SPEAKER_01
I want a double portion of your spirit. It's a challenging prayer to pray, a double portion. And so we started to ask ourselves, what would a double portion of impact at Moody Bible Institute look like?
SPEAKER_03
You're listening to The Higher Ed Marketer, a podcast geared towards marketing professionals in higher education. This show will tackle all sorts of questions related to student recruitment, donor relations, marketing trends, new technologies, and so much more. If you're looking for conversations centered around where the industry is going, this podcast is for you.
Let's get into the show.
SPEAKER_00
Welcome to The Higher Ed Marketer podcast. My name is Troy Singer and I'm here with my co-host and honorary Super Bowl referee, Bart Koehler, where each week our quest is to seek out higher ed marketers and executives and gain from them through their stories and through their advice tangible things that you can take back and implement right away. Today, we are graced by Dr.
Mark Joe. He is with Moody Bible Institute and we're going to talk to Dr. Joe about leadership lessons for major impact in growth.
He gave us a semester of leadership lessons within 40 minutes.
SPEAKER_02
I think it was a really great conversation and I'm really excited to share this with everyone. Mark has a tremendous amount of leadership experience as well as what he's doing today at the Moody Bible Institute. It's a 135-year-old institution, massive in the size.
Many of you might think, well, it's just that little Bible college in Chicago. They've got a massive radio network. They've got a print publishing division.
All that falls under the leadership team that Mark has put together. I think that it's a great conversation about leadership. It's also a great conversation about authentic storytelling and how to do that in different environments that we're in today.
Regardless of your type of institution, I think that this episode would be really pragmatic and beneficial for you. Yes. Here's our conversation with Dr. Joe.
SPEAKER_00
It's our pleasure to have Dr. Mark Job, president of Moody Bible Institute here on the Higher Ed Marketer podcast. Before we go into our conversation with him about the leadership lessons for a massive impact in growth, we'd like to know, Mark, if you could give us an overview of the Moody Bible Institute and what all comes under your authority.
Thank you, Troy and Bart.
SPEAKER_01
Great to be with you today. Moody Bible Institute, probably like many organizations of higher institution is complex. We are in the heart of Chicago.
We have been around for 136 years, started by a high powered evangelist by the name of D. L. Moody, who was quite a force to be reckoned with. And so currently Moody is a both a school.
We have an undergrad school with students living on campus downtown, about 1400 students that live on campus. We have a total of about 3000 students. We have a seminary, a seminary in Michigan.
We have an aviation school in Spokane, Washington. And that's education, of course, online education as well. But we also have a publishing arm that sells about 3.
5 million books a year in the religious Christian niche area. And then we also have a broadcasting network. So we have 1.
5 million listeners that listen every month. And that goes throughout all the country. We own various stations and networks.
So it's all under one umbrella called the Moody Bible Institute. But it has a three fold stool we like to call it, that literally impacts tens of millions of people every year. That's great.
Thank you for that,
SPEAKER_02
that introduction there, Mark. And really appreciate having you on the show. And it's, it's, it's fascinating to me.
I mean, that's obviously a lot, a lot of under your purview and your team's purview. But at the same time, I think, you know, being, being a new president at Moody, in the last few years, I understand that there's, there's some ways that you kind of look at it from a leadership standpoint that really kind of helps with that idea of how to massively grow, how to, you know, provide massive impact for, for the mission. Why don't you tell me a little bit about how you frame that and, and how that works from, from your experience? Yeah.
So first of all,
SPEAKER_01
let me say that I do not come from a higher education background. I do have a doctorate degree. I come from a ministry background, a pastor in Chicago for 35 years, urban setting, started a non-for-profit.
So that's been my word. And so when Moody first asked me to come and consider, I was reluctant because I thought I love Moody, but you know, that's not the world that I live in. But what I've come to realize is that every ministry, every organization, whether it's higher institution, higher ed institution, or whether it's a church, the principles are very similar.
Leadership is leadership in whatever field you're at. And so when I started at Moody, I thought, what would I like to see? What would we like to see as a team in the next decade? And so I'm a terrible maintainer, but I get very fired up when there's a challenge that I think that's worth investing in. And so we started to envision and pray a bold prayer.
And our bold prayer was that of Eli Shuh the prophet, when there was a transition between a senior prophet to the next guy, he said, I want a double portion of your spirit. It's a challenging prayer to pray, a double portion. And so we started to ask ourselves, what would a double portion of impact at Moody Bible Institute look like? And so for us, it looked like doubling the number of the students that were impacting, it meant double the number of listeners that we have via radio and digital, doubling the number of books and readers that we have, which seemed like a very, very challenging prayer to pray, vision to have.
But we felt like that's what we want to do. So from 37 months ago when I started, we have been focused on that. What does it mean? Not just numerically to double our impact, but spiritually impact of students, impact on leaders.
And so that's what we've been going for. And it has been a great challenge and the team has bought into it. We're on the same page.
Someone told me, you must be doing something right because I heard a janitor talking to someone else and we said, well, this is about doubling the impact. And so the janitors are talking about doubling the impact. You know that it's seeped down the ranks into the mass of employees.
We have a great team working on that right now. I think that's great. And I love the fact too that
SPEAKER_02
I think you just pointed out there with that story of the janitor even talking about it. I think sometimes in leadership, whether we're the president of an institution or whether we are a director of communications or a project manager, there's still leadership that's involved in that. And I think that kind of what you're saying is having some clarity of that and making sure that you can kind of help guide those that are a part of the team.
It's not this and it's also, like you said, bold vision, bold prayers. But I think that we, you know, sometimes I think we get kind of confused that, well, I'm the leader, I'm supposed to know everything and it's supposed to be on my shoulders to make that happen. Even if I'm a leader within my small department on campus, we're talking to higher ed marketers, there's still this idea though that as leaders, it's our responsibility to know where we start and stop with what we know.
Is that true?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you know, I look at leadership, I have a limited responsibility. Sometimes people look at what I'm doing and they say, how do you do so much? How can you keep track? The good leader has to narrow down, I think, what are their primary responsibilities? And so I view my primary responsibilities as number one, number one, clarifying vision. Where are we going and what is our mission? And so vision and mission are a little bit different.
Mission is the purpose why we exist. Vision is in a timely fashion, where are we going? Vision can be five years out, 10 years out. How are we implementing that mission? So I think it's a, it's the responsibility of a leader to say, this is where we're going.
Max DePree, who taught a lot of leadership, said the first responsibility of a leader is to define reality. If you don't define reality, if you don't define our current state where we're going, someone else will define it for you. So we started to define, this is who we are, let's be clear about who we are and who we're not.
And let's be clear about what we want to accomplish in the next 10 years. The second responsibility, I believe of a leader, at least in my case, is to gather the team, the right team of competent leaders to be able to implement a strategy, move things forward. And that's not always easy to do.
But that was part of the responsibility when I stepped into Moody. And then I think finally, part of the responsibility of a good leader is then to embrace a strategy. Once you have the vision, you have the team, you articulate a strategy together, I believe that's formed together, and then metrics to say, how are we progressing towards that? So those are my three primary responsibilities.
Now I may do a lot of other things in subcategories, like do podcasts for Bart and Troy, but my primary responsibilities lie in those three areas. That's great. I also know from a previous conversation
SPEAKER_00
that you take pride in knowing what you don't know. And you use the story of how when you first took over the leadership role for Moody, that there were a recruiter to that was crucial to your success as you set out on the journey. Could you share those stories with us?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, absolutely. I think that comes under the category of bringing together the right team. When I started at Moody, Moody had just, well, there were several people that had transitioned out of their office, the three top roles, really the president, the COO, and the provost.
So those are very important in a higher education setting. And all three of those had transitioned out around the same time. And so I stepped in and I looked over Moody and I realized, okay, I come from a pastor background, a leadership background, I believe in the mission, I can articulate that I can inspire people to train men and women to live on purpose, on mission for the cause of Christ.
I understand that. But this is a big business operation as well. There's organizational dynamics, there's strategies, it's there's quite a few employees, we're multi campus, we're scattered around the country.
I need someone that really understands business. And so there was a gentleman on the board by the name of Mark Wagner, and he had been the president of Walgreens. And obviously he had worked his way from way down in the mailroom, all the way up to the presidency.
And I thought he would be a great COO. I talked to some of other board members about it, and he had stepped into some volunteer responsibilities. And I said, Hey, do you think he would consider it? They laughed at me and said, No, he's not going to take on that responsibility.
But I sat down, my wife and I sat down with him and his wife. In October, I started in January. And I said, Mark, I'm stepping into this role.
And I know that you have decisions to make. I had heard that he wanted to transition maybe into retirement. And I need someone like you with your skills and your understanding to come help me make an impact for the kingdom.
You've helped Walgreens make a lot of money. And but come help make a spiritual impact with me. And we talked for quite a while, what that would look like.
And he said, I'll pray about it. Five days later, he called me up and said, I can't get away from the idea of making an impact. So I'm going to say yes.
And so I told him, Hey, Mark, I don't even know if I can hire you because I'm not I haven't even started yet. But I think we can work out those details. And so Mark, who's never worked at a non for profit, never worked in higher education.
He's worked in the business sector, the pharmaceutical sector. He was just a great guy to bring a balance to my gifting that I did not have. And so and then we needed someone to head up education, neither Mark nor I were experts in education.
And Moody, you know, is primarily an educational institution. And so we were able to recruit and hire someone that was seasoned in education by the name of Dr. Dwight Perry.
That was his field. He understood it. And so those are some of the top leaders.
But it was my responsibility to say, who needs to form this team. And they're just doing an outstanding job. It's hard to go places if you don't have the team to help take you there.
SPEAKER_02
That's great. Love that story and love how that how that all plays out and plays together. I think that's so so important.
And again, I think it can apply to so many different ways. And I think that just kind of also tell me a little bit about over the course of the last 36, 37 months, there's obviously some challenges that all of us is faced with with the pandemic and with the economic issues around that. And even whether it's retail sales or whether it's people coming into into higher education, everyone's had a challenge.
But tell me a little bit about how you and your
SPEAKER_01
team kind of worked through those physical challenges. Yeah, well, I have to echo everybody else is saying this has been one of the most disruptive challenging times for institutions, organizations and leaders to navigate through. And by the way, if you're leading something right now, I want to just commend you.
It won't always be this way. It hasn't always been this way. I had to remind my 28 year old son that stepped into pastor and recently, hey, these last three years have been an intense crash course on leadership that probably puts you ahead 10 years into the leadership curve because you had to deal with challenges and political polarization and racial issues and economic issues and virus issues.
And well, when we stepped in, obviously, I didn't know that a year after we had begun to announce and pray for a doubling of the impact that we would be hit by a massive global pandemic that would seek to almost shut everything down. But we actually viewed it a bit as an accelerator. It's been disruptive, but I also see it as the great accelerator.
It has thrust us forward a decade. Technology has sped forward some of the trends that were happening, even off site remote working. I think that was coming anyways.
I think the virus has just kind of accelerated it forward. So we've been in this capsule of time that has compressed the speed of change. Leaders have felt that.
In the midst of this, a couple of things I would say, one, I think Mark Wagner, our COO, he had the foresight to believe that create a task force to handle this disruption. And in the beginning, the task force made up about 20, 30 people every single day, every single day they were meeting, over communicating. That was just some good experience that said we need to over communicate during this time.
As we got into this volatile season, we also discovered that it was a time where there was a lot of very strong opinions about a lot of different things. And it was a time where people were expressing their opinions oftentimes in a very strong way towards the leadership and what we were doing. And for a little season, I felt like we just were responding to negative social media posts, to negative comments, to negative stories.
And it felt like for a while we were just on the defense. And I had a long conversation with our head of marketing and I said, you know, I feel like we're just not saying much, but just waiting to have to respond to the next critical negative reaction. We need to be much more proactive in telling what is going well, telling our stories of our graduates and the impact that's happening.
And so we determined we're not just going to wait around for the next negative story to pop up, that we're going to start telling these great stories that we have to tell. We told the story of one of our graduates who during the pandemic in the city of Chicago was able to roll up his sleeves with a bunch of volunteers and feed at one time 30,000 people a week over the last 20 months fed 2 million people a moody graduate rolling up his sleeves, engaging in the community, many of this in immigrant communities. And what we realized is we have so many good stories to tell and we need to be proactive in telling those stories in compelling ways rather than just sitting back and trying to play the defensive.
I love that idea because I think that especially in today's
SPEAKER_02
environment, it's very easy. There's just so much polarization of everything. And I think that if we can be proactive in telling the stories of our institution, of the mission that we represent, what we're doing, I think that's going to be so much more impactful for those constituents that we have, whether they are already constituents or they might be willing to become a prospective student or family, those types of things.
So what kind of ways are you telling those stories? I mean, I guess this gets into a little bit more of the pragmatic and practical ways because I mean, you have those stories from a practical standpoint. How are you getting those stories out about
SPEAKER_01
Moody Biddle Institute? Well, you know, you have the traditional ways of telling stories with alumni magazines and so forth. And so they've been, that's been happening a little bit more aggressively. But we've also sought to tell the stories a little bit more visually and video, being able to capture the images.
I think it's crucial for institutions nowadays. Most higher education institutions, I don't think are probably that good at that. I just had a talk just this morning with our IT people.
And I was responding to some improvements that we could make. And the head of IT, John's to say that he told me this, he said, I get it. He said, what I realized is that we have to operate much more as a production company than an audio visual support team.
And I said, you know, John, you got it because nowadays our streaming, like we, for example, we live stream our chapels, we have events on campus that become the windows to the world. Not only are we disseminating a message outwardly, but we are also giving people a peek into the institute, into our world. And so our team, and he told me, hey, we've been playing a lot of catch up, but our team has become much more, much more adept at telling stories with students creatively through visual content, through our different online platforms, our social media platforms, that has become much more the way that we're telling stories now.
Now you have an older, older constituent that maybe aren't as versatile and adept to social media. So you don't want to just engage them. They're still going to be the printed.
So people that are, you know, in their 70s, 80s, 60s, they may not be as adept to social media. So I think print is still important for them. I told our marketing guy, hey, I'd like to, I'd like to have a video videographer ride in the car with me my first day at Moody and just capture some of my thoughts as I'm starting on campus, what it looks like.
So he rode around in the car with me and I'm driving to the institute, trying not to get too distracted, don't want any car accident. And he just traveled with me in the car and I'm talking to him about to start. This is my first day.
I'm excited about it. This is why I took this position, parked the car, followed me out and I'm walking into the institute, going to the office. I'm saying hi to people.
You know, I think there was a, there was a time when the stories that were told were very clean cut, formalized, very produced. And that was what people expected. I think the greatest stories nowadays are authentic, the raw, they're less produced, they're real, they're unedited and people have a sense of I can, I get who these people are.
And so I believe that we need to be telling more raw, authentic stories, especially via our video platforms. That's great. I must admit that I find you inspirational and
SPEAKER_00
you are a wonderful storyteller. So I'm sure if that's permeating through your organization that you are very effective of getting those stories across. Earlier you had talked, you're welcome.
Earlier you had mentioned the, give me double. And I would like to go to what I believe is titled the vision script initiative where you've taken that concept and then you've utilized that and kind of formalized it with your team for massive impact and growth in the organization. Could you explain to the listeners the vision script initiative? Yeah, again, I think
SPEAKER_01
that it's a responsibility of the leader to try to paint a clear picture of the future. And typically we set goals that are numeric, which I think they should be, we have to measure our progress. And so we had almost from day one, numeric goals.
What does it mean to double publishing what does it mean to double education? What does it mean to double broadcasting listeners, readers, and students? But most people, to be honest with you, are not inspired by numbers per se. Most people are inspired by the three dimensional picture of what that means. And so I started to realize as people dug in a little bit more and say, Hey, what does the doubly impact really mean? I realized I need to do a better job at painting the picture.
And so I believe I first heard of this concept through Michael Hyatt, who does some coaching and so forth. And this was much more for personal development. But I thought it would be great for organizational development.
I was in Mexico with my wife, and I was thinking about our marriage and our children and our family. And I was inspired through some of the reading about that to paint a picture of what it would look like over the next 10 years for us. So I did a vision marriage script for us.
Like, Hey, I want to laugh more than ever before. I want to have some adventures. When I look around, this is what I want to see.
This is the kind of relationship I want to have with my children. This is how I want us to be experiencing our life in 10 years from now. And it was a, and then we read it together.
It was a very compelling, powerful description of the future that I thought was helpful for us and our marriage and our family. But I was inspired by that actually to say, you know, this is the same thing that I need to do for Moody. And so I got away, sat down, and I wrote out, if I were to step into the year 2026, I did a little bit shorter because 2026 is our 100 year anniversary of our first broadcast.
It's our 140th anniversary of existing as a institution, as a school. And so I sort of went forward into the future and said, if I were to look around in 2026, what would I want the culture to look like? What would I want our team to be celebrating? What would I want the students to look like? The atmosphere on the school, our finances, our engagement with our society. What are we celebrating? What are people coming to learn from us? What are we highlighting? And about a two page paper, I include education, broadcasting, publishing, culture, dynamics, finances, spiritual, health and atmosphere on our campus, impact.
And then I read it to our executive team. I read it to our board. And I read it to our staff as well.
And I've had so many people come up to me after it and say, now I get it. Now I get it. And, you know, we're wired that way.
Troy, if you're listening to a story, there's a lot of stats, a lot of good information, you can disengage, but your mind is wired to engage as soon as you hear a story, a picture is painted. And I believe that many of us, as we go forward into the future, we need a clear picture. It needs to connect with our emotions.
It needs to, we need to be able to see it more clearly as we move forward. And I think that's part of the responsibility and job of a leader to do so. And so now we have a clear picture and the challenges and people refer to that.
Hey, in the vision script, you mentioned this, like one of the things we want to do is honor people better on their way out that retire or transition. And we just had a phenomenal honoring of a couple that's been around for 40 years. And I just thought this is part of our vision script.
We want to honor people well as they transition
SPEAKER_00
into this next season. That's great. That's very inspiring.
And Dr. Job, we end every episode by asking our guests if there is a quick piece of advice that they could offer that could be implemented by a listener right away. What would that be? If you're the leader of a team,
SPEAKER_01
I would challenge you to clarify, clarify, clarify where you're going and what your mission is. I believe that there's a lot of vague fuzziness, lack of clarity, and it makes teams not function at their best. And so if you're a part of a team where there's lack of clarity, then I would encourage you to set down with whoever's leading the team and maybe give a little nudge and say, you know, I'd like to, I really believe in this place, but I feel like we need to be more clear about who we are, what we're trying to accomplish, and what does it mean to win in
SPEAKER_00
our setting. Wonderful. Well said.
And again, very inspiring. For our listeners that would like to find out more about you or maybe even reach out to connect with you, what would be the best way
SPEAKER_01
for them to do so? Yeah, well, there's a lot of ways of following me if you'd like to. I'll mention a couple of them. I have an Instagram account.
I have, of course, a Facebook account. I'm on LinkedIn. I also do a daily radio program called Bold Steps.
There's a lot of information, messages that you can get there. And they can even go to pastormartjove.com. And I have a website there as well. And all things Moody, by the way, of course, you can just Google Moody Bible Institute.
SPEAKER_00
And there's a lot of stuff that's there. Thank you, Dr. Job. I've sincerely enjoyed our conversation and listening to your leadership advice. Bart, do you have any final thoughts or words that you
SPEAKER_02
would like to share? Yeah, just a couple of things I wanted to kind of pull out of our conversation, just as our final points. Really appreciate what Dr. Job talked about with authentic storytelling.
I think that that's something that, you know, just you might go back and listen a little bit more about that, about especially how if we can be authentic in our storytelling and especially storytelling that is visual and creates emotion, and really allows people to kind of peek into your institution, I think that's going to be so critical and really a nice pragmatic point to take away. And I also really liked a lot of what he talked about with leadership. And again, if you're a president of a college or if you're a leader of a marketing team, I think that clarity of vision and the way he articulated that was so important.
It's what we've heard from so many of our other guests, whether it was Eleanor Bierman from Indiana University, Chief Marketing Officer, who talked about the clarity of vision is what keeps the silos at bay in their institution. We've talked to Ethan Braden a couple of times at Purdue, and he's often talking about the idea that, you know, having that vision, being the drivers of the marketing and the brand on campus, rather than just the driven to make something look prettier by Monday, it all comes back to that clarity of vision, whether you're receiving it, whether you're giving it, I think that the more clear that we can be with each other, the better effective that we're going to be in our jobs. And so really appreciate that and really appreciate the time today.
Thank you, Dr. Job.
SPEAKER_00
That brings us to the end of another episode of the higher ed marketer podcast. Our show is sponsored by Kailer Solutions, an education marketing and branding agency, and by Think Patented, a marketing execution company combining personalization and customization for engagement success. My name is Troy Singer.
On behalf of my cohost, Bart Kailer, thank you for joining us.
SPEAKER_03
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