Is culture really a competitive advantage, or just something you deal with when there's time? After a decade of this work, Jenni's answer is that it's the whole thing — because growth doesn't create your culture problems, it exposes them. In this conversation, Jenni sits down with Mark Batterson, lead visionary of National Community Church in Washington, D.C., New York Times bestselling author, and author of Not My Circus, to talk about what thirty years of building culture on purpose actually looks like.

This episode kicks off 10 Years of 4Sight, a series marking 4Sight's 10th anniversary with the leaders Jenni has been privileged to serve alongside. Mark's team was one of the first to take a chance on her, and they've worked together on strategic planning, multi-site strategy, org design, and team dynamics across nearly the entire history of the company.

Mark's story started small and unglamorous. Coming off a failed church plant, he and a core group of 19 people began meeting in a D.C. public school. Average attendance that first year was 20-25. Monthly giving was around $2,000, and the rent was $1,600. It took five years to grow from 19 to 250. Three decades later, that same church has planted a network of churches, owns a debt-free city block on Capitol Hill, and still runs on a mindset Mark sums up simply: everything is an experiment.

Jenni and Mark dig into the culture barometer he uses to check himself, why values have to be lived creatively instead of codified and hung on a wall, and what it costs to build the kind of team culture that holds under growth. They share candidly about the seasons of leadership that require a leader to change, and why Mark decided to write a book he knew would cost him something.

What You'll Hear

• Why healthy culture turns growth into fuel, and unhealthy culture turns growth into a threat
• The NCC origin story: 19 people, a rented D.C. public school, and a long obedience in the same direction
• Why leading one church for 30 years has meant leading 17 different churches, and how to tell which season you're in
• What changed when Mark traded the title of Lead Pastor for Lead Visionary, and how he decided where his value actually sits now
• Mark's culture barometer: when you walk into the room, does the anxiety level go up or down?
• Leading with non-anxious curiosity, and the difference between a "here I am" leader and a "there you are" leader
• Inside the Play and Pray Retreat, the three-day gathering for staff plus spouses and kids, and why Mark defends the line item
• Why values only stick when you find creative, human ways to live them out
• Giving leadership away, teaching-church thinking, and building a pipeline for the next generation
• Mark's encouragement: reserve the right to get smarter later

Connect with Mark Batterson

• Website: https://www.markbatterson.com/
• Book: Not My Circus — releases October 20, 2026
• Church: https://national.cc/

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Can you be friends with the people you lead? Most HR advice says no. In this conversation, Jenni sits down with Marcylle Combs, entrepreneur, executive mentor, and author of Never Hire Your Friends, to talk about why friendship at work, handled well, can be a leader's greatest asset.

Marcylle has spent more than three decades leading organizations. Her leadership story started with a hard moment. Early in her career as a young home health branch manager, she learned that her entire team had met with the company owner to complain about her. A wise colleague gave her two choices: sit down with every employee, or start firing them. Marcylle chose to listen. That moment turned a reluctant manager into a lifelong student of leadership, with a goal of being both the hardest and the best boss her people would ever have.

Jenni and Marcylle dig into what Marcylle calls "friendship management," the ongoing tension between discipline and grace, and why clear expectations are what make close relationships at work possible. They also talk about what emerging leaders need from those of us who have been leading for decades.

What you'll hear

• Marcylle's leadership wake-up call, and why she chose to listen instead of clean house
• How to hold people to a high standard while making sure they know you care
• Why knowing when to give discipline and when to give grace takes mentoring, not just a policy manual
• Why Never Hire Your Friends really means always hire your friends, and the three pillars behind it: honor, honesty, and humility
• Setting ground rules for friendships at work, from "boss hat vs. friend hat" to what an email, a text, or a phone call signals
• How senior leaders can better understand and mentor a younger generation whose experience is very different from their own
• Marcylle's encouragement: the only person you can change is yourself, so keep learning and keep investing in others

Connect with Marcylle Combs

• Website: https://www.marcyllecombs.com/
• Book: Never Hire Your Friends
• Podcast: 50% with Marcylle Combs
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcylle-combs-65978425

We need your help to get the LeadCulture podcasts in front of more leaders! There are three simple things you can do that truly help us:

1. Review us on Apple podcasts
2. Subscribe - we’re available wherever you listen to podcasts.
3. Share - let your friends know about the podcast by sharing your favorite episode on social media!

Trust is the thing every leader depends on and almost no one builds on purpose. In this conversation, Jenni sits down with Dr. Rob McKenna, founder of WiLD Leaders and author of Whole Leaders, Wild Trust, to talk about why trust is a byproduct of leader development, not a topic you can lecture your way into.

Dr. Rob has spent decades running longitudinal leadership studies, including a six-and-a-half-year study following 120 leaders in aerospace, plus research with several thousand engineers moving into leadership roles and a multi-year study of leaders in large church organizations. What emerged surprised him: as teams did the work of understanding their own competence, motivation, and purpose together, they started trusting each other — without anyone naming trust as the goal.

Jenni and Dr. Rob dig into why trust feels like air (essential, invisible, impossible to grab), what happens when a CEO's read on their culture is rosier than their employees', and the single question a leader can bring to their team on Monday morning that opens the door to real candor.

What you'll hear

• Why leader development and trust building turn out to be the same work
• Whether trust is genuinely harder to build today, and what social media may be doing to our appetite for candor
• The trust quadrant: team trust on one axis, organizational trust on the other — and what it means to be in the "jungle" versus the "stronghold"
• The uncomfortable pattern in the data: leaders of low-trust organizations tend to think things are better than they are, while high-trust CEOs are accurate or under-rate their own culture
• Why the leaders most afraid to measure trust are usually the ones who already know it's low
• Jenni on the delta between how leaders experience culture and how employees do

Connect with Dr. Rob McKenna

• WiLD Leaders: wildleaders.org
• Contact the team — contact@wildleaders.org
• The Leading Under Pressure Inventory and other assessments — wildleaders.org/the-wild-toolkit
• Book: Whole Leaders, Wild Trust

We need your help to get the LeadCulture podcasts in front of more leaders! There are three simple things you can do that truly help us:

1. Review us on Apple podcasts
2. Subscribe - we’re available wherever you listen to podcasts.
3. Share - let your friends know about the podcast by sharing your favorite episode on social media!