Church Staffing Oxymorons (Part 2)
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In Part 2 of our church staffing series, Sean and I tackle another challenging oxymoron teams are facing. You have great people on your staff, but do you have the right people on the wrong team?
In this episode we unpack:
- How to assess your current staff leaders beyond basic performance metrics
- Understanding the four levels of leadership capacity (10s, 50s, 100s, 1000s)
- The importance of evaluating roles separately from the people in them
- Why designing your structure for future growth matters
- Tools and assessments for understanding staff wiring and capacity
Plus, we discuss the value of outside perspective when making tough staffing decisions, share practical next steps for leaders, and explain how to avoid creating the same challenges in future hiring. We also address the personal growth needed from senior leaders to build and maintain healthy staff structures.
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More Episodes in This Series
- The Understaffed Team With Too Many People – Episode 382
- The Perfect Staff Structure For Never -Episode 384
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Transcript
Sean:
Before we get into this week’s episode, I want to mention an upcoming opportunity for leaders at large multi-site churches. Our East Coast Multi-site Leadership Cohort kicks off April 1st and registration for it closes February 21st. The multi-site cohort starts with a two-day gathering at Transformation Church in the Charlotte area, where you’ll connect with eight to 10 like-minded multi-site churches and the Unstuck team. The cohort continues throughout the year with quarterly video calls, Unstuck support and opportunities to continue the connection with other churches. To learn more and sign up today, just go to theunstuckgroup.com/cohorts. That’s theunstuckgroup.com/cohorts.
Well, welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean, your host. Here again with my teammate and managing director at The Unstuck Group, Amy Anderson. Amy, our consulting team at Unstuck has been really busy since the start of 2025. Just wonder if you have any stories to celebrate from churches that you’ve been working with recently.
Amy:
Sean, what’s been fun about this year is the number of repeat churches that I’ve been able to work with. Right before the holiday, four churches that I’ve served in the past reached out and wanted to bring Unstuck back in, and all of them reached out within 48 hours of one another. It’s just been so fun to reconnect and hear their stories, their wins. One of those churches is in Athens, Georgia, Athens Church in Athens, Georgia, and this Athens, it sounds familiar. This was North Point’s First Strategic Partner Church that launched, I think it was 20 years ago in September. We had the opportunity when I met them to work with them back in 2019, to put together their strategic ministry and staffing plans together.
And then we walked with them through this last year, I didn’t do this as much as Tony did, for their first multi-site launch, which is an amazing story for another day. And now I’m heading back there in a few months to do our normal process with them again. That’s actually a normal rhythm for a large church. When you first go through our process, you end up with this long list. It’s just loaded up. And because you have clarity on where you’re going, you just start to work through that list of items. The Athens team has some great strategic leaders on their team, so they were able to work through all those plans, and now they’re ready to do it again. So I’m excited to head back there. And then I slack this to you the other day, but I’m working with a great church in Durango. Again, this is the fourth year.
Sean:
Durango, Colorado, right?
Amy:
That’s right. The only bummer is that Delta doesn’t fly direct there anymore, so I have to kind of piece it together and take another airline. This is my fourth year working with them. Pastor Jeff just sent me an update so I could stay in tune with their story. And he showed me their year over year growth. And, Sean, they’re a smaller church, but they have quadrupled. It was just remarkable. It just made me smile. So there’s been new churches too, but it’s been really fun to engage with the churches that we’ve got to serve in the past and watch how fun their stories of just leading unstuck churches. So how about you? What have you been up to?
Sean:
Yeah, I love that. Well, speaking of new churches this last week, I had a great opportunity to work with a great team in the Pittsburgh area at the Table Church. God is doing some really great stuff at their church. They baptized 170 people last year, which was 16% of their total attendance. It was pretty remarkable. They’re a multi-site church, so we’re helping them kind of develop their multi-site model for future health. But we walked away from our assessment just with a really great sense of optimism for what’s next in their church.
Amy:
I love that.
Sean:
I’m excited to continue that process with them. So really looking forward to that. Well, this week, you know, Amy, we find churches are often hiring from a reactive kind of “we need someone now” approach, but they’re actually more strategic ways to staff that actually support your ministry vision.
Amy:
Yeah. I mean, ideally as leaders, we see the big picture and we’re building the team that will help us get to where God has called our church to go. But I think for so many churches, they just seem to be in this constant reactive mode when it comes to building teams and being reactive. It’s exhausting and it really hinders your ability to execute a plan. I get it, because there’s no faster pace, constant relentless pace than in the church world, but operating without that plan really is exhausting.
Sean:
Well, let’s kick off the second episode in the series here with another oxymoron that we see all the time. The church is saying something like this: we have the right wrong people. That is, we have some really great people on this team, but they aren’t right for the roles that they’re in on the team. So let’s talk about it. How do we fix it when we know we have good people, but in the wrong seats?
Amy:
Yeah. I think before we dive into talking about how to fix it, I think we should spend just a few minutes on some of the signals that indicate that you have the right wrong people. How a pastor begins to recognize this is an issue. In times of growth, for example, like so many of the churches we’re serving right now, they’re in this fast-moving pace, and they’re just plugging holes dealing with urgent staffing needs, maybe consumed by them, but they don’t have staffing plan for how the organization needs to adapt as they get larger. In other words, they’re staffing to gaps instead of staffing to a strategy. If you’re feeling like that, that’s an indication that we might not have a plan. And often when I see churches in this scenario, sometimes they’re brave and they just kind of put a pause on hiring even though they’re desperate because they didn’t have clarity on what they really needed to be hiring for.
Here’s another one for our listeners. Your team is starting to voice their fatigue because over time they’ve started wearing multiple hats to keep the ministry moving forward. And by the way, I think this is so common coming out of COVID. And because people started losing focus, they started becoming generalists on the team. And then sometimes, I just had this with one of my churches, that the team members who were kind of wearing multiple hats as this church is working to kind of refocus the ministry teams and get people back to singular roles. Some of the team members, they’ve gotten attached to the things that they’ve been asked to pick up. They feel more valuable because they’ve been doing A and B, and now they don’t want to let go of those responsibilities. And the outcome of all this, I think is just a huge leadership void on the team. Teams end up with a full staff, but they have huge leadership gaps and also sometimes huge skill gaps. So those are some of the symptoms I see out there.
Sean:
Yeah. That’s good. Let me add another to the list for growing churches. Sometimes, you have a staff member who used to knock it out of the park in their role, but as the church has grown, the needs of their role have outgrown their personal leadership.
Amy:
That’s so true.
Sean:
Right? And now where you used to see great results, you just see frustration and burnout in that person. Still a great person and probably the right person for the team, but maybe in a different role in this season.
Amy:
Great example.
Sean:
Okay, Amy, so when churches recognize that this is happening, where do they start?
Amy:
Well, to bottom line it, you need to get to a place where you can respond instead of react. So here’s what reacting looks and sounds like. You’re asking the question, where do we find the right people? This is kind of a secondary issue. It’s reactionary. And if you’re asking this, you’re probably already behind the eight ball If you’re finding you need to add and you don’t have anyone you’re thinking of, you know, where they would come from. Or another example when there’s a resignation, the response sounds like this, well, we can move so and so, he could pick this up and so and so could shift over here. And then there’s a big brainstorm on how to reshuffle the staff deck to cover the gap. And, okay, that’s okay if you’re thinking about a plan for a month or two while you’re trying to navigate this change. And often that’s the intent, that’s what they intend to do. But two months can quickly evolve into a culture of just shuffling and reshuffling the deck.
Sean:
Of course.
Amy:
With that, I don’t know if you remember this Sean, but we had this challenge at the Unstuck Group a few years back, just to kind of peel the curtain back. But we needed to add another leader to our team. Our work was growing, and back then, Tony, our founder and lead strategist and I, were just beginning to talk about plans for succession. It wasn’t like immediate, but it was coming. Like many lead pastors, you kind of get a sense when you’re entering that season. And so you want to make sure you have time to make a solid succession plan for the future. So part of that conversation when we were talking about adding a team member was about a future Tony, a future Amy, and then we also had a need for a strong content developer on our team. Pretty soon we were looking for the future face of Unstuck who had a content bent like Tony and a galvanizing bent like Amy, who is entrepreneurial with a strong leadership church background. And suddenly, you remember Tiffany, our sales and marketing director, she called foul, like, stop the insanity. We cannot try to find all of those things in the next hire. What do we need right now? And then we all calmed down and what we really needed was another full-time consultant, and that’s what we hired. But I understand how you can get into this creative storming to try to solve all the problems in a really creative way, but I think reactive hiring, this is what it gets down to for me. It creates this tangle in your organization, and sometimes you get a knot that is very difficult to undo. So the solution is to get to a place where you can respond, not react.
Sean:
All right. So what does responding actually look like then?
Amy:
Yeah. So this is hard to cover in a podcast, but let me move through some next steps on how you can start getting to a place of responding. If you are in this place where you feel like you have good people, but maybe in the wrong seat – the right, wrong people – first thing to do is take a step back and do an assessment of your current staff leaders. On last week’s podcast, I had you do an assessment on just staffing and structure overall. You should have written down a long list of what’s right, what’s working, what’s not working, what’s confusing, what’s missing. This assessment today is actually on your people and specifically the leaders in your organization. This oxymoron about the right, wrong people is really focused on the leaders of your organization.
So I encourage you to look at their competence in their current role, their character, their chemistry, and their leadership capacity. This is actually what we guide every church through when we go through the unstuck process. We just facilitate it with a small group of people. Saying that I would encourage you not to just have this talk with yourself if you’re the leader or executive pastor. I would invite a few people into that conversation so that you can get multiple perspectives on each person. The purpose is really to have an honest conversation, what I like to call a diagnostic conversation, so that you have clarity on the gaps that are pointing to them being the person you want on the team, but in a different seat. And my guess is that you’re not going to have big character or chemistry or even alignment to your culture issues with these people.
It is likely a competence issue, like you were using in your example before Sean, or it’s a leadership capacity issue. But, this is my caution, if you don’t have a process for doing this, or honestly, if this feels out of your wheelhouse, you need to get someone who has these skills to help you. This is not an activity you do and just take a flyer. A good resource I would recommend is Pat Lencioni’s book called The Ideal Team Player. And you know, my words are evaluate competence, character, chemistry – he talks about the same things. He just calls them hungry, humble, and smart like people smart. But a resource like this will give you some tangible things to evaluate versus just coming up with your own definitions of what competence means in character and chemistry.
Sean:
That’s good.
Amy:
So I would evaluate that. Do whatever scoring system you want to do. The whole point is about the conversation because you’re trying to diagnose what are the gaps? Why is this person, this good person not fitting in this role anymore?
So then the next conversation is to evaluate each leader’s leadership capacity. Not their potential, but where are they actually leading today? And how we do this is we base it on Exodus 18. So there’s four options for each leader. Are they a leader of tens? Now don’t get married to the number, get married to the concept.
Sean:
Yeah, sure.
Amy:
These are people who lead by example. They model to others the way things should be done, but they’re still primarily doing the work themselves. Next would be leaders of fifties. These are the people who lead other people. They recruit and build teams of volunteers. When they are with their teams, they are observing and directing, very different than modeling. The third level is leaders of hundreds. And these are people who lead other leaders, who lead other people. And the primary thing they do is develop people. At this level, people who are truly leading at this level have a specialty in leadership. In other words, if this was your level of leadership and I hired you, I could put you over adult discipleship, but I could also put you over our weekend experience, and I probably could also put you over next gen, because it’s not about what this leader knows or does. It’s about their ability to identify and develop leaders around them. So different than the leader of fifties, and then the leader of thousands. These are the people who lead through vision and really are the people who are catalytic in an organization. So just look at the leaders you have now, and how are they leading today, really is a good starting point next to the character, chemistry, competence evaluation.
Sean:
That’s a really good assessment, Amy. And exactly what we do when we work with churches through this process is lead them through those conversations. So after, if a church goes through that assessment together, then what’s next? What comes next after that?
Amy:
Do you think it’s wise for me to tell everybody exactly what we do? That’s kind of what I’m doing, isn’t it?
Sean:
Yeah, yeah.
Amy:
But, really, they are helpful conversations. Once you’ve done that assessment on your leaders, now I want you to put that work down, and I want you to actually evaluate your current structure, not the people anymore, but the roles and how your ministry is organized. And here’s some questions you can ask yourself. Do you have the right leadership roles? Again, not the right leaders, but the right roles. We aren’t thinking about people in them yet. And again, I can’t tell you how many leadership roles you need, because that really depends on your ministry. But for large churches, at a minimum, you generally need a leader over your operations, your weekend or front door experience, your discipleship steps, and your next gen ministry. And often large churches bring on an executive pastor somewhere between 1,000-2,000 people, someone to really take that vision and integrate it and make sure we’re putting action to it.
So if you’re a lead pastor, you need leadership roles around you that allow you to focus on those four things that you can’t delegate, which is to be the spiritual leader and over the teaching, you need to be over the culture, primary vision caster, and leaders of leaders. So this is really your opportunity to design the structure that you think your team needs to get to.
Once you have that done, that’s when you finally need to look at the roles and your staff leadership list with the evaluation you’ve done, and ask yourself, do you have the right leaders to fill those roles? My guess would be that the right wrong people are not the people to fill those top leadership roles. That’s what your gut’s been telling you. And honestly, if you keep them in that role, that’s a higher level of leadership that they don’t have the capacity for anymore. Or like you said, the role has just grown beyond their abilities. It’s no fun for you, and honestly, it’s no fun for them. Doing this work will give you the beginning of a plan that you can now work towards. Better yet, if you’re taking time to think it through, if you want to do the 3.0 version of this exercise, develop your structure for your church that would be double the size it is now. This would give you a longer term plan to tweak and work towards. So that’s the hard work of figuring out what to do with the right, wrong people. But because they feel like the right people, my guess is there’s still a role. But most churches I work with, it’s at this leadership status that we just don’t have high enough capacity leaders in some of the roles anymore.
Sean:
Before we move on, I want to take just a moment and thank this week’s podcast sponsor Planning Center. Planning Center is an all-in-one software that helps you organize your ministries and care for your church. It has easy to use, efficient platforms of products where you can organize event details, create signup forms, schedule volunteers automatically and much more. You can actually get started for free today at planningcenter.com. That’s planningcenter.com.
Amy, here’s what I’ve found to be so tough for church leaders. As we start thinking about these roles, we see people, right?
Amy:
Yes.
Sean:
And these people are our family. That’s what it feels like. So navigating these staffing issues can be really difficult to do on your own. So just to kind of address this, here’s a few things that come to mind for me. First, get an outside voice. But it’s really hard to be objective when you start evaluating these people that you care about so much. So find someone that you can bring from the outside with an outside perspective and help you get the right people in the right roles, both for the long-term health of the church, but really truly for the long-term health of the individual. They know when they’re not fitting in the role correctly.
Secondly, I think help people better understand their God given wiring and capacity. All of us are gifted differently, and as we read 1 Corinthians 12, we see God designed us all to be different parts of the body. So understanding our fit is really critical to being able to feel like we can fully contribute to the work that God’s called us to. And we all want to do that. We use assessments. Amy, you’ve talked a lot about the process we go through. We use assessments like Leading From Your Strength, sometimes Working Genius, just to better understand how individuals are wired to contribute to ministry. So those are types of assessments you can use to help. And then lastly, I would say if the role, if the needs of the role change as the church grows or changes, then you need to reestablish the needs and expectations for that role. For instance, we’ve used this example before, but when your children’s ministry is smaller and has less kids, you may look for a person who’s gifted at working directly with kids, right? But as your children’s ministry grows and you have dozens or maybe hundreds of kids, you’re going to need a leader who’s great at building teams of adults who are great at working with kids.
Amy:
Right.
Sean:
As the needs of the role change, make sure you adapt the expectations of the role and write them down so that they’re clear for the team.
Amy:
That’s a great example, Sean. I can’t tell you how many times I have cast vision to say, you need to make sure these leaders understand they might be the adult discipleship director, they might be the kids pastor. But they are primarily a team builder at this stage of the game in the life of your church.
Sean:
Exactly. Well, Amy, any specific next steps that you’d like to encourage pastors to take today?
Amy:
Yeah, maybe a few thoughts. This is hard work. I appreciate you bringing the heart into it because it is, and this is work that you want to do slow, and you want to think it all through before you take your next steps publicly with any changes. But here’s some stuff to do during that slow time. I think self-awareness is really important. I often say as leaders, we need to look in the mirror first. So reflect on any ways that maybe you need to grow as a leader to prevent what’s preventable. That was a great example, which you just gave Sean. That’s one. Like, maybe we haven’t been clear on what the expectations for these roles are. It’s leadership that needs to bring clarity to that. So just look in the mirror and do an evaluation on yourself. Here’s what I see.
Here’s what I see sometimes: some pastors, when they look in the mirror, they recognize we’re just avoiding some necessary endings that need to happen. I get it. A lot of us are wired on the people side of the wheel, and these moves are hard when it’s dealing with people and friends. But if that’s yours, you might want to read a great book written many years ago called Necessary Endings by Dr. Henry Cloud. Ask yourself, am I moving too fast right now with these changes, or am I not moving fast enough? Because both can be hurtful to an organization. So I do want you to slow down and think this through, but there is a time where we are not moving fast enough and the staff is getting frustrated because everyone can kind of see what needs to happen, but none of them have decision rights to make those changes.
Another question: Are you over relying on the same competent go-getters and stretching them too thin or asking them to carry things that would be better suited to someone new? I’ve been in a year long coaching relationship with a great leader at a church in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and she just stepped into this new role, and she took over responsibility for kind of the weekend as well as communications, and she also had connections with her. So kind of that serving component. And right away I said, that doesn’t fit. That needs to go back to discipleship. And she’s like, I know. It’s just that I’ve been doing it.
And right now we don’t have, I don’t know if it was that they didn’t have the leader, or they just wanted me to keep it. But I just met with her today and we celebrated that Connections is now in its rightful place. And I had this little bit of a fear because she’s such a competent leader, she’s very good at what she does, that they would pile things on her because she can get things done. But that leads to burnout. And we don’t want to burn out our superstars. We want to keep them in their lane.
Fourth question, are you consistently hiring more people just like yourself? This, you mentioned the assessment we use leading from your strengths. I just did this with the church of about 30 staff members. 87% of them were on the people side of the wheel, and 13% were on the mission task. And that is the nature of what can happen if we don’t have visibility to the diversity of the team. If everyone is wired alike, then we probably have eight arms, but we’re missing a foot. We need to keep our team diverse. And then the last one, getting clear on your role in creating the issue, I think can help you avoid getting back into the same spot again after the next restructure. So getting clear on what we need to avoid going forward so we don’t end up back in this situation again.
Sean:
Well, Amy, that’s a really helpful summary. Great thoughts. Any final thoughts just to put a period on this episode today before we wrap up?
Amy:
Yeah, I think sometimes you need someone to verify or confirm your sense that you have great people in the wrong roles. Sometimes when it’s so personal as someone you’ve been serving in ministry with for a long time, it’s just hard to see it objectively. I remember our founder, Tony Morgan, used to say leaders see stuckness on the horizon first. So if you have that hunch or that feeling that you just can’t shake it, again, we’ve said it a couple times, it might help to have an outside process to walk you through this. We’re really good at that. I’m sure there are others as well. But it’ll also give you the confidence when you do have to make some of those harder calls, that this is not a flippant, reactive situation. It was one that we thought through, and now, we have a staffing plan to move forward.
Sean:
That’s very good. Well, thank you all for tuning into this week’s conversation. Maybe you feel stuck in a reactive cycle on staffing decisions like we’ve talked about today. If you do, you’re not alone. Many churches find themself making rushed staffing decisions in response to unexpected transitions, or sometimes sudden growth, or maybe even budget constraints. And those reactive decisions can often lead to strained teams, confused roles and missed opportunities just for alignment and unity within your team.
So what’s the solution to all of that? We want to discuss that more on our next free live webinar. It’s happening tomorrow, February 13th at 1:00 PM Eastern. We want to help you learn how to build a staffing master plan so you can be responsive rather than reactive, proactive rather than reactive. So we’ll share some insights to help you build a plan that supports your church’s vision and positions you for sustainable growth in the future. You can sign up to participate live, or just to get the video replay at theunstuckgroup.com/masterplan. Next week, we’re back with another brand new podcast episode. Until then, have a great week.
