said we only have 2 quarterlies — where are the rest of our quarterlies. So we buy for attendance, and if have a little spurt you may be short. You have to manage change or you'll be victimized by it.

The way I've tried to do change is to involve people in the changes. Don't just say this is what's going to happen. If people have a chance to buy into the changes and to see the need for, it they may not like it but they at least don't resist it as much and will move more effectively into change. People have to have a chance to accept it, so once you begin to make changes you do it in the right way — you continue to let people know this is going to be a pattern.

We are going to be flexible. Flexibility is what keeps organizations alive. When they become inflexible they die because it's the old story of the Titanic. If it had been built where it could have given a little bit it wouldn't have sunk. But it was rigid and it cracked when it hit that iceberg. If we're not flexible our organizations will be like that. Churches are like that. Businesses are like that. So you build a culture of change. You help people make decisions in change and then you let them know that there's always going to be change.

We're going to do our best to manage it and to contribute wisely to change and not be surprised and victimized by it. Give good reasons why you're changing. It's not just because the president woke up on the wrong side of the bed but there is a real reason. You give people real information and then you lead them because ultimately you know you've got to make the changes but you lead them to have a chance to realize — to buy into it. What we did in '92 and what we did recently is we acted on the recommendations. When the organizational task force back in 1992 came (with their report), they said, "We have four recommendations and here are three. Now the fourth one is our preference but we don't think that you all have enough nerve to do it." And of course we shocked them in doing it! Then everybody said "whoa." So you have to move through change and get the buy in and endorsements and the participation of people so they at least feel like they have a voice in it. But you've got to tell people change is inevitable. There will be change whether you like it or not. We just don't want to be blindsided by it.

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