Every hire you make is a culture decision.
You’re either adding somebody who makes your team more like who you said you want to be, or somebody who pulls it a little the other way.
You can use your culture shaping behaviors when you’re hiring, onboarding new team members, in evaluation conversations…and over time, that makes you better at hiring. You start to see less turnover. You have more staff embracing and celebrating your culture alongside you.
In this episode, we’re talking about interviews, onboarding, and reviews. We’ll share a bit of how Sun Valley does this at their church, and what it would take for you to get started.
- Assessing Culture Fit in the Hiring Process
- “Cultural Crash Course” in Onboarding
- Culture Conversations in Staff Reviews
If you sit in a review and you don't address a lack of culture fit or a behavior that's not right, that's a decision, too. [episode 471] #unstuckchurch Share on X We delay and we put off difficult conversations because we don't want to hurt the person, or if we're honest with ourselves, we delay and we put off the conversations because we're uncomfortable having the conversation. [episode 471]… Share on X Think football, if you had a football team of just offensive linemen and a quarterback, that's great, but who are you handing the ball off to and who's gonna catch the ball and actually score? So you gotta have different players on a… 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.
Get the Leader Conversation Guide
Opt-in here and get access to the Leader Conversation Guide for this episode and to the full archive. Emailed each Wednesday.
Share Your Thoughts and Questions on Social Media
We use hashtag #unstuckchurch on X @unstuckgroup and on Instagram @theunstuckgroup.
Write a Review—It Helps!
Your ratings and reviews really do help more pastors discover the podcast content we’re creating here. Would you take a minute to share your thoughts? Just open the podcast on iTunes on your phone or computer, click Ratings & Reviews, and leave your opinion. Or leave us 5 stars on Spotify.
Transcript
Sean:
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church podcast. I’m Sean, managing director here at the Unstuck Group, and this is week three of our series, Getting Practical on Developing Culture. I’m here again with Paul Alexander. Paul is the XP out at Sun Valley Community Church in the Phoenix area, and a longtime Unstuck consultant. Paul, I’m not calling you old by saying long time. I’m just saying you’ve been doing this a long time.
Paul:
It’s been a minute.
Sean:
It’s good to have you back, though.
Paul:
Man, this is in danger of becoming a normal occurrence here, Sean. So glad to be hanging with you again.
Sean:
All right, so since I have you here, we’ve done two weeks of this already. Can you do a recap for our listeners on the first two weeks?
Paul:
Let me see what I can do here. So if you are joining us today, we are literally right in the middle of a four-part podcast series about building a healthy team culture on your church staff. And so, again, I’ll say this, you owe it to yourself to go back and listen to those first two episodes if you miss them, because we walked through the process for defining four to six culture-shaping behaviors with your senior leadership team in the room. And we discussed moving from the idea of staff values to staff behaviors, two very, very different things, because you can actually coach behaviors, and our values ultimately are demonstrated by our actions, right? So we talked about this idea that ultimately you get what you tolerate, and that the culture of your staff team, and subsequently, ultimately your entire church really starts in the heart of the leader and the senior leadership team.
So the good news is, if you don’t like what you have right now, you can change that. It really is within the power of the senior leader and the senior leadership team to change and shift the culture of your church. And then we got really practical and talked about some concepts and ideas around staff culture at Sun Valley, the church I lead at, and been here for like the last 15 years. And we helped guys and gals who are leading churches get to real concrete action that they can take in their context.
Sean:
One of the things that we’ve tried to be really intentional about on the podcast, Paul, for the more than 10 years that we’ve been doing this is just being very practical. We want leaders to be able to listen to this and walk away with, “What’s something I can do at my church?” And so we did that last week. We’re gonna do more of it this week. And here’s the thing, once you can start using these behaviors that you define, they get really helpful. You can use them when you’re hiring, you can use them when you’re onboarding new team members, you can use them in evaluation conversations. And over time, that makes you better at hiring. You start to see less turnover on your team, and you have more staff who are actually embracing and celebrating the culture alongside of you. So today we’re talking interviews, onboarding, and reviews, and we’ll share a bit about how Sun Valley does this at their church and what it would take for you to get started at your church.
And I know everybody hears interviews, onboarding, and reviews and gets really excited. So I expect no one’s turning off the podcast at this point, right?
Paul:
Dude, it’s funny to joke around about, Sean, but the reality is with every new team member you choose to invite to your team, you’re giving them so much power to either double down and advance and make your culture better, or completely erode it and side rail it. Inviting team members to your team has such tremendous influence on who you’re becoming at the church and where you’re going.
Sean:
Paul, I think you’re here to redeem my sarcasm, so I appreciate that. All right, before we get into it, let me thank this week’s podcast sponsor, Tyndale House. They’re releasing a brand new book. It’s called The Missing Messiah by best-selling authors Kyle Idleman and Mark Moore. This book and the supporting study guide and videos that go along with it, it’s gonna help your church rediscover Jesus based on Scripture, not based on culture. And you can learn more about the book if you just go to missingmessiah.com.
So Paul, let’s start with hiring. In my experience, a lot of churches look at three things when they’re hiring, and I think all three are important. One, can this person do the job? Do they have the competency in what we need them to do? Two, are they a person of character? Character’s very important in ministry. And then three, and this is the one that we look for, I think whether we admit it or not, most of us don’t admit it, but it’s, do we like them? Do we like working with them or would we like working with them? And I think all three of those are really good criteria. I think we need to take a hard look at all of them as we consider somebody new for the team. But I also think that something’s missing within that. None of that answers whether this person will behave the way our team behaves, the rest of us behave and the rest of us work together. So was there ever a season, Paul, at Sun Valley where you weren’t factoring in culture fit when you were hiring? And what was maybe behind causing you to realize that it was missing from that process?
Paul:
Absolutely, Sean. So like you said, early on in my tenure here, we would get really specific on things like you just mentioned, character. Do they have the character the Bible describes as required for spiritual leadership in a church? You can get that really concretely out of the New Testament. Competency, do they have the gifting and work experience, because they’ve demonstrated that in their track record in their past to actually do the job you’re asking them to do today? Sure, you can dig into their real track record unless they’re lying to you, which by the way happens. But you can actually dig into all that and figure out, do they have the real competency to do the job? And then chemistry, do they fit with your team? That question you asked, do we like them?
The way I talk about that is like if we were in the grocery store and I saw them, would I be ducking behind the Cheerios if I saw them because I didn’t wanna hang with them? Or would I stick my head in the ice cream ice box because I didn’t wanna see them? Like when I see them, am I happy to see them or am I like, oh crud, it’s them again? Which by the way, should tell you something about whether they should be on your team or not. So character, competency, chemistry, you’re right on to nail all that to the wall really quick.
But our culture, it hadn’t been defined yet. Like some of our senior staff could talk about it because they’ve been around for a long time, but it was still in kind of this nebulous framework. We hadn’t done the hard work to really articulate what that was so that our staff as a whole could use that to evaluate do these potential new team members fit our culture or not. No, if you remember in our conversation of episode one on this whole series, we did this hard work because we were growing so rapidly and we were starting new locations and we wanted to have cultural consistency between our locations.
And so we felt like we had a culture worth replicating and that was really the pressure for us to say, “We gotta figure this out” because we tried, like a lot of churches in multi-site, early on in our journey, we tried to bring some people in from the outside because we were growing exponentially as a church. So we were growing exponentially as a staff too. So we were adding new team members and we’d add a new team member and put them in a new location and it just didn’t work, because they weren’t carrying our culture. They were bringing other culture in with them. And we’d look at it and say, “Man, they’re just not thinking the way we think. They’re not making decisions the way we make decisions. They’re not treating people the way we would treat people.”
And so we started transferring staff that were at healthy campuses to new locations and backfilling from the outside new people into existing strong cultures. And so that was a real big shift with us in multi-site, but the bigger shift was getting to the point where you can actually write all this down, articulate it, and then actually tangibly interview for it. So I would say in addition, one of the things that makes this difficult in church world, Sean, is when you’re collecting team members who are coming from different parts of the country or even different kinds of church backgrounds with different experiences, we found that they may use the same words we use, but they actually mean different things than what we mean. So it’s forced us to slow down and go even slower than what we were going in our hiring process and really dig into the cultural stuff, be able to clearly articulate it.
Sean:
It’s interesting right now. I don’t think a lot of that has even changed based on what I’m hearing from churches today. And right now, as you talk, Paul, I’m thinking about both our churches here in North America, and then I think about some of the conversations I’ve had with church leaders in other parts of the world, UK, South Africa, Australia, places like that, where it’s less common for just individuals who are part of our church or even outside of our church to think, “I wanna work in a church.” It’s just not part of their culture within their country. And so from most of the church leaders, I hear a couple of common things right now. For one, hiring new staff is really hard. It’s just hard to find the people to fill staff roles. And churches, because of that, are pretty commonly looking outside of the organization for people right now.
And I think a lot of that’s due to the leadership pipeline gap. Probably one of the top two questions we’ve gotten over the last several years has been, how do we do better at developing leaders internally? So that’s true of churches of all sizes, all across the world. Then they add to that challenge, once we do find somebody, onboarding somebody onto the staff team so that they see that higher workout long-term, that is an ongoing challenge too. And I’ll bet some of our listeners right now are hearing all of that, just kind of nodding their heads. Yep, we’ve been through that too. When we dig into the reasons why some of the new staff didn’t work out, it really comes back to competency. The person could do the job. It’s usually not character either, although sometimes that comes up or just something was a character issue we didn’t know about.
It’s typically the fit. They just behave differently than the team behaves, and that’s hard to put a finger on until after the fact if you don’t have those behaviors already identified, which by the way, Paul, you know this, that’s the most expensive way to learn this, right? You’ve spent a ton of months, a big chunk of salary, and sometimes an outside search process, and then you have a hard exit conversation, all from something that you could have probably identified in the hiring process had you been clear on your culture already. And I’d say the same thing is true on the management side. We ask churches through our Unstuck Teams assessment to self-assess their performance reviews and how they manage under-performance. And both of those are consistently near the bottom in self-assessment. And I don’t think those are unique to churches, those issues, organizational issues across the board, but churches feel it more intensely because the relational stakes are higher and the accountability muscles that we have within church leadership are usually weaker.
You’re sitting in these conversations at Sun Valley all the time. Why do you think reviews, from your perspective, and underperformance are so hard in a church context specifically?
Paul:
Well, I think you’re onto something. I think it’s important to acknowledge that ministry is relational in the very nature of what it is, right? So it’s not surprising to hear you say what you’re saying, that churches are elevating and escalating in the conversation that you’re talking to. Church staff members have a tendency to have a stronger relational skillset and a weaker performance or organizational skillset. That’s a general true statement across the board. I can remember there’s a church I was working with this year doing their staffing and structure. One of the things we’ll do is we’ll take the senior leadership team and we’ll actually plot the entire senior leadership team on a personality profile graph, essentially, because you see the strengths, weaknesses of the team, what’s missing, what’s the team designed for? Think football, if you had a football team of just offensive linemen and a quarterback, that’s great, but who are you handing the ball off to and who’s gonna catch the ball and actually score? So you gotta have different players on a team with different skillsets.
And this team, kinda north and south, if you think about a line running horizontally, north of that line would be much more organizational, performance oriented, project oriented, south of that line would be much more people-oriented, relational in nature. The entire senior leadership team was south of that line. Very people-oriented, very relationally oriented. Just naturally wired up that way. And that’s a very true thing we see across the board with churches as we talk to senior staff at churches all across the country. The nature of what ministry is, is relational. I mean, most people got into ministry because their life was changed by Jesus. They wanna be a part of seeing that same thing happen in the lives of other people. It’s fantastic.
Sean:
Right.
Paul:
But ministry naturally attracts people who are people, people. And church staff who are naturally more people-oriented than they are project-oriented have a tendency to choose relationships over progress. So that can look like not wanting to wound somebody. Like you and I are on a team together. We love one another. We’re sharing our lives together. Man, we’re not just coworkers; we’re friends. You’ve been in my home. I’ve been in your home. I know your kids’ names and vice versa, right? And so I don’t wanna wound you because I love you. You’re my friend. We’re coworkers. We’re taking the ball, moving it forward in the kingdom together, and we’re doing spiritual work that’s worth giving our lives to. So I may not really tell you the full truth. In fact, that’s really common in church world. I love you so much, I’m not gonna tell you the whole truth, which is weird because in no other relationship that matters do we do that.
So, or we delay and we put off difficult conversations because we don’t wanna hurt the person, or if we’re honest with ourselves, we delay and we put off the conversations because we’re uncomfortable having the conversation, right? It makes us squirm a little bit inside. So there’s a reason they’re called difficult conversations. It’s because they’re actually difficult. So people, we choose relationships over progress a lot of times, and we can’t lead ourselves through our own emotions associated with comforting and addressing this. And we end up enabling all kinds of bad behaviors that violate and erode our team culture or a poor performance by a team member, and enabling those things we’re actually unintentionally putting a lid on our church. So because we love people so much, and because we have a tendency to pull punches and not be fully honest and straightforward with them, we may allow bad behavior to continue in small ways that then grow up to provide really bad results for the whole thing.
And the scriptures actually teach us … We’ll go that way for a second, man. I think scriptures actually teach us feedback’s a gift, right? The wounds of a brother are actually a blessing. And frankly, there’s way too much at stake, Sean, with our calling to not do what’s best for the church, even if it means having difficult conversations. Add to that, that working at a church is weird. And I think we gotta acknowledge that. I mean, you’ve chosen to stack your spiritual life, your family life, your friendships, and your employment all in one stack. And that takes a great deal of humility, intention, and self-leadership to know what hat you’re wearing at any given time.
And frankly, I’d remind us that in the Gospel of John, Jesus came full of grace and truth, and it’s never loving not to tell people the truth. And the truth isn’t designed to be wielded as a weapon to hurt people. It’s designed to actually set people free if they can receive it. So it’s not one or the other. You don’t have to be an ogre and go around and wield the truth like a hammer and hit everybody between the eyes with it. Truth is supposed to be a blessing. It’s supposed to set you free. It’s supposed to help you and lighten your burden, right? But you also don’t need to go around afraid to tell the truth to people, afraid to hurt them. You gotta do what’s good for the church. And if it’s good for the church, it’s gonna be good for the team member.
Sean:
It takes me back to the Brene Brown quote, that clarity is kindness, right? And I think all that we’re swirling around here is really a clarity issue. If your culture isn’t clear, you’re not gonna hire for it, right? There’s nothing to interview against. So then what you do as a pastor is you end up falling back on your gut feeling. And we’ve talked about this before on the podcast, very few pastors and church leaders wanna make people decisions just based on intuition. So if your culture isn’t clear, you can’t onboard, you can’t hire for it, you can’t do reviews around it either. But once you’ve clarified those behaviors, all three of those things get easier. I wouldn’t say easy, but they definitely get simpler.
Paul, let’s start to kinda explore some of the solutions here and I’m gonna take these one at a time. Starting with recruiting and hiring, at Sun Valley, you’ve built the distinctives into these processes for you. Just walk us through that. What does a candidate actually experience?
Paul:
So sure, Sean, let’s imagine if you’re interviewing at Sun Valley, there was a time where I could be involved in every interview, now because of the scope and scale of things I can’t, but I still choose to be involved in every director-level and up. And the part of the interview I’m involved with is the interview for our team culture. We interview for lots of different things and have lots of conversations that a lot of people are involved in, but that one’s the one that I still feel ownership of because I really feel called to guard the gate when it comes to our team culture. And so I’m still involved in that conversation. And so I’ll just walk you through how that whole thing rolls. If we were doing that, you would receive a one-page overview of our team culture from the gal that does all of our initial vetting, and we’d set that call up, and it would actually be a phone call.
And I intentionally don’t look at their resume. I’m not interviewing for competency, so I don’t need to deal with that. And I don’t do a Zoom call. I don’t wanna see what they look like. I have all kinds of confirmation bias that happens in my life. And so I literally just wanna get on a call with them, and I’ll ask them how it’s going, how the interview process is going, what they’ve enjoyed about it so far. And I just kinda lay out for them, “Hey, the conversation we’re gonna have today is gonna be around our team culture because the last thing I want for you as a potential team member is to move your family here and realize, oh my goodness, they’re really serious about this stuff. I’m not sure this is who I am, who I wanna be, and what I wanna be a part of.” So I’m like, “I wanna protect you as a candidate from that, and I also wanna protect us from hiring someone that’s not a good fit. So this is gonna be helpful for both of us.”
And I just tee the whole thing up. I’m like, “Every two years, we do a conversation with our staff teams, and maybe they’re interviewing for our East Mesa location.” And I’ll say, “Hey, our East Mesa team, every two years, they have a conversation about our staff culture.” They go through a facilitated conversation about all eight of our distinctives, and they just literally go through and say, “Red, yellow, or green. Which ones of these are green? If every team at Sun Valley behaved this way, we would be more like what the Lord’s call is to be. Which ones are yellow?” You know, there’s been some drift on these things that we need to get back in line over the next 180 days. And there’s eight of them, man. So chances are, one of them’s gonna be bringing up the rear, you’re gonna be the worst at this one right here. So which ones would be red?
And so I just ask them, “Why don’t you walk through all eight of these distinctives with me? Which ones are green? These are natural to you. They’re second nature to you. You’re not gonna have to think about these. You’re gonna be leading out of who you are. Which ones are yellow? You’re gonna have to pay attention to them. It’s gonna take some intention.” And then there’s eight of them, man, so there’s probably one that’s red that you’re like, “Yeah, I’m gonna have to genuinely work at that one.” And what I’m trying to do at the front end of that conversation, Sean, is free them up to be honest and to be open, and then not just go down the line and just green, green, green, green, green, green and try to impress me on a call.
In fact, every once in a while, and if you’re listening to this and you’re interviewing at Sun Valley, here’s a secret sauce for you. Do not go down that list and just go green, green, green. If you do, I’m gonna text your hiring manager and say, “Don’t hire them. They’re not self-aware. We can’t risk having them on a team.” I’m giving them permission to be straightforward and honest. So we go through all those eight distinctives, and along the conversation, I give them feedback on how those things work their way out on our team and how we behave. Kinda give them a sneak peek behind the curtain of Sun Valley.
And at the end of the whole thing, I literally try to talk them out of working at Sun Valley. I’ll literally say, “Hey, Sean, I’ve never had a conversation with anybody about this who thinks, wow, that place sounds terrible to work at.”
Sean:
Right.
Paul:
In fact, the opposite’s usually true at the end of that hour-long conversation. And I just say, “Be careful what you ask for, because you might get it. And I want you to understand, if this isn’t who you are,” and I give some real concrete examples of how those eight distinctives work their way out and how we would expect them to behave. If this really isn’t who you are and you wouldn’t be leading out of who God’s made you, wired you, and called you to be, you’re just gonna hate working here. And frankly, we’re gonna hate working with you. And so, like, save yourself some pain, brother, and opt out. And the right people lean into that, and the right people lean away, and both of those are good answers.
Sean:
Paul, we’re consultants, and we do a lot of that sort of red, yellow, green dot kind of conversation. And the best thing that comes out of that is when something’s red or something’s yellow, we ask, “Well, what’s it gonna take to move it to green?” Do you ever have that conversation with new hires? Like, just that self-awareness of, “I might be a red today, or I might be a yellow.” Are they able to then begin to dig into, “Here’s what I think I can do to move that more towards a green”?
Paul:
Absolutely. And remember, this is an interview. They’re not even on the team yet. So they’re not on staff, and so that’s an absolute normal conversation. If someone says, “I think this is the one I’m red in.” I’ll just ask, “Do you think you could get that to yellow?” And tangibly, what do you think it would actually take for you to get it to yellow? And so what I’m listening for, hey, how honest are they? How vulnerable? How humble? ‘Cause humility is the kind of soil that all the other fruit of the spirit grow up in, right? And so I’m learning how self-aware they are. I’m learning, can they diagnose a situation and move the ball forward in their own life? Are they the right kind of people?
Sean:
That’s good. All right. So once somebody’s hired, what happens after that? ‘Cause you guys have got a real onboarding process built around this also.
Paul:
So I’ve alluded to this earlier in these episodes. Their first week, two weeks, they kinda get a crash course in our culture. So you’ve just joined the team. It’s video-based. We’ve shot it in our studio. It doesn’t matter what campus you’re on. Geographically, there’s no barrier here. And so they just go into their employment portal, and there’s eight videos they have to watch. And if they watch it, it automatically goes in their file as though they’ve watched it. So they watch all eight of these videos. They have a participant guide that they’re following along with and they’re filling out. And then they meet with their supervisor after they’ve watched all eight of those videos. And they have much more intimate, honest, and casual conversations about all eight of those distinctives. It’s kind of a crash course. They’re still new to the room, so we don’t expect them to be experts in it quite yet, but we also wanna set them up for success.
And then Chad, our lead pastor, and I do new staff orientation pretty much once a quarter where we’ll spend a half a day with all of our new staff, no matter, again, what campus they’re on. And we kinda go through our story, our philosophy and approach to ministry, and we go through our culture and we allow people to ask anything they wanna ask. And we have some great conversations about this as a team. So a lot of on the front end is exposure to it. We don’t expect them to be completely proficient in it, but we’re setting up the language and the expectations and the boundaries. So as life happens in the months to come, we can come back to them and say, “Hey, remember we said this with one another.”
Sean:
I love that orientation idea. I think the proximity to you guys, you guys are a larger church, so proximity and being multi-site as well is just physically harder to get close to you and Chad for, especially for your newer staff. I think that’s true in smaller churches too, though, probably more just because of the pace of ministry. Proximity can get hard, you know? And so just to intentionally set aside, we have some time for our senior leaders who the culture is flowing out of. It’s coming from what they value first, right? We have some time for the senior leaders to be near our staff team, near our leaders so that they can hear, understand, catch the vision for the importance of that culture. I really love that step. That’s an easy add, I think, for a lot of churches.
Paul:
And candidly, Sean, if they’re a kids coordinator on a campus and their scope of responsibility in the whole scheme of things is quite limited, they’re still in the room because they’re a new employee. We’re not doing this with just senior staff. We’re doing this with every single hire.
Sean:
That’s good. All right. Last thing then, reviews. Paul, you go through, you rate every staff member kind of green, yellow, red on each distinctive as part of the review. Tell us how that whole process actually works.
Paul:
Every year, there’s a review. It happens in November. And I would go so far as to say this. If you’re doing reviews at your church, which I hope you are, and there’s lots of different ways to do those. Some churches do 360 reviews, all kinds of different things. But they’re surprised at the end of the year. You’re not doing a review, you’re doing a reveal. And so a review is by definition a review. It’s looking back. How did things go? It’s a rearview mirror conversation. So if you’re surprising an employee, it means either you’ve not been honest with them along the way or they don’t know how to listen very well along the way. Both of those could be true.
And so in those reviews, we’re having conversations and scoring around a competency, like their job and how well are they proficient at their job. And then we’re scoring on their goals, you know, what did they say they were gonna get done? Did they actually get it done? And then our culture, all eight of these distinctives, and each employee does a self-review, and they score themselves first. And then that goes to the supervisor, and the supervisor scores them. And they may see things the same way, and they may see things differently. But there’s fields that the supervisor has to fill out to say, “Hey, you see yourself this way. I see you this way. This is why.” And if there’s a difference, we expect the explanation on the why. It’s gotta be written down. Because again, if it’s not written down, it’s some conversation, it turns into he said, she said kinda junk. And no one wants that.
Sean:
That’s good. All right. So if you’re a pastor, you’re a leader who knows this is the type of thing you really need to introduce at your church, I just wanna share a few thoughts to get you started. Specifically, let me start with hiring. And I’d encourage you to start with hiring because getting it wrong there I think can be so incredibly costly. I mean, you spend a lot of time looking at, discerning, is this the right person to hire? You’re gonna spend a lot of money on it. So if it’s wrong, you really pay the price.
So one thing that comes to mind for me, sit down and write a one-page summary of your behaviors and provide that to your candidates early in the process. Give them a chance, like Paul’s talked about through their process, to read it, go through it, and an early idea of whether your culture is a good fit for them, not just whether they’re a fit for you.
And then add that dedicated interview focused on culture. One round with specific questions and somebody on the team who’s really assigned to listen for answers and whether this person’s a good cultural fit. I’d be upfront with them in the process that culture training is part of the job here. For the right candidate, that’s gonna be really encouraging for them. They’ll lean into the process even more because of that.
Second, set a plan just for the first 30 days. Whatever training materials require new staff to work through, develop those. Don’t let it be just kind of a self-guided process. Give them something actually to complete with reflection questions so they’ve had time to think about it, not just watch a video, but also think through it and answer themselves. And then put a dedicated conversation on the calendar between the new hire and their supervisor to walk through it together. Don’t do just kind of a hallway conversation. A genuinely scheduled meeting on the calendar with an agenda is very important.
Paul, where would you encourage leaders to start when it comes to reviews specifically?
Paul:
Sean, there’s a lot of places to go with this, man, and you can spend a lot of time, effort, energy, and money on this. There’s a lot of sophisticated tools that you can get to. A couple of principles that I think are really important. One is don’t surprise people. Don’t let the review be a revealing. Let it be a review. It should be like a good culmination of healthy, consistent, one-on-one conversations you’ve been having throughout the year. So I would start a review in January, you know? Like, are we gonna have one-on-one meetings? Are we gonna do it every month? Are we gonna do it bimonthly? What are we gonna talk about in our one-on-one meetings? What’s good for the employee to help them succeed? What’s good for you as the supervisor? Lay all that out on the front end, so that way when you get to the review, the review is just a culmination of the conversation you’ve been having all year. You’re kinda putting a period on that whole thing.
And people walking in, if they’re nervous walking into a review, as a supervisor, you haven’t done a good job. They shouldn’t be nervous. It’s just another conversation I’ve been having all year long. I know Sean is gonna be straightforward, loving, and honest with me. I know he’s gonna ask me about my family. I know he’s probably gonna pray for me. I know he’s probably gonna encourage me of the things I’m doing really well. And there’s probably gonna be a few things that I need to continue to grow in because I’m not face-to-face with Jesus yet, and I’m not done. I think there’s some principles in all that. I hope that people can kinda let the pressure out of the room. And so it’s just a good, healthy, ongoing conversation. And it’s a period at the end of the sentence.
So I think you gotta deal with character, chemistry, and culture. You gotta deal with competency. Those four Cs somewhere in there need to be baked into the conversation. People deserve that kind of helpful feedback. You gotta decide, are we gonna do 360 reviews or not? Some people love those; some people hate them. That’s your choice. It’s your house, so you get to decide. I think the bottom line value though, Sean, is honest, helpful feedback to your team to help them succeed in your cultural context. Bottom line, be consistent, be clear. Every team member can get better. The largest room in the world’s the room for improvement. And that starts with me.
Sean:
That’s really good. A little bit different question. Is there anything you’d tell a leader not to do? Any landmines they need to be aware of that you would just, from my experience, make sure that you’re aware of this, don’t do this.
Paul:
Gut response here, Sean. I think we’re talking about onboarding and reviews. So if you’ve not, and we’re putting those two things together with some intention here, onboarding, if you’re not setting clear expectations of your culture early, if you’re not coaching those cultural expectations consistently, you can’t review to them at the end of the year later. You can’t hold people accountable for things you haven’t clearly articulated and consistently coached. That’s not good leadership. That’s not blessing people, caring for people, developing people. And frankly, if you do that, if you’re holding people accountable to cultural boundaries that you haven’t set and you haven’t coached, you’re the problem, not them.
Sean:
Paul, this has been a great discussion. Hopefully some really practical things that pastors can do after listening today. What’s the most important thing that you hope they take away from this conversation?
Paul:
I would say probably when it comes to onboarding and coaching and evaluating your culture and your team, as a leader, it really is your job to guard the gate when it comes to the culture of your team. You get to choose who joins your team. And with every addition to your team, you’re either strengthening or eroding your team culture. You get to choose. And so yeah, I think that’s where I’d land.
Sean:
I underline the same thing. Every hire is a culture decision, right? Whether you’re approaching it that way or not, you’re either adding somebody who makes the team more like who you said you wanna be, or you’re adding somebody who pulls a little bit in the other direction. There really is no neutral hire. And that’s true every time you don’t address something in a review. If you sit in a review and you don’t address a lack of culture fit or a behavior that’s not right, that’s a decision too. So this isn’t about building an HR process. It’s about realizing that you’re already shaping culture through who you bring onto the team and what you address or don’t address. The question, though, is, are you doing it purposefully or is it happening by neglect?
So if you want the process behind all of this, all of the things that we’re talking through, the “Culture Development Playbook” is in our Resource Hub. It’s built on what Paul and the team at Sun Valley actually did to build this into their process. And it walks you through how to build your culture around hiring, onboarding and reviews. So we’ll link to all of that in the show notes.
If developing your culture shaping behaviors is something bigger than you can tackle right now on your own, this is exactly the type of thing we’re helping churches with every week, and we’d love to help you as well. You can start a conversation with us about that if you just go to theunstuckgroup.com.
Next week, Paul and I are gonna close out this whole series. We’re talking about what happens when a staff culture becomes a church culture and how Sun Valley pushes theirs out to their volunteer leaders in congregation and how it turned into a leadership pipeline that keeps feeding the staff team. I think that’s a great teaser for pastors because that is a huge question that most have. So subscribe so you don’t miss an episode, and we’ll see you back here on the podcast next week.
As a leader, it really is your job to guard the gate when it comes to the culture of your team. [episode 471] #unstuckchurch Share on X
Leave a Reply