024 Treating Complaints as Gifts | World Renew Executive Director Carol Bremer-Bennett

Carol Bremer-Bennett sensed there were meetings before the meeting and meetings after the meeting. The initiatives she was pushing kept stalling, and she couldn't get people to say what they really thought. So about halfway through her tenure, she brought in a culture coach and ran the Lencioni five dysfunctions assessment. Trust came back yellow. Every other layer of the pyramid came back red. Not one green. (That's bad.) It took her breath away. But Carol decided to be thankful for it. This conversation covers her decision to build a culture of psychological safety from the top down, starting with herself, and why treating complaints, concerns, and hard feedback as gifts instead of threats became the most consequential choice she made as a leader. It's also about what the roughly year-long delay cost her before she found the courage to act. Carol also talks about the structural change the culture work required, how a flat organization once left her supervising as many as 18 people directly (that's also bad), and why she told staff to not be loyal to her. Carol Bremer-Bennett is U.S. Executive Director of World Renew, a Christian relief and development organization working in more than 20 countries, with $18.3 million in U.S. revenue in fiscal year 2025.