The final week of Emotionally Healthy Discipleship involves creating a structure of life whereby we can progress to becoming more emotionally healthy. There is a similar need for those interested in creating emotionally healthy organizations. For an organization to embody a healthy culture, it is necessary to develop systems by which that emotional health is created, maintained, and improved.

This week’s blog is based on the following premises:

1. There cannot be emotionally healthy organizations without emotionally healthy leadership.
2. Leaders must first become emotionally healthy before instilling emotional health in their organizations.
3. Healthy leaders can create organizational structures that result in healthy teams and organizational culture.

Consequences of a Lack of Emotionally Healthy Leadership

Anyone with organizational experience has experienced emotionally immature and dysfunctional leadership and cultures. At some point, organizations can be so dysfunctional that their culture is toxic—harmful to everyone involved—leaders, followers, customers, stakeholders—everyone. In recent years, I have had the opportunity to study dysfunctional and toxic organizations. They have one common characteristic: emotionally unhealthy leadership.

It might be helpful for me to give some examples based on my experience as a lawyer and pastor over the years.

• Company X recently declared bankruptcy due to massive financial fraud. The court-appointed trustee announced that they had discovered considerable financial fraud involving many senior management members, much of which was ordered by the company’s president.
• Company Y just made a massive restatement of its financial results. It turns out that senior management instituted a bonus system that incentivized risk-taking among sales and trading personnel. Since bonuses were paid on current-year transactions, most of which would take years to pay out for the company, employees booked many unwise transactions. Senior management was also paid bonuses on the anticipated profits of current-year transactions. In fact, they designed the system.
• Company Z was just hit with a massive lawsuit alleging various forms of sexual harassment of female employees. As one magazine put it, the company has been famous for years for a kind of “fraternity boy” atmosphere. The Chairman and President were personally named in the litigation.
• Church A has just experienced a massive split and laid off many staff members. The Senior Pastor has become the subject of a sexual misconduct scandal. For years, the Board of Elders knew the pastor was ignoring his family, traveling with female employees, and working 70 or more hours weekly.
• Church B just lost an extremely effective discipleship pastor. His wife and family had been complaining about his schedule and many late-night meetings for some time. Finally, one of the children developed a serious addiction and rebellion. The pastor resigned to spend more time with his family.
• Non-Profit C has recently paid huge settlements due to misconduct charges against many volunteers. Some years ago, the non-profit changed its qualifications for adult leaders and its way of training them, lowering its standards under pressure from governments and special interest groups.

In these imaginary cases, and in many cases I have studied over the years, the fundamental failure was poor leadership, sometimes motivated by greed, lust, or desire for power and status. In other words, the problem was fundamentally a spiritual and moral problem created by spiritually and morally unhealthy leadership. In many cases, that leadership was never held accountable for what they did. In other cases, the accountability was insignificant compared to the social and monetary damage done by the leadership.

Healthy Organizations begin with Healthy Leaders.

Of course, emotionally unhealthy leaders are emotionally unhealthy people, which is why the past few weeks have focused on attaining and maintaining personal emotional health. Because none of us is completely emotionally healthy all the time and in every situation, emotionally healthy leaders embrace systems of self-care—regular habits of rest, recreation, retreat, self-examination, and other disciplines designed to maintain emotional health.

The concept of a “rule of life” or what might be called “a healthy structure for daily living” is simply a tool to enable people, and especially leaders, to attain and maintain emotional and spiritual health. For most people, including most Christians, our “rule of life” is not in writing. For example, it is nowhere written down that I will walk at least 8,000 steps a day and stretch three times a week, but I religiously do so. Before I knew anything about a rule of life, I did not usually work on Sundays, attended worship regularly, exercised, followed a healthy diet, avoided unhealthy behaviors, and many other elements of a wholesome lifestyle.

Nevertheless, there are real advantages to putting a rule or order for life in writing. For many years, I kept a long “to-do list.” Interestingly, most of the time, all the items on that list were accomplished. There is something about putting things in writing that encourages one to achieve them. Putting 72,000 sensible words on paper initially seems impossible when writing a book. In my list of things to do, I have a 1000-word-a-day target. Guess what?  If I write 1000 words daily, I will write a book draft in seventy-two days. When I fall behind, I do catch up. Having a rule or order of life has the same function: It reminds us what we intend to do and gives us a practical way of achieving our goal.

Good leaders have goals for their lives. Some things need to be done, and priorities that must be maintained. Peter Scazzero suggests the following priorities for Christians and their leaders:

• Relationship with God
• Relationship with Others (including family)
• Relationship with Self
• Relationship with Work [1]

A good order for life assures us that we are taking care of our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual lives by attending to each area systematically and often daily. For example, if I spend at least 30 minutes a day in prayer and Bible study daily, and pray on at least two other occasions during the day, I will go a long way towards keeping my relationship with God in good order. If I set aside time daily for my spouse and children and prioritize that time, I will go a long way towards maintaining my family’s health. If I walk at least 6,000 steps a day and work out three times a week, I will go a long way towards maintaining my physical health.

Taking Emotional Health to the Workplace

Very few people work entirely alone. Most of us work in an organization where various groups join to reach a common goal. Within large and small organizations, there must be leaders who see that the work gets done and organizational goals are accomplished. One of the leader’s primary responsibilities is maintaining the workplace’s health to accomplish organizational goals.

In The Emotionally Healthy Leader, Pete Scazzero sets out some indications that an organization needs a more emotionally healthy approach to leadership:

• The organization and its leadership define success too narrowly (for example, profits only or membership numbers only).
• Plans are instituted without sufficient time, attention, energy, mediation, and prayer to determine their impact on stakeholders, i.e., management, employees, shareholders, contributors, customers, and others.
• The organization emphasizes performance standards that exceed human limits, so employees are constantly challenged to work longer, harder, and more intensively beyond their limits. The organization does not accurately understand its financial, personnel, and other limits. [2]

Conversely, an emotionally healthy organization has specific characteristics:

• Success is defined holistically with due consideration of the needs of all stakeholders.
• Planning is done with a clear understanding of its impact on all stakeholders.
• Planning is done in a way that is prudent and loving towards all stakeholders.
• The organization and its employees are encouraged to find ways to succeed within natural and other limits.
• The leadership and staff have clear, written covenants that define acceptable behavior and commitment to healthy goals and outcomes. [3]

Good Leaders build Healthy Teams.

Many books have been written about the impact of a healthy corporate culture on business and organizational performance. Few aspects of an organization influence its success more significantly over time than its culture. Consequently, wise leaders invest considerable time cultivating the best possible culture within their organization. This requires a slow process of working with people to see that they are transformed as they impact the organization’s culture. Here are some basic principles that can help in achieving that goal:

• Our primary goal is to impact human flourishing among our leadership, employees, clients, members, shareholders, partners, customers, etc.
• Success includes building teams of people with various backgrounds and abilities who can work together without fear, prejudice, or anxiety.
• Success includes caring about the emotional, moral, and physical health inside and outside the organization. [4]

Developing a Meditative Leadership and Organizational Culture

In another context, I have written about meditative leadership styles and cultures within organizations. [5] In our society, most corporations, especially large and successful for-profit companies, employ a “scientific, results-driven, measure-intensive style of leadership and corporate decision-making.” There is nothing wrong with any of this. In the churches I served, we had annual budgets and multi-year forecasts. But they resulted from deeper planning centered on the question, “What would God have us do next?”

In making decisions, we spent much time in prayer, meditation, and conversation trying to discern the ultimate impact of any decision on not just the group as a whole but as many individuals as possible within the whole. I have spent days in my office praying and listening to people as they described their hopes or fears related to decisions of importance. I believe that those days were important.

Using Scazzero’s work, a meditative style of leadership looks something like this:

• Leaders and team members define success as broadly as possible in planning and making decisions for Christians in the context of God’s will.
• Leaders and team members prepare their hearts for sound decision-making by taking time for prayer, meditation, and other spiritual preparation.
• Leaders and team members seek the most prudent and caring option in devising plans.
• Leaders and team members live within their limits, seek solutions to problems, and develop plans that allow everyone to succeed within limits.

Conclusion

This blog concludes this series related to Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and The Emotionally Healthy Leader. I have reviewed these books on more than one occasion and suggest reading and working through them for all Christian leaders. I also suggest congregations and intermediate church administrative bodies use this material with all pastors and church leaders. There is more to know about leadership than can be contained in any book or program, and Scazzero’s work only scratches the surface of servant leadership and meditative leadership. But his works are, in my view, must-reads.

Copyright 2025, G. Christopher Scruggs, All Rights Reserved

[1] As mentioned previously, these blogs are based on Peter Scazzero, The Emotionally Healthy Leader: How Transforming Your Inner Life Will Deeply Transform Your Church, Team, and World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017), hereinafter EHL. See also Emotionally Healthy Discipleship: Moving from Shallow Christianity to Deep Transformation (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2021). Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Updated Ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017). The Emotionally Healthy website is https://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/. The materials needed to guide individuals through emotionally healthy discipleship training are available on the website and most Christian and secular online book retailers. The Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and Relationship Courses are offered as the “Emotionally Healthy Disciples Course,” which includes books, study guides, teaching videos, devotional guides, and teaching aids. This list is slightly different from Scazzero’s, which I have simplified and secularized for this blog.

[2] EHL, 180-185.

[3] Id, 187-197. I have slightly changed Scazzero’s listing, which is centered on churches and non-profit ministries.

[4] Again, I have slightly changed Scazzero’s listing to apply his ideas more broadly.

[5] G. Christopher Scruggs, Letters to Leaders (Bay Village, OH: Bay Presbyterian Church, 2019).