Too Big to Run on Relationships: Getting Your Structure Right as a Large Church (Part 3)
You’ve got a structure on paper. You have clean reporting lanes, ownership and a healthy span of care.
But the boxes that make up each role are still empty.
How do you determine who goes in which seat? How do you know if someone has the leadership capacity a role requires? What happens when a role grows past the person in it?
What do you do when the honest answer is that someone isn’t in the right seat anymore?
In this episode, the conversation shifts from charts to people, as Jonathan and I talk about getting the right people in the right seats.
- 10 years of The Unstuck Church Podcast!
- Evaluating character, chemistry & competency
- Clear is kind
If you never set the target for your staff members, you don’t get to be frustrated that they missed the target. [episode 466] #unstuckchurch Share on X Everyone wants to know whether they’re winning at work—and the mystery is more anxiety-producing than being told they’re losing. [episode 466] #unstuckchurch Share on X Proximity to platform distorts everything. We overvalue what we can see on Sunday and undervalue what people are silently carrying. [episode 466] #unstuckchurch Share on X
This Episode Is Brought to You By Tyndale House.
If Jesus walked into your church right now, would people recognize him? We’ve created a personalized Savior who exists primarily to meet our needs, bless our lives, and guarantee our spots in heaven.
But here’s the problem. That Jesus would be unrecognizable.
In the book The Missing Messiah, bestselling authors Kyle Idleman and Mark More will help your church rediscover the Jesus based on Scripture, not on culture. Plus, check out the six-session companion study guide with free access to streaming videos.
Learn more at missingmessiah.com.
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Transcript
Sean:
Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean, managing director here at the Unstuck Group, and I’m here again with Jonathan Smith, one of our Unstuck consultants and the lead pastor at OneChurch.to in Toronto. Before we get into today’s conversation, Jonathan, I have to mention, it’s a big milestone for us today. This month, the podcast is actually turning 10 years old.
Jonathan:
Wow.
Sean:
The first episode, very first episode was released way back on September 12th, 2016. And back then, it wasn’t even called the Unstuck Church Podcast. It was actually called Leadership Unstuck with Tony Morgan. And we only released an episode once a month at that time. So fast-forward 10 years, a lot has changed. Of course, the name has changed. The format that we do the podcast in has changed a few times. The frequency that we do it obviously has changed. The number of churches that we’ve served has grown by several hundred over the last 10 years. But the goal of this podcast really has never changed. We’re here to give leaders practical ideas and tools that they can actually implement at their church. This isn’t a podcast where we spend a lot of time on theory or philosophy. We try to bring something every week that you can use.
So if you’ve been listening and tuning in since 2016, thank you. If you found us in the past month, welcome. And if you’re the type of leader who listens and then shares episodes with your team, you are the reason that we do this. Jonathan, I believe you were an Unstuck podcast listener way back before you were a cohost or even a consultant. Do you remember back when you first started listening to the podcast?
Jonathan:
Yeah, vividly. I first stumbled on the book that Tony Morgan had written in 2013. It was called Stuck in a Funk. I don’t know if you remember that brown cover of that book.
Sean:
I do.
Jonathan:
And he painted a picture of change for the church. I bought copies for my entire leadership team, and you already know Tony’s voice. It’s in this podcast. Heavy on mission, but incredibly practical and clear. It was so helpful to us. And when the podcast launched, I just automatically became a regular listener. And so I’ve been around through the Tony Morgan years, Amy Anderson and Sean Bublitz. And so congratulations first to The Unstuck Group. 10 years is a big accomplishment. Excited to see this continue to grow.
Sean:
Well, we’re thrilled that you’re a part of it now too, Jonathan. So thanks a lot for doing this. We actually, through our emails and social media, we actually asked our listeners what their experience has been over the last 10 years with the Unstuck Church podcast. And just for a little feedback, and we offered as part of this, a Starbucks gift card to a winning response. And our winning response actually comes from Michael Smith. Michael sent us a note and said, “Congratulations on the 10-year anniversary of your podcast. I was first introduced to the Unstuck Group in the podcast while working for Converge in 2018. The podcast has been an outstanding resource for me since I became a church communications director in 2021. Thanks for how your team serves the church and its leaders.” Thank you for that, Michael. It’s really encouraging to hear. And hopefully you’re encouraged by some extra coffee because we’re sending a Starbucks gift card your way.
Well, let’s dive into the third week of our series because this is actually why people tune into this. We’re in this series called Too Big to Run on Relationships, about getting your structure right as a large church. So let me rewind just a little bit. Week one, we asked whether you’re overstaffed or understaffed and landed on the answer that for a lot of churches it’s usually both, that we have too many people, not enough leaders. In week two, we talked about structure and shared that in our experience, structure needs to follow strategy. Before you start charting your organizational structure, you have to know where the church is going and what your core ministry lanes are. So today we get to the place where hypothetically, let’s say you’ve got your structure on paper, you have clean reporting lines, there’s clear ownership, you’ve done that work for a healthy span of care, but the boxes that make up each role are still empty.
And today we’ll work on determining who goes in which seat. How do you know if someone has the leadership capacity a role requires? What happens when a role grows past the person that’s in it today? And then the most difficult conversation of all, what do you do when the honest answer is that someone isn’t in the right seat anymore? Jonathan, this is really the week the conversation stops being about the charts that we’ve been talking about and it shifts into being more about the people.
Jonathan:
Sean, this is the part of the conversation where the ball can easily be dropped. When a leader starts a conversation about seats, we just need to realize everybody in the room thinks one thing. What does this mean for me?
Sean:
Right. Yeah.
Jonathan:
Should I be worried? Is my job on the line? And it doesn’t matter what you actually say, that’s the fear in the room. And if you don’t address it directly, the anxiety begins to run the process of talking about structures and seats for you. So I’ve found it’s best just to say it out loud. In a healthy realignment, some people get promoted because they’ve outgrown their current role. Some move sideways into a seat that actually fits the way they’re wired and that’s a win-win. And some stay exactly where they are because they’re thriving there. And of course, in some cases, it becomes obvious to all sides that where the church is headed, perhaps that person isn’t the right fit. So four possible outcomes, name all four at the start and you’ll take the rumor mill out of the process.
This is where Brené Brown has been so helpful to me and I’m sure to many leaders listening in her book, Dare to Lead. She says clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. And she gets specific about what unclear actually looks like. And it’s not cruelty; it’s vagueness. And I think because I feel very awkward in certain conversations, I can be very vague. Most pastors think they’re being kind by keeping realignment quiet until it’s finalized. That’s my temptation. Maybe it’s theirs. Maybe it’s yours listening because I’m wired to lift weights off people. I don’t wanna add weights to them. But as it turns out, that’s not pastoral care. That’s me managing my own discomfort. So the discomfort in this conversation, it’s not a problem to solve in a conversation like this. The discomfort is the price of doing this well. What I’ve learned the hard way is the kindest version of me is not the most comfortable version of me.
Sean:
Well, today’s conversation may not be comfortable for everyone, but I do think it’s gonna be really helpful. So before we go there though, I wanna stop and say thanks to our podcast sponsor, Tyndale House. You know, for a lot of churches, if Jesus walked into their church this weekend, I’m not sure they would know that people would fully recognize that Jesus. And Tyndale House has announced the brand-new book called The Missing Messiah by bestselling authors Kyle Idleman and Mark Moore. And this book helps churches really rediscover Jesus based on Scripture specifically, not the Jesus based on culture. There’s a six-session companion study guide that goes with it and free access to a lot of streaming videos to support the book. So if you’re interested in that, you can learn more at the website missingmessiah.com.
All right, Jonathan, let me start out just by kind of calling out the tension. And you’ve really set this up well because I don’t think it’s always what people assume. The assumption is that pastors avoid hard people decisions because they don’t like conflict. And there might be some truth in there, but that’s not what I hear when I talk to pastors. What I hear instead seems maybe even more relatable than that. It’s something that goes like, I’m not going to change somebody’s job, impact their family, maybe even impact their sense of calling based on just a gut feeling that I have. And you know what? I think that’s a really good instinct. These aren’t just employees in a company. These are people that you worship with, people whose kids are in your kids’ ministry. Some of them were probably there when the church was 200 people, and nobody was even sure, is this thing gonna work for us? So the tension isn’t that pastors won’t act; it’s that they won’t act on just a gut feeling. And a gut feeling is usually all they have to go on.
Jonathan, I know for you, you’ve made these calls at one church and you help other churches now through our work make them. What makes people decisions in a church feel different than they would anywhere else?
Jonathan:
Well, I think Sean, first, let’s start by saying it should be hard. If a people decision in a church were easy, that would tell you something about what’s actually driving us, and it wouldn’t be good. I had a guy on my directional leadership team, and Sean, I think you’ve even met him before, who came from the corporate world. He’d done this many times, restructure, role changes, walking people towards the door, and he ended up in a seat here where he had to do it again. And I watched the weight just land different on him. He said to me, “I’ve done this so often, but this is different. I know their family. I worship with these people. He’s a good guy. He’s just not a fit.” That was a hard season for him, and it should be. It should be a little weighty.
Here’s what I think is actually going on underneath. There are two ditches. On one side, we tell ourselves that if we were truly a spiritual organization, we’d never give up on people. There’s something so right about that. And I don’t wanna lose that in the conversation of people in the church. But when you hire someone onto a staff team, something shifts, something changes. They move from being a part of the church family into an accountable system. And that doesn’t lower their standing. It adds something, though, to it. They’re still part of the family. They’re now though in an accountable system. And so am I. That’s why our language matters more than we think. You’re on a staff team that serves a church family.
The other ditch is treating staff as a corporate entity. It’s a job. You’re not delivering, you’re no longer a fit, we’re done. That one ignores the fact that every staff member is connected to people, families, small groups, volunteers, friendships. You don’t move one person in a church, you’re actually moving a web. So whether it’s a promotion, a move sideways, a step back or an exit, kindness has to be the fuel and lens. And I wanna be careful with that word because kindness is not the same as niceness.
Sean:
Right.
Jonathan:
Niceness is about me. It’s what makes me comfortable. Kindness is what I owe them. Now, to your point about gut, because I think you really named the real problem, the stakes are too high for a gut call. And I think that’s where I’ve left with feeling the shadow of, did I make the right call? That’s exactly where structure and strategy conversations of our previous two podcasts, and even what we’ll be talking about today is so important in pastoral work.
Clear expectations, clear scorecards, clear reporting lanes, not because we’re turning the church into a corporation, but because that’s what gives us something other than our gut when what’s at stake is somebody’s family.
Sean:
And here’s what I’ve seen typically happen when a leader has the conviction to act, but there’s no really objective basis to act on. It’s usually one of two things. Either you make the call on instinct and then you spend an anxious period of time, that could be a long period of time, really second-guessing whether you were right or not. Or what’s far more common is you just wait. You wait for a more sense of clarity. You wait for the situation sometimes to resolve itself, or you try to wait until after things slow down. And the thing about waiting though, is the decision usually gets made for you. And it gets made when somebody leaves the team on their own terms, usually upset. And sometimes after that, they’re gonna tell a few people why they left. Or it gets made when your best people start leaving because they’ve been watching under performance go unaddressed and then they’ve drawn a conclusion about what this church actually tolerates.
The second one there, with your best people leaving, I think is the one that actually hurts the most because what’s true is your high performers are always the ones with the most options. I’d also like to say that this one’s maybe even more of a gut check. A lot of what looks like underperformance problems is actually a clarity problem. You’ve touched on clarity already, Jonathan. Before you assess anybody, you have to ask an honest question about yourself. Have we ever told this person what winning looks like in their role? Not just shared a job description; I mean specific, defined outcomes that they know they’re accountable for. Because if we have never set the target for them, we don’t get to be frustrated that they missed the target. And in my experience, there’s a percentage of people we’re frustrated with who just have never been told in plain language, “This is what success looks like in the seat that you’re in.”
Jonathan:
Yeah. Again, back to Brené Brown, you know, clear is kind, unclear is unkind. And I’d say there are two reasons ministry leaders aren’t always clear. The first one you named. We’re uncomfortable sometimes with being clear. The second one’s a little harder to admit. Sometimes we’re not clear with them because we’re not clear with ourselves. We haven’t nailed down the strategy yet. We haven’t defined the win, so we’ve got nothing specific to hand to anyone. We’re just frustrated that things aren’t working the way it should be, so they don’t have a target. We never set one for them.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe. Everyone wants to know whether they’re winning at work and the mystery is more anxiety-producing than being told they’re losing. People can do something with bad news. They can do nothing with fog. So the fix isn’t a harder conversation later. It’s better communication hygiene now. Defined outcomes, regular check-ins, feedback in real time. People should know where they stand as they go, not discover at their yearly review. If you’ll have those clarifying conversations as you go, it’ll save you and spare you from a hard conversation once a year or at the end of something.
Sean:
Yes.
Jonathan:
I recently sat with one of our new team leads who had given some feedback. I was so proud of her. I was so proud because she didn’t go at this person in the moment, because there’s heightened emotions, there’s other people around. She waited to a regular scheduled check-in that was coming that week. And when you have a regular check-in, you have a place where it’s natural to bring things up. We always say in our staff team, walk towards the mess. Don’t ignore. We don’t want to ignore things. We have to deal with things, and we automatically create regular check-ins to make sure that we deal with things.
And if a pastor’s listening right now and you realize that they’ve never actually told someone what winning looks like, don’t try and go back and do some history evaluation as to whether they’re winning in the past. Just have a reset moment. Sit down and say, “Here’s the role. Here’s the role you own. Here’s what success looks like, and we’re gonna start measuring it today.” Give them a clear runway, a fair start there. And you can’t hold someone accountable to a standard you never gave or a standard that’s ambiguous. Maybe I feel like sometimes I’ve said things, but I can be so ambiguous at times that it can be foggy. So it needs to be very clear.
Sean:
Yeah. And I wanna say this too in defense of pastors like you, Jonathan, who sit in that lead seat. The other thing that I hear from them a lot of times is that they feel like nobody ever trained them for this. There’s no course on assessing your team and how to tell the difference between somebody who needs coaching and somebody who needs a different role. Now there are hundreds of books on hiring. There are almost none on evaluating people that you already have on your team and then ending things well when they need to end. So pastors end up doing what any of us, I think, would do without training or tools. They just end up going with their gut or they wait, like we talked about. But the rest of this episode, we’re gonna talk about another option to throw in there.
So Jonathan, let’s talk about what church leaders can actually do to get the right people in the right roles. And the solution for us is an objective assessment of your team. And I use objective intentionally here because I think that word really summarizes what we’re trying to do. The definition of objective is a fact-based view that is free from personal bias. That’s what we need because we all have a bias, right? Sometimes we’re biased because of our history with someone. Sometimes we have a bias because we know what their family is going through personally right now. Sometimes in the church, Jonathan, we’re biased because some of our staff are actually family members.
So we’ve developed tools for our team here to help pastors and leaders really get an objective view on their staff. And I’ll be honest, part of the reason these tools work is because someone else leads the conversation for you. So here’s a quick overview of the process. The framework we use looks at three things: character, chemistry, and competency. And the reason it works is that it separates things we normally collapse kind of together. Most of the time when a leader says something’s off with this person, they can’t name which of those three things it is. And then naming it really changes everything about what you do next. So let me kind of take the first one and then Jonathan, I want you to take the other two because you’re doing this type of work with churches.
Character is who you are when nobody’s looking. High character looks like honesty, humility, teachability. They own their part instead of kind of explaining things away. They point to other people’s contributions and what other people are doing to help with ministry. They handle conflict directly rather than kind of around corners. And they’re like that consistently. You never have to wonder whether they’re telling you the truth or whether they’re acting in the team’s best interest. When character is low, you often see pride. You see defensiveness. You experience broken promises or commitments. There’s a sense of passive aggression. Those people with low character aren’t open to feedback, and there’s often a reason that you hear from them that it was somebody else’s fault. And I think this is the hardest thing of the three that I listed to change. Someone can appear to change their character pretty quickly, but real change only shows up over longer periods of time. And you can’t get inside somebody’s heart. You can only watch the fruit that comes out of it. So that’s character. Jonathan, can you explain chemistry and competency for us?
Jonathan:
I think too, just one of the tests for character is the old saying, you don’t know what’s in someone until they get bumped. And so someone could demonstrate change in a moment when it comes to character, but you really only get to measure it when they’ve been bumped, bumped by a moment, bumped by feedback, whatever it is. That reveals a lot.
But let me take chemistry first. I’ll start with the simplest test I know. It’s when there’s a knock at your door. And a member of your team shows up, what’s your gut reaction in that first half second? Are you glad it’s them, or you’re like, “Ugh.” That reaction tells you more than most evaluations will. ‘Cause chemistry, it’s intangible ability to fit within an existing team. People with high chemistry bring energy into the room. They bring energy into conversations. They’ve got high emotional quotient. They have real influence with their peers, even with their supervisors and with the people they report to. They read group dynamics well. They understand the impact, and this is really big. They understand the impact of their words and their actions. They’re not opening a grenade, throwing it in a room, walking away and asking, “What did I do?” And you’ll know you’ve got one of them because they bring energy. They ask good questions. They’re always, even in the middle of conflict, they’re looking for a win-win instead of the win.
The flip side is harder to name, but you feel it immediately. People who need to grow drain the room. They tell more than they ask. They lean on their position for influence instead of earning it. That’s the tell. When someone knocks on the door, you feel the urge to look busy, you pick up the phone, I act like I’m busy, whatever it is, you stare at the screen. Anything to keep the interaction short. If you’re doing that, that’s data. And Sean, one caution here, because chemistry is the easiest of the three to maybe abuse or misuse. Chemistry’s not necessarily an extrovert, someone that brings the fun all the time, and it’s not someone that looks and feels like the rest of our team. The person who challenges you well or processes quietly or brings a completely different wiring to the table might have outstanding chemistry. Low chemistry is when the team is worse off having you in the room. That’s a tough one.
Sean:
Yes.
Jonathan:
Competency is the ability to get things done, and this might be the easiest to see, but I think you need to really delineate. We’re not talking about potential. Sometimes I’ve believed in someone’s potential so much and ignored their competency in getting things done. It’s not potential; it’s not intention. It’s the demonstrated ability and skill to consistently deliver results. I mean, these people are self-motivated. They’re diligent. They prioritize well. They’re already thinking about the next step. I’ve never worked with someone with high competency that didn’t have a strong work ethic, hungry for more. Sometimes they’re pushing because they’re curious, they’re innovative. They’re great problem solvers. And again, as we mentioned with character and chemistry and competency, this one is probably the easiest one to spot. Or rather maybe the lack of competency is usually the easiest of the three to spot.
Sean:
Right.
Jonathan:
Yeah. Goals get missed. You find yourself checking up on them. Sometimes I find myself keeping a to-do list for somebody else’s to-do list. Checking in on them. Well, there’s a problem there. You manage so closely because things don’t usually happen if you don’t. What I usually find over time, you start to feel exhausted. You’ll also see resistance to change in people with low competency. And this doesn’t mean they don’t have competencies, but in this role, staying with how it’s always been done, coming in unprepared, being more focused on the problem than the solution, these are all tells. And here’s why naming that one matters so much. Competency is the most coachable of the three, if you can name it and identify it.
Sean:
Yep.
Jonathan:
Chemistry can grow with real feedback, self-awareness. Character, as you pointed out, is the slowest and honestly the least likely to change. It’s been the hardest one I’ve had to address. So a new seat can solve a competency problem, sometimes even a chemistry problem, but a new seat never once solved the character problem for me. All I did was move the problem to somebody else’s team.
Sean:
That’s so true. I wanna share a story that comes to mind just to illustrate this. We worked with a church where one of the team members at the church actually showed up to our staffing and structure review about 15 minutes late. And noticed that when they came into the room, they didn’t greet anyone; they didn’t make eye contact with anybody. And you could kind of, like you were describing before, Jonathan, just feel the energy drain out of the room. And the lead pastor had kinda told us beforehand that this was a challenging team member. There had been some private information passed to a lay leader that showed kind of a lack of character.
But the pastor kept coming back to the same rationale. This person gets things done; when deadlines were tight and when the excellence really mattered, this person was who everybody turned to. And what the pastor realized through the process is that he had been evaluating one third of this staff member’s performance. He was so anchored on competency that he’d never considered character and chemistry as part of that role. And I don’t think that’s unusual.
Now, character, chemistry and competency, I think those tell you whether somebody should be on the team. I think it’s the leadership capacity that tells you which seat should they be in. And those are two very different questions that church leaders often answer a lot of times if they were the same thing. The way we talk about leadership capacity is in three levels. We think of doers, leaders of people, and leaders of leaders, or just to kind of make it more practical, doers do, leaders of people direct, leaders of leaders develop.
A doer is somebody who produces through their own effort. You know, they’re kind of busy accomplishing tasks and their output is what they get done on their own. And let me be clear about this. We need doers. I think there’s been a misconception of that in the church, that we’re overemphasizing leaders. Most volunteer roles in your church are doer roles, and there’s nothing lesser about being a doer.
Then a leader of people, they are somebody who’s productive through a team. They can recruit people and build a team. They delegate well. They can set expectations and then sometimes even kind of manage conflict within that team. The measure for them isn’t what they are getting done personally, it’s actually what their team gets done as a whole.
And then the last is a leader of leaders. This is somebody who’s developing other leaders. They’re typically kind of stewarding a budget, they’re stewarding time, and they’re stewarding people. And the measurement for them is actually results and outcomes. These people tend to be good at addressing underperformance when they need to. They’re often thinking about what’s next, what’s coming in the future. And the gap in most churches is there at that third level, the leaders of leaders. There just aren’t enough of them.
But I wanna share, as I’m talking through this, even a caution on measuring this. Capacity is about behavior, not about a team headcount. It’s possible to have someone on your team with 60 people on their volunteer list, but they behave like they’re a leader of just a few people. Everything has to go through them, and nothing multiplies. So I’d encourage leaders, watch for evidence of leadership, not just for a long list of volunteer names.
And one other thing important to add to this, Jonathan, is that roles change over time and the person in the seat doesn’t automatically change with it. And this might be the most misunderstood dynamic on a growing church staff. You may have hired someone eight years ago to lead a ministry with 10 volunteers at the time, and they were excellent at it. But today, that ministry is 100 volunteers and a couple of staff underneath them. And that’s not the same job. It’s a totally different job. It just might still have the same title. So when that person struggles, everybody’s instinct, including, I think, theirs, is to see it as a failure. It isn’t. That role just outgrew the seat or the person that’s in that. So every leader has a lid, you can develop it, you can raise it, you can get better at things, but there’s a level at which each of us tops out. And that’s true of your team, but it’s also true of you and it’s true of me.
And the kind thing, like you’ve talked about before, is not to pretend that that’s not real. The kind thing really is to identify it early enough that that person can do something with the information.
Jonathan:
Yeah. Sean, before pastors even run with this idea of a lid, which I like because I do believe it, I wanna just add a qualifier. A lid is almost never absolute. I mean, it’s a lid in, as you mentioned, in this role at this size or at this speed or in this chapter, it’s become a lid. The person who is topped out on your team might flourish somewhere else and probably will. And that isn’t a consolation prize I’m talking about. That’s just true. So say lid, but don’t infer that this is somehow a ceiling on their potential.
I like where Henry Cloud, and I think every leader should read this book, Necessary Endings, what an excellent book. He’s shaped how I really think about this. His picture is of a gardener with a rose bush. If you’ve read the book, you know what I’m saying. And he says that there are three kinds of branches you prune in a rose bush. There’s the dead ones; those ones are obvious. The sick ones, that aren’t going to get well. They’re just not gonna recover. And then there’s a third kind, and this one’s the hardest. Sometimes you have to prune healthy and good branches because not every branch can produce. And he’s just being honest that the third cut is the one nobody makes because there’s nothing wrong with it. I mean, it’s a good person. It’s just not bearing fruit.
That’s exactly what you’re describing here. When a role grows the person in it, we’re usually not looking at a bad staff member. We’re looking at a good one sitting in a seat that needs something different, needs great. And good is precisely what makes it so hard to act. Nobody has done anything wrong, so we wait. I’m that guy. I wanna wait it out. Cloud has a question that I’ve asked myself more than once. What reason do I have to believe that tomorrow will be any different? What new information, what new skill’s gonna come along that somehow is gonna reframe and change what I’ve already seen that maybe this seat, this role has moved and scaled past this individual’s abilities? We can be passive and call it faith if we’re not careful. And that one can sting in church world.
He also draws a line that I use constantly, and I’ve used this many times, especially in conflict, but especially as I’m trying to coach. The wise person: you give them feedback and you will see they’re wise because they make adjustments. The foolish person in Proverbs gets feedback, but it doesn’t land. They defend, they explain, they don’t adjust their behavior. Instead, it’s, you’re having the same conversation over and over. And the only way in Scripture that the fool, and I’m not calling anyone a fool here, I’m just saying foolish behavior only changes with some sort of consequences.
Most pastors I know had the same conversation with the person eight, nine times and were hoping that somehow the 10th time is gonna be the breakthrough. But here’s the pastoral piece. When a role has outgrown someone, we own our part. Say it out loud to them even. “This role changed underneath you, and I either didn’t tell you it was changing or I didn’t see how it was changing, but this is where we are.” And that sentence takes the shame off the table. It’s usually the one way the person can actually hear the rest of the conversation. Hey, just the rules of engagement have changed. The world has changed. Our church has changed and here we are.
I had one of these conversations a few years ago, a good guy in a role that was beyond him. And I tried having direct conversations, but he kept confusing learning. And this is, I’ll never forget this, and I’ve seen this repeated sometimes in ministry environments, because I’d never worked with someone who had read more about leadership, read more about management and ministry. And so he kept confusing all of his learning. He was just gonna read more books with execution. And I found myself just loathing our one-on-ones because they were painful. And I started to feel the weight. I was picking up all the balls he was dropping, and I was having to deal with the fallout of unwise decisions. At some point, I had to own it. He was suffering. I was suffering. The church was suffering. We had that departure conversation that turned out to be a healthy one. He’s gone on to do great things, I think in seats that are better suited to him. And I was able to find someone for that seat that has just caused the church to scale. So pruning is not an easy conversation, but I think wishful thinking is not your strategy.
Sean:
Totally agree. All right. So let’s get to what can pastors actually do with this. And if you’re a leader that’s listening and you know that you need this type of objective evaluation, here are a few things that I’d recommend just kind of get you started. First, and I’ve said this every week so far, get your senior leadership team in a room. And I’ve got three specific questions for this conversation. First, have we been clear with our team about expected outcomes? Does every person on staff know what success looks like in their role this year? Not mostly, not kind of, but really specifically.
The second question, have we done an objective assessment or are we operating on gut right now? I want you to really be honest about that answer. And then third, what metrics do we currently use to evaluate performance? And if the answer is we don’t really have any, I think that’s okay. Like you’ve just started now to map out what your next steps need to be. I would say if you can only work on one thing, I’d suggest focusing on the first question, question number one, because if you can’t produce a written agreed upon definition of the win for each role, you’re not ready to evaluate anyone against it.
The second thing I would do is do an assessment and do it as a senior leadership team. Don’t do this on your own. This should be the senior pastor and other executive leaders going person by person, working through character, chemistry, competency for each one. Start with the clear definitions so you’re not five people using the same word five different ways. I know that sounds basic, but it makes the rest of the exercise work. Jonathan and I have given you some definitions of that already.
And to be honest, I’ll tell you, the natural drift in a church setting is to rate everyone high because when we grade generously, it feels like it’s being kind, but it’s actually not. We’ve talked about this. I think we’ve made a strong case so far. You’re not being clear in that instance. Another thing to remember as you do this, the real value of the exercise isn’t the ratings. It’s the conversation the ratings force you to have as a team. When your leaders disagree on a team member, that disagreement is really valuable data. That’s where the learning happens and it’s what gives the team the shared understanding and sometimes the honesty and courage to actually take a next step forward.
And then the third thing, turn the assessment into next steps for every single person. For your high performers across all three areas, this is a conversation about the future for them. Tell them the impact that they’re having. Show them where they fit in and where the church is going. Give them a bigger challenge. That kind of conversation can be just as encouraging as a raise, quite honestly. For competency issues on your team, ask yourself what coaching, training, or other resources would help this person. Competency is the most coachable of all three. For chemistry and character issues, I think you really have to be realistic. These need more direct intervention. And character changes, as we’ve talked about specifically, can happen slowly if they happen at all. And if all three of those things are low, character, chemistry, competency, that’s the critical conversation. That’s a person who probably needs a different seat or may even need a different organization at this point.
But here’s what’s true in almost every one of those situations. If you feel it, that person feels it too. When they’re honest with themselves, they know that the fit isn’t right. I have to add to this, if you’re considering removing someone from your team, always get legal counsel before you do that. You need to do your homework on labor laws and make sure that you’re taking all the appropriate steps there. Jonathan, what advice do you have for other pastors who might be working through this type of evaluation of their people?
Jonathan:
Well, the first time we did this with our directional leadership team, you call it senior leadership team at One Church.to, it was eye-opening in ways I didn’t expect. I mean, some people who didn’t get a lot of shine in the organization scored higher than I would have guessed, either because we didn’t have eyes on their day-to-day or cumulatively. They were just far more impactful than I’d registered in my little data bites and moments, interactions I had. And some of the more visible and more popular people didn’t score as high as I would have assumed they would have. You talked about that bias and there’s a real bias in church world. Proximity to platform distorts everything. We overvalue what we can see on Sunday and undervalue what people are quietly carrying, perhaps maybe in our system structures as well as with volunteers.
So here’s how we ran it. Whoever oversaw the person presented their numbers first for that person. Then we went into what we call on our directional leadership team, we call it the green zone, which is just our language for the space where we are free to push back with each other honestly. And we’d argue. Sometimes it was easy, and we all landed at the same place. Someone presented numbers, and we all went, “That’s fair.” But often somebody would say even something along the lines like, “I think you’re scoring them too low.” Because again, objectivity is increased when you have more people at the table participating in this conversation.
So three things came out of it, I think that surprised me the most. First, that objectivity. The matrix gave us something to reason from instead of a feeling. We moved from just gut and little micro interactions we may have had to much better 360 kind of review of somebody. And I think that was a second part of it. Everyone in the room experiences that person differently across the organization. So you’re getting a fuller picture when you’re having that conversation with not just a single supervisor, but people in leadership that interact because it’s a connected ecosystem, right? And then the third one that I’d underline for our other pastors is that we weren’t evaluating people in the silo of their own team. We’re evaluating their impact across the whole church. And we had never done that before. You could be hiding in a corner doing your job on a siloed team over here, and yet you’re maybe having limited impact or negative impact across the org, but you’re doing your job.
But the last one exposed something. For years, we had done these performance reviews, I think like many people do. Each leader assessed their own teams. But some leaders we found on our team were more generous than others. Some of them just had that pastoral, idealistic, generous, nice cap on when they’re doing evaluations and their numbers would come out high. And another team member wasn’t being cruel; they were just maybe more realistic in their perspective. And so less aspirational and pastoral, more realistic about it, and their numbers would be low. But when we get in the room together and we saw them comparatively going, “There’s no way this person is above this person.” And we realized this helped us maybe calibrate better how to land with evaluating our staff team.
So my advice would be this, you know, work with your leaders. We need to get on the same page. You said it earlier, Sean, same language, same ideas of what we’re evaluating. What does chemistry, character, what does competency really mean and how are we evaluating that? Not from what I think, but what’s our objective way we as a team are doing that. And don’t let the supervisor be the only voice on that person. Make them present their number and then defend it in the room. That single change brought a level of fairness and objectivity we have been chasing for years. I can’t tell you how many different performance review systems we’ve tried to deploy here at this church to try to get it right. This one landed because it was more objective, fair and equitable.
Sean:
Yeah. And before we wrap up, I wanna mention something else that I think is important about this evaluation. And like you’ve done several times now, Jonathan, at your church, it is helpful for most churches to get an outside perspective when this conversation happens. And here’s why. Back where we started this conversation, the assessment we talked through requires objectivity about people that you worship with, people who you know, people you’ve probably prayed for through hard seasons. You are not neutral about those people, as you shouldn’t be. And I don’t think that’s a flaw. I think that’s what makes you a pastor, but it means that you’ll grade them on a curve without even realizing it. You’ll rate the person you like probably a point higher and the person who frustrates you, maybe a point lower. And then the whole exercise is influenced by that.
An outside voice doesn’t know who’s at your church. And I think that’s a good thing. And there’s another thing I think an outside guide brings, and that’s what I would say is just pattern recognition. Here’s what I mean by that. When you’re making a people decision, you’re making it for the first or maybe the second time. Our team, we’re doing this with churches every single week. We’ve seen how these decisions turn into outcomes and that itself can help you avoid really costly mistakes down the road. So, all right, Jonathan, this has been a great really kind of deep dive into getting people in the right seats. What do you hope pastors take away from today’s conversation?
Jonathan:
I think something you talked about earlier, and just acknowledging as you approach any people issues and certainly structure and seats is we all have biases. And it’s worse than that. We go looking for evidence that confirms what we already believe about someone. This works both ways. Like once I’ve decided someone’s a star, I collect the proof. Once I decided someone’s a problem, I can collect that too. And the bias I’ve had to watch out most carefully in myself is towards people I hired because if they’re in the wrong seat, then I made the wrong call. And that’s a harder thing to admit than anything about them. That’s why you build a system, not because you don’t trust yourself, but because willpower has never once beaten bias. Structure does. Shared definitions do. A room full of leaders who will and can push back on your numbers. Well, that does.
But I’d want the posture underneath it all to be this. Walk into every evaluation asking this question, how do I help the person sitting in front of me thrive in this role? Because when they thrive, the church thrives and that’s the whole point. Sometimes you’ll run in a wall. Maybe they can’t thrive in that role because it’s the wrong seat. Either the person has limitations, maybe the seat has limitations, but both of those are real. But there’s almost always a next step for someone.
It just might not be here, which is why one of the most important things we say to our team is, “We can’t promise you lifelong employment, but we can promise you lifelong employability.” You’ll hear me probably say that over and over because we’re going to develop people beyond their current role. We’re going to prepare you for whatever’s next, whether it’s here or somewhere else. And say that at the hire, not at the exit. If the first time a staff member hears it’s on the way out the door, it’s just a line. If you’ve heard it since day one, it’s a promise, and you’ve been keeping that the whole time. So, you know, again, you have a bias; build a system that walks around your bias.
Sean:
That’s really good, Jonathan. I love that. Well, next week we finish this series with probably the hardest part of the conversation. How do you actually make these changes without blowing up your church? I’m really looking forward to this conversation, Jonathan. I didn’t expect to, but I actually am. I think this is gonna be really good and maybe the most helpful of all four conversations from this series.
If you’re a pastor, people decisions are the challenges that probably keep you up at night, and almost none of us feel equipped for them. The assessment that we work through today is a core part of our staffing and structure process. We bring the framework, the tools, and that outside set of eyes, and we walk your senior leadership team through it person by person. So you don’t have to make these calls on a gut feeling. If you’d like a candid conversation about where your team stands, start with us and you can go to theunstuckgroup.com to learn more.
Next week, Jonathan and I are gonna close out the series with how to make your structural changes without disrupting your church. Make sure you subscribe so that you don’t miss it. And then one last thing before we go: if this podcast has been helpful for you, would you do us a quick favor? Leave us a review on whatever platform you’re listening right now. It takes you about 30 seconds, and it genuinely helps more church leaders find these conversations, all right? We’ll see you next week.
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