Jabin Chavez Leadership Podcast — Episode #061

Title: Creating Systems That Serve The Culture
Date: September 2, 2025
Host: Jabin Chavez

Overview

In this episode, Jabin Chavez explores the critical intersection between organizational culture and systems, emphasizing how robust systems are essential to sustaining and delivering the vibrant culture leaders work so hard to create. Drawing from personal pastoral experience and stories from others, Jabin unpacks practical challenges and solutions around scaling ministry and organizational efforts, ensuring the systems are strategically aligned to support vision, mission, and ongoing growth.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Relationship Between Culture and Systems

• Complementary, Not Competing:
  Jabin stresses that a successful organization must balance both culture and systems. While culture is the “guts” or the emotional and relational environment, systems are the “brains”—the structure and processes that deliver the desired culture.
• Managing the Tension:
  “You can have someone on your team that’s incredible at the culture, but terrible with systems… and vice versa.” (02:05) This tension needs to be acknowledged and managed, not eliminated.

2. Healthy Culture Creates New Problems—That Systems Must Solve

• As organizations grow and their culture attracts more people, new operational challenges arise.
• Proverb Illustration:
  “If there’s not an ox in the stall, it’s going to be clean. But if you put an ox in the stall, it’s going to get dirty.” (04:40) Growth brings mess—systems are needed to manage that.

3. Sincerity vs. Systematic Leadership

• Many leaders and entrepreneurs are sincere and passionate but lack systems to support scale.
• “Most pastors are sincere. But very few are systematic.” (08:10)
• Sincerity alone doesn’t deliver results—systems are needed to funnel vision and culture into organizational health and growth.

4. Practical Example: Service Turnaround & Parking Issues

• Jabin shares a friend’s challenge with 15-minute service turnovers leading to parking gridlock as the culture drew bigger crowds than the system could handle.
• Jabin’s Solution:
  “For us, between our 9 and 11 o’clock service, we have a 45-minute turnaround time… We need it to completely empty the parking lots to get the next ones in. That’s a system.” (12:10)
• Systems need to be adaptive based on crowd patterns and actual needs.

5. Adjusting Systems for Unique Contexts

• Differences in crowd behavior and numbers require context-specific systems, exemplified by Jabin’s adjustment for junior high student flow and repurposing rooms for overflow at peak times.
• “The culture created growth. But without a healthy system, we’re in trouble.” (16:35)

6. Defining Systems

• Jabin’s definition:
  “A system is a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network.” (19:00)
• Systems are comprehensive: parking, room resets, child check-ins, and more—all must be optimized to deliver the culture.

7. Systems Serve Vision

• Guiding Question:
  “Are our systems best serving the vision?” (21:20)
• Leaders should assess every system and pain point—is it cultural, or is it pointing to a missing or broken system?

8. Strategic Experiments: Shifting Team and Men’s Conferences

• Jabin opted to swap an annual serve team conference for multiple “team nights” plus a men’s conference that acts as an on-ramp to men’s small groups.
• This is a strategic systems move—leveraging one event to serve multiple purposes and create deeper engagement.
• “That is not culture. That is systems.” (25:55)

9. Evaluating Operational Systems

• Jabin asks probing, practical questions for leaders:
  • “Does the parking work? Does the entryway work? Does the signage work? Does the kids check-in work? Does the in-between service times work?” (27:50)
• Each is a system that shapes the lived experience of culture.

10. Worship: The System and the Sincerity

• Jabin highlights the necessity of technical systems (like sound engineering) to deliver a worship experience that matches the vision and culture.
• “If you turn the volume down, it’s not being delivered. So we also hire really God-loving, sincere audio engineers to run it the way I like it—which is basically like a concert… I’m not going to run the mix for the five people who complain…” (29:10)
• Again, both sincerity and smart systems are essential.

11. Marrying Thought and Feeling

• Jabin closes by emphasizing that growth and excellence in any organization require the marriage of “strategy and sincerity,” “mind and soul.”
• “When you get strategy and you get sincerity, when you get the mind and the thought and the spirit and the soul, when you get feeling and thinking and you marry those things, it’s over. Your organization… is going to go to a totally different level.” (30:30)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On System & Culture Tension:
  “An awesome organization not only has a healthy culture, but has strategic systems. We need both.” (01:50)

• On System-Generated Problems:
  “A great culture creates big organizational problems, and you’ve got to create some systems.” (04:50)

• On Sincerity vs. Systems:
  “Most pastors are sincere. But very few are systematic.” (08:10)

• On System Definition:
  “A system is a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network.” (19:00)

• On Vision Delivery:
  “Are our systems right now serving the vision? Are our systems best serving the vision?” (21:20)

• On Worship Systems:
  “We have amazing, heartfelt, sincere, God loving worship leaders… But if you turn the volume down, it’s not being delivered… It’s more—it’s just as much strategy as sincerity.” (29:10)

• On the Ultimate Goal:
  “When you get strategy and you get sincerity… when you get feeling and thinking and you marry those things, it’s over.” (30:30)

Important Timestamps

• 00:00–02:00: Introduction & context for systems vs. culture
• 02:00–04:50: Defining the critical tension between culture and systems
• 08:10: Sincerity vs. systematic leadership
• 12:10: Turnaround time—solving growth-pain with systems
• 19:00: Defining “system”
• 21:20: Systems’ role in serving vision
• 25:55: Rethinking annual events for greater strategic impact
• 29:10: Worship delivery: the heart and the system
• 30:30: The importance of blending strategy and sincerity

Summary & Next Steps

Jabin Chavez’s central message: to fully realize your organization’s vision and support a thriving culture, leaders must build and continually refine smart systems that handle the logistical and structural realities of growth. Sincerity, passion, and a strong culture are essential—but without well-designed systems, organizations cannot scale or sustain their impact. Jabin will continue the conversation on systems in the next episode, advancing the practical strategies leaders can use to deliver both heart and health in their organizations.