Structured For Burnout (Part 2)
A personality might draw a weekend crowd, but it takes a team to create the healthy systems that foster sustained growth—that’s the role of the Senior Leadership Team. Without it, you’re depending on heroism at the top.
If the SLT is structured well, you can take the lid off your church and create space for sustained health. If it’s not, you’ll keep funneling everything back to the top.
In this episode, Sean and Amy talk about the Senior Leadership Team—the team of people who sit at the top of your org chart. They’ll help you see:
- What the SLT should actually look like
- How the roles of each member are defined
- Why getting the SLT right is so important
The capacity of the senior leadership team really determines the potential impact of the ministry overall. [episode 443] #unstuckchurch Share on X If you don’t intentionally build the senior leadership team during growth, you’ll be forced to build it after burnout. [episode 443] #unstuckchurch Share on X If the senior leadership team isn’t healthy, then the church won’t be healthy, and over time, the lead pastor and the senior leaders won’t be healthy either. [episode 443] #unstuckchurch Share on X
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Transcript
Sean:
Hey, listeners, before this week’s episode, I want to tell you about our podcast sponsor, PlainJoe Studios and how they could help you in your church. Our most recent Unstuck church report said that the average church is actually growing by 14% year over year. That means there are a lot of churches that are paying more attention to their worship space than ever. Well, the creative team at PlainJoe works with churches to create beautiful, engaging spaces that connect with their community. They have a team of architectural, design and branding experts who help transform worship spaces into attractive, engaging hubs for the community. If that’s an area that your church could use some help, reach out to them today at plainjoe.net.
Well, welcome back to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean, your host here again with Amy Anderson, and we are in episode two of our series Structured for Burnout. If you missed episode one, do yourself a favor, go back and listen to that one. Last week, Amy and I got into the specific structural moves that kind of quietly set the lead pastor up for burnout. Things like a siloed org chart, a span of care that’s completely out of control, and the classic move of the lead pastor trying to be both the visionary leader and the integrator at the same time. Here’s a spoiler: that doesn’t end well.
Today we’re going one level deeper. We’re talking about the senior leadership team, that team of people that actually sit at the top of your org chart. What should it actually look like? How do the roles need to be defined? And honestly, why getting the senior leadership team right might be the single most important structural decision the church ever makes. So, Amy, with that introduction, let’s get into it.
Amy:
I’m so glad we’re doing this episode because episode one was all about diagnosing the problem—here’s how your structure is creating the conditions for burnout. This episode is really about the prescription. If the SLT, the senior leadership team—maybe you call it a management team or executive team—if it’s structured well, you can actually take the lid off your church and create space for more sustained health. And if it’s not, you’ll likely keep funneling everything back up to the top of the organization.
Sean:
Alright. Well, let’s name the tension first. Most churches have a senior leadership team, or at least they think they do. What’s actually going on in a lot of the churches that we work with?
Amy:
What I see in many churches is that what they call their senior leadership team is really just a collection of ministry directors who happen to report to the lead pastor. There’s really no shared ownership of the whole church, just ownership of each leader’s ministry area, ministry silo. And when there’s no SLT function, every cross-ministry decision seems to escalate back up to the lead pastor. So, as we said last week, that’s where the lead pastor becomes the only integrating force in the organization. And we talked last week about how exhausting and unsustainable that is. You know, Sean, our founder and friend Tony Morgan used to say, a personality might draw a weekend crowd, but it takes a team to create healthy systems that foster sustained growth. And the SLT is that team. Without it, you’re depending on heroism at the top.
Sean:
And here’s what I’d add to that. This problem doesn’t just wear out the lead pastor — it actually puts a ceiling on the whole church. So, Amy, what’s actually at stake structurally when the SLT isn’t functioning the way that it should?
Amy:
Well, the capacity of the team really determines the potential impact of the ministry overall. So if the team is missing the right people, or if their roles aren’t clear, or leaders aren’t empowered to actually lead, that’s when the church will hit a lid. And we see this play out at churches of all sizes: a smaller church where the lead pastor is doing everything; a mid-size church that’s growing but the structure hasn’t caught up yet; and a larger church where the senior leadership team is technically in place, but no one really owns that cross-organizational alignment and integration we talked about last week. And in all those cases, burnout is just lurking because someone at the top is absorbing all that dysfunction.
Sean:
Okay. Let’s talk about solutions to this. And let’s start with the lead pastor specifically, because I think a lot of lead pastors would struggle to articulate what their actual role on the SLT is. So what are the things the senior pastor simply cannot hand off no matter how busy things get?
Amy:
I’ll share those. It’s funny, Sean. When I find a pastor of a fast-growing church and I share these four things, they’re like, that would be a dream if that was all I had to do. And so let’s make that dream a reality. It does work. I’ve seen it installed. But there are four roles we talk about frequently that the senior pastor can’t delegate, and being clear on these is the first part of structuring a senior leadership team well. So, the lead pastor owns the primary responsibility for helping people buy into the vision. They’re the primary vision caster. You can develop vision with a team. In fact, we recommend developing vision with input from a team, but the person who needs to cast that vision is the senior pastor. That cannot be delegated.
The second is being the spiritual leader and teacher at the church. This teaching role is unique to other organizations, and it’s unique the senior pastor. You can have a teaching team, and again, we recommend having teaching teams, but the lead pastor leads it and takes ownership of the consistency and excellence of teaching. If Sunday prep is getting crowded out by management tasks and fires, that’s a structural problem because that should not be landing on their plate.
Third, we call it the leader of leaders. The senior pastor has to develop the people around them, not just direct them, not just be around a table with them. This is the leadership pathway: you lead by example, then you delegate, then you empower, and then you envision. So if you’re still, as a lead pastor, just leading by example, your church is probably organizationally stuck. And then the fourth one is that the lead pastor has to be the culture champion. The lead pastor is the keeper of the culture. No one else can own that from the top. It can be supported by other senior leadership team members, and it needs to be, but that lead pastor sets culture.
Sean:
I love that list because it’s not just a job description for the senior pastor — it’s also a filter. If you’re spending most of your week on things that aren’t on that list, that’s not a time management problem. It’s a structure problem. And I think that leads us to the executive pastor role, because this is where things get murky fast in a lot of churches. So Amy, what should the XP actually own?
Amy:
We talked about this a little bit last week, but let me recap and add some things. The executive pastor—we often call them the integrator—is the person who takes the vision the lead pastor is responsible for and makes it operational. They fill the gap between vision and execution. That’s an important distinction, because I do think a lot of executive pastors, because they have such a broad purview over everything going on in the organization, are often at risk of being in the weeds and not staying at that higher level integrator role. In a healthy senior leadership team, the lead pastor is leading up and out—casting vision, championing culture, developing key leaders—whereas the executive pastor is managing the day-to-day operations and making sure the whole system is aligned and moving. The executive pastor leads the senior leadership team meeting, and the senior pastor is present and engaged in those meetings but doesn’t have to facilitate it.
The murkiness happens when the lead pastor holds onto that XP role too long, or when the church hasn’t really named the integrator function at all. Then, although the lead pastor absorbs it by default. And we talked about this last week: Leaders are doing instead of leading, and the lead pastor is trying to be both the senior pastor and the executive pastor simultaneously.
And just to reiterate something I said last week, I think it bears repeating: you can’t compare a lead pastor to a CEO. I think it’s important for board members to recognize this because many board members come from the secular workplace. The CEO runs in quarters, but a lead pastor has this public final exam every weekend. So back to the XP—that role exists to protect the lead pastor’s capacity to do their role well. The executive pastor exists to allow the lead pastor to be a pastor: a pastor to the church and a pastor to the staff. The XP is the one who leads the hard conversations, the tough calls. That allows the lead pastor to stay a pastor.
Sean:
And the senior pastor/executive pastor distinction is one of those things that sounds obvious on paper, but it’s generally hard to live out, especially if you’ve been doing both of those roles for years and maybe you don’t even realize it anymore. Okay. So what about the SLT as a whole—that senior leadership team—what does the team itself have to own together that can’t get pushed down to anyone else?
Amy:
If you’ve ever read our ebook, Take the Lid Off Your Church, these are the seven roles we say the senior leadership team can’t delegate. First, they need to model team-based leadership from the top. Let me give you a few handles on that. Modeling team-based ministry, well what does that mean? Each of the senior leadership team leaders practices the values they expect everyone else to follow. They share ownership of the whole ministry, not just individual departments. I had to learn this when I first started on our executive team. I kind of came in with my weekend hat on at every meeting and would glaze over a little bit when we talked about student ministries or other things. And I learned: I’ve got to take that hat off when I come into this meeting and just lend my gifts to every conversation.
So the way decisions get made should reflect a ‘we’ more than a ‘my area’ mentality. They also show what healthy conflict looks like; they model disagreeing well, staying unified while disagreeing, and showing how to mine for conflict. A good team-based model does that. And then they avoid side conversations and triangulation. Alignment happens in the room, not in the hallways. Nothing will undermine a senior leadership team more than having side conversations with other staff about things that happened in an SLT meeting. I won’t go into all of these in so much detail, but sometimes we miss the essence of them. The second one is setting direction. The senior leadership team are the ones who have voices into the directional level of the strategic alignment pyramid, and out of that they’re going to monitor key metrics to make sure the ministry is moving in a healthy direction.
Third, coming right out of that, they own identifying and implementing the strategies for accomplishing the vision. This is the team that’s identifying: here’s what’s important for us to work on now. Fourth, leading the staff and volunteers. Again, I think that can sound kind of invisible. But let me talk a little more about what I mean. If you are an effective senior leadership team member, you’re ensuring that every leader in your care has clear expectations. They understand their authority. They have a defined lane so that decisions happen at the right level and don’t have to come back up to the senior leadership team. You’re also building leadership capacity by coaching and developing your leaders, not just giving tasks away. The senior leadership team really owns the leadership pipeline and succession planning for key roles. They create consistent operating rhythms for teams. As a senior leadership team, we’re figuring out what are the regular intersections that our teammates need to have whether that’s one-on-ones, quarterly priority meetings, things like that. And then within their own responsibility, aligning staff and volunteer teams to the vision so that we’re consistently speaking the same thing across departments.
Just a couple more. Five: keeping everyone aligned and focused, which is part of what I just shared. Six: considering and responding to opportunities and threats. This is why they have to get their eyes above the waterline because they need to be able to see what opportunities and threats are out there right now. And then lastly, facilitating communication with the rest of the staff and church. So making sure whatever decisions were made at the senior leadership team meeting are translated into clear, consistent messaging for staff. This is where I use the term ‘push-CADing’ versus cascading. You need to be strategic about when you’ll communicate, what you’ll communicate, and when you’ll get it done. We always need to assign an owner for every communication — who will share it with whom, by when, through what channel. And of course they have to be masters at communicating the why as well as the what, so that teams understand the reasoning behind priorities and trade-offs. I say that because sometimes there’s this big mystery about what goes on behind the closed door in senior leadership team meetings. Good SLTs are great at communicating and removing that mystery. So I’ve talked for a while here, Sean. Beyond those seven, is there anything you would add?
Sean:
Well, one I’ve heard you say many times and help a lot of churches with is that every person and every ministry needs to connect back to someone on the senior leadership team. Just from a structural perspective, if there are staff or ministries floating around without leadership connected to the vision of the church, that’s a big structural gap that needs to be fixed. Also, meetings matter. The SLT meeting agenda needs to be action-oriented. It needs to have an honest assessment of the numbers and trends and things that are happening within the church. Everybody needs to be involved in the conversation. Like you mentioned before, you’ve got to take off your weekend ministry hat and put on your ownership hat for the whole church. If someone doesn’t need to be there, that decision probably should have just been an email.
Amy:
Right. We don’t need to talk it out.
Sean:
That’s right. We get a lot of questions about meetings and meeting structure and what should be included in those meetings — and I think the fact that we get those questions is an indicator that right now a lot of meetings aren’t good. So here’s a sample agenda framework for what a healthy SLT meeting could look like. Start by opening with a win or a story of life change that you’ve heard about or experienced in the church recently. That keeps the main thing the main thing and keeps us focused on why we’re here. Then move into a quick scorecard review of all your key metrics. Our friend and founder Tony Morgan talked about those key metrics like the dashboard on your car, right? And when you see that little red flashing light come on, that’s actually a good thing. It’s a warning sign that something’s headed in the wrong direction, and this is a team that can dive in and begin to diagnose why and fix it. So reviewing those metrics is really important.
Make sure you address one or two strategic decisions or cross-ministry alignment issues. What are those key things that rise up to this team where having representation from all of the ministries within your church lets you really bring strategic alignment? And then close with any communication the broader team needs to carry. What do we need to make sure filters down through all of the lanes within our structure that this team has connection to? So make sure those meetings are short, engaging, and that everybody gets to participate. And then you’ll probably have a lot better meeting, and we’ll have a lot less questions about meetings at the end of the day, too.
Amy:
True.
Sean:
Alright, this is great Amy. Let’s make this really practical now. If a lead pastor is driving to work today and saying, our senior leadership team isn’t actually functioning as a team right now, what’s the first question they need to sit with?
Amy:
First question: does every staff member and ministry connect back to someone on the senior leadership team? I think that’s an important question. Here’s what I see once in a while: There’s like a random direct report to the lead pastor who’s not on the SLT. That’s someone who’s floating out there. If there are people floating without clear leadership connected to the vision, you’ve got some silos. And often those positions are more about the person than strategic ministry alignment; it’s someone who has reported there for a long time, for a lot of reasons. And then the second question: look at your senior leadership team meeting and assess — is it action-oriented? Is it honest? Or is it mostly just reporting and status updates or talking about this weekend? I think the quality of your senior leadership team meeting is a pretty good proxy for whether the team is actually functioning as a team.
Sean:
Here’s the one thing I think catches a lot of churches off guard. What about churches that are in a really exciting season right now? Their church is growing, attendance is up, energy is good overall. Is there a real risk that they wait too long to build the SLT structure they’re actually going to need as the church continues to grow?
Amy:
Yeah, absolutely. And this is the momentum trap we talked about a little bit last week. I think growth feels like validation — hey, everything is working. But the structure that got you here won’t get you there. And if you don’t build the senior leadership team intentionally during growth, you’ll be forced to build it after burnout. In those exciting moments, this is where you should do the activities. Like, let’s double the size of our organization and start to think about what the structure’s going to look like then, so that you have informed, good thought around priority positions and things you need to add.
I’m just an advocate for growing churches to ask every 18 to 24 months: do we have the right people on the senior leadership team? This goes to the principle that different people have different leadership capacities. So the team that was right at 500 may not be the right team when you’re a church of a thousand or 2,000. You don’t need to be manic about changing it up, but the church is changing and the team probably has to change with it too. There are times when we need to add diversity, leverage that team for a new leader to come on board and get a voice around the table.
And the last thing I’d say about waiting too long: when we wait too long, we get to panic hiring and just start filling roles. What we really need to do, especially for growing churches, is hire for leadership capacity. The right people on the senior leadership team matters more than the right titles. You need big-picture thinkers, strategic thinkers, people who can build teams and who are fully aligned with the vision and values. If someone on your team is a good person but isn’t a great leader, I would just find another role for them—just not on the senior leadership team.
Sean:
That’s a really helpful reminder. Amy, I think we’ve probably overwhelmed pastors at this point with information about how they can create and improve their senior leadership team. So let’s wrap up episode two for today. Any final thoughts before we do?
Amy:
I want to leave lead pastors with this. The senior leadership team is so critical for growing churches. If the senior leadership team isn’t healthy, then the church won’t be healthy, and over time the lead pastor and the senior leaders won’t be healthy either. So it’s a really important part of a healthy growing church. And I think getting this right is one of the most important decisions a lead pastor will make, because it really determines whether leadership is sustainable. Go slowly in who you put on the team, be honest about whether you have that integrator role, and then let that integrator protect the lead pastor’s non-delegatable roles so they’re not swallowed up by operations. And then build a team who are genuinely empowered to lead, so problems get solved where they belong instead of always ending up at the top of the org chart.
You know, Sean, we’ve got two more episodes in this series. Next week I’m excited to have Cody Thompson from The Table Group on the podcast. We’ll be talking about Working Genius and structuring your team around your wiring, understanding your own strengths and then building the right team around you so that you can lead at your healthiest pace. I know at The Unstuck Group, Tony just had a knack for identifying diversity around our team. And I remember when we took Working Genius, it was just so evident that we had complementary geniuses that made us a good team. It also exposed a couple of gaps we have, which we now pay attention to. So I think it’s going to be a fascinating conversation with Cody. And then we’re going to finish the series with a conversation on probably what everyone thought about when they saw the word burnout—a conversation about personal habits and replenishment to sustain your health for the long haul. So don’t miss those.
Sean:
Absolutely. Well, thanks for being with us for episode two of Structured for Burnout. If this conversation is hitting close to home for you and you’re starting to realize your senior leadership team isn’t quite functioning the way it needs to, our team at The Unstuck Group can help. We work with churches to assess their staffing and structure and identify specific moves that create a healthier, more sustainable organization. You can start a conversation with our team at theunstuckgroup.com. And make sure you’re subscribed wherever you listen so you don’t miss the rest of the series. We’ll be back next week with a great conversation with Cody Thompson. Until then, have a great week.
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