Increasing Leadership Capacity in Your Church (Part 3)
“Where do we find great staff leaders? We need them, and we need them now.”
If your only approach to finding staff leaders is to hire fully formed, fully capable leaders from the outside whenever you need them, you will always be reactive.
So far in this series, we’ve talked about the importance of developing your volunteers and volunteer leaders. But all of that volunteer development work, as important as it is, only pays off long-term if you know how to develop your staff leaders well, too.
In this episode, Jonathan and I talk about developing and equipping your staff leaders to do the work God has called them to do.
- Building a staff culture where leadership development isn’t just a one-time event
- Identifying the leadership capacity of every person on your team
- Intentional development toward the highest level they’re wired for
Real development does not happen in a classroom. It happens in proximity; it happens in relationship. [episode 453] #unstuckchurch Share on X If most of your investment in your team is happening in staff meetings and annual reviews, that’s not a development culture—that’s just a management culture. [episode 453] #unstuckchurch Share on X The pastors who develop their staff best are the ones who are still being developed themselves. [episode 453] #unstuckchurch Share on X
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Transcript
Sean:
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean Bublitz, managing director here at The Unstuck Group, and I’m here with my co-host for this series, Jonathan Smith. Over the last two weeks, we’ve been building something. In episode one, we talked about the volunteer bench and why it’s too lean in most churches. Last week, we got into the volunteer leadership pipeline, how to identify volunteers with leadership capacity and what it looks like to develop them intentionally through three levels: volunteer, team leader and coach.
Today, we’re taking the final step because all of that volunteer development, as important as it is, only pays off in the long term if you know how to develop your staff leaders well, too. And that’s what this episode is about. How do you identify the leadership capacity of every person on your team? How do you develop them intentionally towards the highest level that they’re actually wired for? And how do you build a staff culture where leadership development isn’t just a one-time event, it’s just how you do things as a church? So Jonathan, as you’ve been with me for this series, I’m just curious what stands out most to you through the first two weeks of our conversations?
Jonathan:
Well, I think what stood out to me, Sean, was how much the conversation has been about seeing, right? Seeing the volunteer bench, honestly, seeing people in your church who have capacity, maybe that hasn’t been named yet, seeing the gaps where they actually are versus where maybe I assume they are or feel they are. And as we mentioned last week, it’s kind of moving from intention to attention. What gets noticed gets energy, and what gets energy it moves. So I just wanna pat everyone on the back who kind of committed to journeying with us over these last two weeks, because you’re drawing your attention to building a volunteer bench and a leadership pipeline, and that’s gonna produce energy, at least leadership energy, organizational energy, in the right direction.
Sean:
Love that. Alright, before we dive into today’s content, let me tell you about our series sponsor The Church Lawyers. Honestly, I know that most pastors would rather preach 10 sermons than talk to one lawyer. But the good news is the church lawyers actually know and speak your language. This is a law firm that serves thousands of churches of all sizes and denominations throughout the United States. They handle everything from church bylaws and employment issues to real estate transitions. They come towards the work with you with no judgment. They won’t use legal jargon; they just have practical, sound legal advice. So you can check out their free, useful resources and affordable membership options if you go to thechurchlawyers.com.
Alright, Jonathan, so here’s the tension I wanna name right at the top of today’s conversation. And it’s one I hear from church leaders constantly, quite honestly. Where do we find great staff leaders? We need them, and we need them now. And we have ministries to run, teams to lead and more on the plate than we can handle. So when someone says you need to develop your leaders, the honest reaction from a lot of pastors is, “That’s great, but I don’t have time to develop anyone. I need somebody who’s already developed.” And I get it. The pressure you feel, especially in a growing church, is real. Here’s the problem with that approach. If you’re only move to find staff leaders is to hire fully formed, fully capable leaders from the outside every time you have a need, you’ll always feel reactive and you’ll keep having the same conversation five years from now.
I think Paul actually addressed this directly in Second Timothy one through two. He tells Timothy the things you have heard me say, entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others. In that verse, Paul lays out four generations of development and a vision for that all in one sentence. Paul’s developing Timothy. Timothy’s telling reliable people. Reliable people are then developing others. The whole model is built on intentional relational development over time. The church has always grown through leaders, developing leaders. That’s not a modern leadership principle for us. It’s actually a biblical one.
But I think Jonathan, in some churches, staff development looks more like a lecture than a relationship. You know, we send people to a conference; we assign them a book to read. We put ’em through an onboarding process, and there’s nothing wrong with all of those things. But then we wonder why they’re not growing into the leaders that we’d hope they’d be. Because here’s what we know, real development does not happen in a classroom. It happens in proximity, it happens in relationship. It happens while you’re doing the work together, not before it, and not in a separate room away from it. So Jonathan, those are my thoughts on the tension that church leaders are feeling. How do you see the tension playing out in the churches that you work with?
Jonathan:
Yeah, Sean, I think one of the most common tensions I see is a lot of pastors, they carry this low grade guilt. They know they should be developing people, but the math just feels impossible. Like you said. And like we said last week, Sundays come with increasing regularity, right? They’re always coming at you. But here’s the trap. That idea that I just need someone already developed a ready-made package right there. There’s a interesting author, Boris Groysberg, he’s a professor from Harvard Business School. He spent years studying what happens when companies hire star performers or kinda ready-made performers away from the competitors. And he tracked over a thousand top performing Wall Street analysts who switched firms. And you’d assume a star is a star, right? You know, you bring them over, plug them in, and they keep producing. And he found it was almost exactly the opposite, that when stars change companies, their performance dropped, and their team got less effective.
And I think this is the part I missed because I’ve done this. I’m guilty of this very thing. Here’s the part I miss. And I think church leaders miss. The star was never just the individual. The success that kind of they grew from was woven into the team around them. It was the systems, the cultures, the relationships built over the years. And so in essence, you hired the fruit, but the fruit grew on a different tree.
Sean:
That’s good.
Jonathan:
I think that’s what I like about the Unstuck Process. You know, we actually, especially when we’re doing staff and structure with churches, we lean into kind of team culture, organizational culture, because that’s the ecosystem that produces the fruit of the leaders that you’re actually developing. I’m sure, Sean, you’ve seen this through the years. I’m guilty of it when you hire a worship leader from maybe a big church down the road or maybe a youth pastor, and they have an imppressive track record, and you watch them kind of enter into your church organization, and it just doesn’t click.
Sean:
Yeah. We’ve all had that experience.
Jonathan:
I think we’ve all kind of fallen into that trap. But much to what you said, if external hiring is your only leadership strategy, you’ll always be one resignation away from crisis. Someone’s gonna always coming, and someone’s always leaving. And sometimes on church teams, the people you don’t want leaving, leaving and the people that maybe you think could have another chapter somewhere else staying .
Sean:
Yeah, that’s true.
Jonathan:
And, I think that’s why staffing and structure has been so helpful in our organization when you guys have come alongside us to help keep that clean. And that brings me to the second piece of what you talked about, seeing it as an event versus a flow. I think, again, I’m talking as the guilty party here. I think churches can treat it like a transaction. Like you said, send ’em a conference, hand them a book, and you feel like, okay, check done, or run them through the onboarding process, whatever that looks like.
But all of those things, and I, I do believe in reading books together. I believe in those kind of team formation moments where you teach and all of those things, those events don’t form leaders. I think what you said is true. Relationships do. And just look at how Jesus did it. He didn’t run a three-day intensive for the 12. He lived with them, you know? They watched him heal. They tried it, they got it wrong. He corrected them in real time. I mean, that’s not curriculum. That’s a current, that’s a flow, a steady relational flow where the work and the development are the same thing happening at the same time.
The pastors I see actually growing leaders and, you know, I’m a nerd when I see this because I want to know how they’re doing it. And the ones that I see is they decided that their leadership pipeline runs through their calendar. If you’re looking at a place to start, just start adding a person into what you’re already doing in your calendar. Take someone with you, have them walk alongside you. That’s a classroom that’s ready-made. And I think Paul talked about this in Thessalonians, actually. He said, “We loved you so much that we are delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God, but our lives as well.” That’s not just content, that’s life. That’s not just teaching. That’s bringing people to the table with you.
And so I think external hires are—they’re not all bad. I think we need them. And there are moments when outside talent can really help your organization, help your church move forward, but, sometimes, they’re exactly what you need. But at other times, raising up staff, as I mentioned in a podcast before, 75% of our team at One Church.to have come from our volunteer benches in our leadership pipeline. And they’re people we already know. They’re placed around us. We just needed to develop them. So, a question for you, Sean. You work with a lot of churches and have for years now. What are some of the levels you see in terms of leadership and development in the churches you’ve worked with?
Sean:
Excellent question. I think one that pastors need to answer, and I actually think that takes us to the solutions that I wanted to spend some time on, because pastors wanna know what does it actually look like to develop staff leaders? Well, and I’ll start with something that I think is really freeing. If you let it be to you, not every person on your team is wired to lead at the same level.
Jonathan:
Facts.
Sean:
That’s not a problem. That’s actually by design. You know, God gives different people different capacities. The goal of staff development isn’t to turn every person on your team into a senior leader. The goal is to help every person on your team reach the highest level of leadership that they’re actually wired for. So let me talk through the five leadership levels that we’ve identified, because I think having this framework changes how you see every person on your team.
The first level, and I’m talking about staff here, the first level is the individual contributor. This person handles most ministry tasks themselves. They solve problems by just jumping in. Their win is direct ministry impact, and they love being needed and seeing immediate results. And that’s genuinely valuable. But their growth ceiling is real. You know, ministry growth becomes limited by their own personal capacity. They lead few to no volunteers, but their goal is just, how do I serve people directly, accomplishing the task is the ceiling for them. And when I said they love being needed, I mean that in absolutely in a good way. They love being needed. They love serving people. And they love seeing immediate results.
The second level is the leader of people. This person has made the move from doing ministry to actually directing others while still delivering ministry. They’re kind of that player-coach. They recruit volunteers, build processes, and they help clarify expectations. Their win is stability with less chaos and more predictability, if that makes sense. But their growth ceiling is that the church becomes organized, but not multiplying. You know, things run better, but they’re not getting bigger or deeper necessarily. In order for these people to grow to the next level leadership, they actually need to show that they can grow other people who then those people lead ministry. And that takes me to the third level.
The third level is the leader of leaders. And this is where things really start to change. This person has stopped doing ministry themselves and started investing in the development of other leaders. They recruit and coach volunteer leaders. They delegate responsibilities. They create leadership pipelines for their area. Their breakthrough insight is that multiplication creates what I’ll call exponential growth. This is the level where a church starts to actually scale up.
Then the fourth and fifth levels of leadership are what we call strategic integrator. That’s number four. And visionary leader, that’s number five. And these are your senior leadership roles on your team. The strategic integrator connects vision to execution across teams. They make vision actionable. They bring focus to what matters most and align ministry strategies to the church’s overall direction. The visionary leader defines the future. They drive the culture in the church. They lead change, and they’re the one investing primarily in the senior leadership team. Now, most churches only have a few people actually operating at these levels. And that’s exactly right. That’s the way it was designed to be.
So after hearing that framework, here’s what I want you to do. Think about every person on your staff team and ask honestly, where are they right now? And then where do they have the capacity to go? Because one of the most common mistakes churches make is assuming that a great individual contributor will naturally become a great leader of people. Or that a great leader of people will naturally become a great leader of leaders. Those transitions require different skills, different mindsets, and intentional development of those people. They don’t just happen because someone’s been around long enough.
And, here’s the point that I wanna make sure I don’t skip over. If you’re only developing your male staff leaders, you’re leaving half of your leadership potential on the table. Women on your team have the same capacity to grow through these levels. And the way that you develop them well is the same way you develop anyone well: relationally in proximity with them, while doing the work of the ministry together. And don’t build a development culture that accidentally excludes half of your team. Jonathan, you lead this in your local church. What would you add to this framework?
Jonathan:
First, maybe before I even add anything, I just wanna clarify ’cause I think you just, dropped some great wisdom, for all of the pastors that are listening, and I think it’s implicit in what you said, but it’s worth pulling out that the levels are not a value statement. I mean, a level one individual contributor is not less valuable to the kingdom than a level five visionary leader.
Sean:
Exactly.
Jonathan:
They’re just differently wired, and you do need them. And I think as the levels go up, it’s almost like a pyramid. There’s less and less people, probably equipped to be at certain levels, but these people are so necessary. And one of the gifts you can give your staff team is freeing them from the assumption that they have to keep climbing to be useful or valuable. And I remember I had a staff member, valuable level two leader, valuable, just exceptional, directing people, a brilliant player-coach, you know, involved in the trench coach love serving people. And the assumption, partly mine, partly theirs, was that their natural next move was level three: leading others, coaching coaches. And we tried it, and it didn’t work. And they were the one that actually came to me, which was interesting. And they said, listen, I don’t think this is me.
Sean:
Oh, that’s great.
Jonathan:
Yeah, it was really neat because I think they were feeling a lot of undue pressure, not because the role was too much, but because they weren’t designed for the role, and they were trying, but they were wired to work with people, not one step removed from them kind of thing. And so I’d say I’d add to the framework, your job as a senior leader is not to just push people up the levels. It’s to help people find the level they’re wired for and thrive there. Some people will move up; some people won’t. And that’s not a failure to be solved. That’s a person to be honored.
And the other thing you said, because I think I’ve seen this in ministry circles, and it’s so valuable. I really appreciate you just highlighting that half of the potential leaders in your church, maybe over half, when you look at the percentage of women that actually attend churches, are women. And we serve people across every tradition and theological stream. And I love that about The Unstuck Group. But what I can say is every leadership table I’ve sat at has only gotten better when it reflected the congregation it served, whether it’s women or racial diversity or generational diversity. The body gets richer and stronger when we develop the full range of gifts within it. You know, I, like you, get to work along some remarkable women with deep leadership capacity at The Unstuck Group, and I certainly do at One Church.to, and I’m better for it. So, theologically, it doesn’t matter where you land, just be generous and find ways to develop all the people that God’s entrusted you to care for.
So I’ll ask you maybe a follow up question because I’d love to hear it from your side. When you think about your own development as a leader, what it actually looked like. Was there a moment when someone named something in you, or stayed close, stretched you, challenged you, pushed you maybe to jump a level?
Sean:
You know, I actually think my story’s similar to a lot of people’s stories. Somebody took a chance on me as a young leader. And hopefully they saw something me at that time, but they certainly took a chance on me. One of my early ministry roles, as a 20-something, was in a large multi-site church at a campus of about 2,500 people.
Jonathan:
Wow.
Sean:
I was way out over my skis in terms of my age, matching my position, Jonathan. But I had a campus pastor who believed in me. He had patience with me, you know, allowed me to sit at the leadership table and whether I had real value to add or not. And believe me, I thought I did. He let me be a part of the conversations as I grew. And I think this is the piece that ties all of this together, and with what I said at the very top of the podcast, development happens in relationship, not in a classroom.
What does that actually look like practically? You know, it looks like a senior leader who’s consistently in the room with the people they’re developing, not just in performance review conversations, but in the actual work with them, debriefing after a hard meeting, processing a decision together before it’s made. Asking them, what did you learn from that after something doesn’t go the way that you’d planned. You know, it looks like giving people a challenge that’s slightly beyond their current capacity and then staying close enough to coach them rather than just watching them, you know, see if they sink or swim through it. I think it looks like naming what you see in people, you know, telling them, I think you have the capacity to lead at the next level. And here’s why I believe that. Most people have never had a leader say that to them. And when they do, it changes something within us. So, those are my thoughts. Jonathan, what would you add before we go to next steps?
Jonathan:
Like you? I think, my development as a leader, didn’t come specifically from a class book or a conference. It was senior leaders who saw something in me before I even saw it in me. I think of two men right away. Keith Smith, I’m not related to him, but he was a lead pastor and he saw something in me and, brought me, into his orbit. And that was a way of just learning and growing. I could see and watch what he was doing. He gave me space to make mistakes. I think of a leader, Bill Morrow, that he saw something in me as an emerging leader, a young emerging leader, gave me opportunities that were frankly, I think beyond me.
Sean:
Yeah.
Jonathan:
But he saw something deeper in me, and it stretched me, and they gave me those responsibilities that moved me. And I, I got to stay close enough to them to catch, what they were dropping, but also they caught some of the things that I dropped accidentally in that process. So I think that was the whole curriculum. I think it’s a little formula, naming that you know what, you see something in them, give them a responsibility. So naming plus responsibility plus proximity, that creates an incredible development pathway for young leaders that might be around you.
Sean:
I like that. That’s really good, Jonathan. Alright. So I think that’s practical, but let’s move on to some more practical part of the conversation. And here’s where I just encourage churches to start. If you’re a leader listening and thinking, we don’t really have a staff development culture; we just kind of hire people and hope they grow. First, I would start with, doing a staff leadership level audit. Sit down with your org chart and just honestly assess where every person on your team is operating right now in terms of those five levels of leadership. Not where you hired them to be, not where you wish that they were, but where they actually are today. And then ask two more questions for each person. What level do I think they have the capacity to reach? And what would it take? What intentional investment, what development conversation, what new challenge would it take to help them get there?
That exercise alone will start to surface some of the really important conversations. You’ll probably find some people who are operating below their capacity because nobody’s ever challenged them or invested in them. You might find some people who are in roles that require a level of leadership they’re genuinely not wired for. And that’s a hard but important thing to know. Jonathan, you just told a story about how you experienced that in your church.
The second thing I do is restructure how you spend your time in development with them. So if most of your investment in your team is happening in staff meetings and annual reviews, that’s not a development culture, that’s just a management culture.
Jonathan:
That’s gold.
Sean:
Development of people actually happens in the margins. It’s in the one-on-one conversations in the debrief after the hard conversation you just had. And in the moments where you know, you’re in the work together, and you stop and say, let’s talk about what’s happening here. You can practice the time-tested process of I do, you observe. I do, you help. You do, I help. You do, I observe. And then release someone for leadership.
Third, and this one’s for the senior leaders listening today, you have to model it from the top. Your staff will develop other leaders to the degree that they see you developing leaders. If leadership development is something you talk about but you don’t practice personally, it will never become a culture because what’s true is the culture flows out of who you are and what you value. Jonathan, anything you’d add for leaders who are trying to figure out where they actually start with all of this.
Jonathan:
One of the ways you can just personally, if you’re a pastor, you’re thinking like, how do I just personally start modeling this? Start with one person, maybe not the whole team. Even just one person. Pick that staff member on your team or that key volunteer if you’re in a smaller setting, that you think has the most untapped capacity. So not necessarily just the most faithful that can be part of but the most untapped capacity. The one where if you invested in them seriously over the next 12 months, the church would feel the difference.
And then have a conversation with them even this week. Tell them what you see, that you notice something. Tell them what you want to invest in and ask them what they need from you. Put a regular rhythm in the calendar: biweekly, monthly, whatever it fits. And then protect it. This is the hard part. Protect it like you would protect your sermon prep time, like this is important. You’re not gonna miss it.
And if you do that with one person for a year, you will have learned more about how to develop staff than any framework that maybe I could teach you because you’ll be in the flow of it, and then you do it with a second and then a third. But eventually, you begin to produce a process that will help generate that beyond your capacity to meet with individuals. The other practical thing I’d say is just be honest about your own development needs. The pastor who developed their staff best are the ones who are still being developed themselves.
Sean:
Oh, that’s good.
Jonathan:
You know, we can’t take people spiritually places we haven’t been. We know that. And it’s the same with our leadership. If you’ve stopped growing, your team will stop growing. So find someone who’s further down the road than you. Let them speak into your life, the way you speak into your teams. And I don’t think that’s a luxury. I think that’s part of our job as leaders and pastors. And the thing I wanna avoid for pastors listing is the trap that I’ll start developing my team once things settle down ’cause I think I’m guilty of that. Things are constantly moving, and I think when we get a pocket, but that pocket never seems to come. Right?
Sean:
Right.
Jonathan:
When we get that margin, you have to make it. You have to protect it ’cause ministry doesn’t settle. The only way to get on the other side of a busy season is to develop the people who will help you carry it. Start now. Start small; start with one.
Sean:
That’s so good. Jonathan, thanks a ton for being with me for this series. I think this has been great and hopefully it’s been helpful for the church leaders that tune in. Before we close, I wanna zoom out for a second and tie this whole series together because I think there’s a thread running through all three episodes that’s worth calling out specifically. You know, we started with volunteers. We moved to volunteer leaders, and today we’re talking about staff leaders. And here’s what’s true at every level, the churches that are healthiest and growing the fastest are not the ones who went out and found the most talented people. They’re the ones who built a culture of developing people, the people that they already have. That’s it. A volunteer who gets developed becomes a team leader. A team leader who gets developed becomes a coach. A coach who gets developed becomes a staff candidate, and a staff leader who gets developed becomes a leader of leaders and on and on it goes. The flywheel only spins if somebody starts spinning it and is willing to do that. And that someone has to be you.
And before you fire up the email that says, well that sounds good on a podcast, but who has actually done it? You know, I could point you to at least a dozen churches who have a culture of identifying and developing people from within. What’s true is that the best leader you’ll ever hire is the one you develop. So if this series has been helpful for you, I’d love it if you’d consider leaving us a review on your preferred podcasting platform. It genuinely helps more church leaders find the show. And if you’re sitting with your team right now and you’re thinking, we need help building this kind of staff and development structure at our church, that’s exactly the kind of work that we do at The Unstuck Group. We work with churches on their staffing and structure all the time to help them build teams that are actually set up to develop leaders at every level. You can start a conversation with us at theunstuckgroup.com. Thanks for being with us for this series. We’ll see you next week, where we’ll start to review this quarter’s data from The Unstuck Church Report.
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