Staffing Wisdom for Church Leaders (Part 2)
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Do you believe your current senior leadership team offers you your best chance to achieve the vision and mission God designed for your church to accomplish right now?
Before you start restructuring departments of your ministry, you need to clarify the role of the SLT and get the right people leading on it.
STACKING YOUR LEADERSHIP TEAM
In the second episode of our series on “Staffing Wisdom for Church Leaders,” Amy and I talk about stacking your leadership team with gifted and qualified people.
- Core tensions leaders face when building a team
- How to solve leadership problems
- How to determine leadership capacity
More Episodes in the “Staffing Wisdom for Church Leaders” Series:
Structure to the Strategy – Episode 351
Right People, Right Roles – Episode 353
Handling Misfits – Episode 354
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Sign up for the The Church Lawyers’ Client Member program today at thechurchlaywers.com
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Transcript
Sean:
Welcome to the Unstuck Church Podcast, where each week we are exploring what it means to be an unstuck church. Selecting people to serve on the senior leadership team is one of the most important decisions a senior pastor will make. Too often though pastors find themselves wondering if they have the right leaders around them. On this week’s podcast, Tony and Amy continue our series on staffing wisdom for church leaders with a conversation on how to select your senior leadership team. Before we get into today’s content, though, if you’re brand new to the podcast, head to theunstuckgroup.com/podcast and subscribe to get the episode show notes in your email. When you do each week, you’re gonna get resources to support that week’s episode, including our leader conversation guide and some bonus resources you won’t find anywhere else. Again, that’s theunstuckgroup.com/podcast. Now, before this week’s conversation, here’s Tony.
Tony:
The Church Lawyers Client Member Program was created for organizations just like yours. Their team of Christian legal professionals are personally called to empower and protect churches, ministries, and their leaders to fulfill their mission by providing biblically informed and ministry-focused legal solutions. Whether governance, employment, litigation, or other matters, let the Church Lawyers walk alongside you as you navigate legal issues facing your ministry. Sign up for the Church Lawyers Client Member Program today at thechurchlawyers.com.
Amy:
Well, welcome back to all of our listeners. Tony, it’s good to see you. We are in part two of our series on staffing wisdom for church leaders, which I think is a really great topic from my viewpoint. ’cause I get to work with churches so often on their structure. So I’m excited to dive into week two.
Tony:
And this week is gonna be a lot of fun because we’re talking about how to stack your leadership team with gifted and qualified people. And Amy, will you kick us off today? What are some of the core tensions church leaders face related to building a great leadership team?
Amy:
A few things come to mind for me on this one. When I work with senior pastors, I get a sense that the pastor doesn’t feel like he or she has the right leaders around them. They have great people around them, people they love, that they’ve served with for years, but they’re just sensing this lack of leadership capacity, and they’re wanting to find some different people to help them lead. And another tension that I see is this lack of action or urgency on the senior leadership team, meaning they aren’t sure what they should be meeting about, or the senior leadership team meetings feel more like a weekly tactical one than the longer term strategic initiatives. And this often comes out when we do our leading from your strengths assessment. And I can see a senior pastor who’s got this natural wiring, they move fast, they’ve got, they’re on the people side of the wheel, but they have to adapt all the way up into that driver space on task mission because they’ve got so many people people around them, and they don’t have people who are pushing action. It’s the lead pastor who feels like he or she is always the one that has to push the team forward. Those are a couple of big tensions that I hear a lot of.
Tony:
Let me share another one, Amy, that came to mind as you started to talk about that. In a private moment, maybe with a senior pastor in the past, once or twice or more, I’ve heard this, I don’t like going to my leadership team meetings. And some of them have gotten to that place and actually stopped going to their leadership team meetings. And when I hear that, a couple things come to mind. One, maybe the team is just focused on the wrong things, and I’ve seen this happen with some teams where rather than wrestling with big issues about how we move our mission forward in the future meetings, just become reporting meetings, if you will. So, this week I’m working on this stuff and I’m checking these things off my task list. And I guess in those situations, everybody feels like they’ve been heard, but very little is there, there’s very little real strategic decision making that happens about moving the mission forward. And so those meetings, reporting meetings, I think many times are about maintaining control, but there, they’re really not strategic conversation. So in other words, you could, you may not like going to those leadership meetings because you’re focused on the wrong things. But frankly, one of the reasons why you may not like going to those meetings is because you have the wrong people in the room. In other words, you have the wrong leaders with the wrong capacity or the wrong fit. And the reality is you should be fueled by those meetings because the people in the meeting, are helping push you in a way, encouraging you to really lean into what God’s called you to do to be able to accomplish the mission God’s given the church. So when either one of those is not in place, either the leadership team is focused on the wrong things, or it’s the wrong people in the room, senior pastors bail, either they physically bail from those meetings, or at the very least, they’re mentally just not engaged like they should be.
Amy:
And we’ve talked about this before, that senior leadership team meeting, when that lead pastor separates from that meeting, there is a predictable outcome if you play that movie forward. So, let’s fix the leadership team and not excuse the lead pastor from it. I have one more. I’ve also talked with some pastors where there is a senior leadership team, and yes, they do meet regularly and they talk, but they don’t really make any decisions. Rather, it’s the senior pastor and exec pastor that kind of huddle up after the meeting and then make all the decisions. And you can get away with that when you’re smaller, but eventually that’s going to be counterproductive for the church. Even just the simple communication process. If those two leaders make all the calls, my guess is that doesn’t get cascaded down back down to the senior leadership team, which then certainly doesn’t get cascaded down throughout the organization. So, if any of this resonates, probably a good time to pause and take a look at your senior leadership team.
Tony:
That’s right. And this is one of those things that we should probably talk more on this topic more frequently, Amy, because it’s such a common theme that I hear from senior pastors and executive pastors that just, something’s not quite right with their leadership team. Or just the fit isn’t working, or it just doesn’t feel like this is the wisest investment of everybody’s time. And I think, oh, no, that’s just, that speaks to an opportunity to get on this more on the solution side and really position this team with strength to help accomplish what God’s called you to. And on that note, let’s try to get through the solution side of this. Amy. How do we begin to solve this problem?
Amy:
Well, there’s lots of things to think about when building a senior leadership team. Definitely how you’re structured informs, I believe, who should be on the senior leadership team. But I also think we have to remember, structure alone does not inform who should be on that senior leadership team. Great teams have great diversity, and so we have to not only look at position, but also do we have enough diversity on that team in the way that we handle processing information, managing change, just that natural wiring around the wheel. Do we have good diversity in age? Do we have good diversity just in general? You can use that word in a lot of different ways. The more we have, the stronger that team can be. Another thing I’d raise is the size of that team matters. And again, we talked about this last week when about flipping the funnel.
Sometimes as we grow incrementally, we just start adding people incrementally. And eventually that senior leadership team is going to get too big. And we say all the time, the largest that team should be is eight people. If you breach that even one person, you’re gonna start to have a significantly less productive meeting. So what strengths do we need on that team? We need to think about the size of the team, and then we have to talk through what this team should be focused on. This is not the place to talk about how the message went last weekend and start thinking about some of the logistics for next weekend. In fact, I was just talking with the church today and we talked through with a lead pastor and executive pastor, how do we even lead this meeting? I’m a big fan that the lead pastor does not lead this meeting.
The lead pastor should have a lot of input on what needs to be talked about, and the executive pastor and senior pastor should agree, if we have decisions to be made, what are the decision rights for that? How do we facilitate this conversation? Are we just sharing information? But if it’s a decision who gets a voice into this, who gets a vote into that decision? But I think it should be facilitated by the executive pastor that provides a senior pastor the opportunity to be in the room to share the vision, thoughts, perspectives. That honestly helps the rest of the team continue to really understand that lead pastor’s heart and helps them lead even better. That’s why I said a few minutes ago, the worst thing to do is to have such a bad meeting that the lead pastors don’t wanna be there because that’s the opportunity for all of the top leaders of the church to understand the senior pastor’s heart and be able to absorb that through these standard meetings.
Tony:
Amy, on that note, I agree. I think it’s wise for the executive pastor to be driving the agenda for that meeting and actually making sure that the team is staying focused on the key topics that they need to be addressing in that meeting. For the larger churches that we work with, it’s not uncommon for there to be two or three different executive pastors, maybe an executive pastor over ministry, an executive pastor over operations. Doesn’t matter which one is driving the agenda for that meeting. Should it be shared? What should that look like?
Amy:
What I find when you’ve got a couple of different executives, one of them has the bent for this and one of them doesn’t, or one of the three. So I think it’s important to choose the person who has that administrative gifting, who likes to take time to plan out what we’re gonna be talking about, who likes to take time to land the meeting well, who likes to take time to do the follow up that comes out of a good meeting. But I do think it’s probably best to have a consistent person responsible for that meeting, because if it’s a shared responsibility, I don’t think it’s gonna have the same effectiveness and rigor as if you’ve got an owner over that experience.
Tony:
And I want to circle back to just thinking about do we have the right people on the team? Because I do think that’s one of the key aspects of all of this that we need to be considering. It’s not unusual, especially as the church grows, we’re gonna have dozens of leaders on our staff team. The question is, which of those leaders do we pull into this senior leadership team? So I wanna share a few things as we’re on the ground coaching pastors, senior executive pastors on what this senior pastor or the senior leadership team should look like. Here are some of the attributes we’re encouraging them to think about. Now again, all of this is with the assumption that whoever we’re considering already meets the biblical qualifications of leadership as defined by scripture.
So that aside, these are what we’re looking for, do they share the vision, the values, or are they embracing the strategies that we’re trying to use to accomplish our mission as a church? In other words, we’re talking about full alignment here. So this is one of those instances when we’re considering who’s gonna be on our senior leadership team, we don’t need the devil’s advocate to be a part of this team. We don’t need someone who sees their role as to bring checks and balances to this team. We need somebody who’s all in fully aligned with where we’re heading as a church, looking for the right leadership capacity. So again, especially the largest churches, you’re gonna have dozens of staff leaders. The question is, do they have the right leadership capacity for this team?
And to use as a model, Jethro’s coaching to Moses from Exodus, he talked about leaders of tens, fifties, hundreds and thousands. In this instance, we’re not talking about team leaders, leaders of tens. We’re not even in many instances talking about ministry leaders, leaders of fifties. We’re talking about those people. They may not literally be leading hundreds and thousands, but they have that level of leadership capacity. Those are the folks that we want on this team. You have to really make sure you have big picture thinkers on this team. And we see this again on staff teams. There are some staff leaders that they are just focused hyper-focused on their ministry area. And that’s a good thing because we want them to be leading and taking ownership of their specific ministry area. But then if you pull that type of person into a senior leadership team conversation, it’s almost as if they’re going into that conversation representing their ministry rather than considering what’s best for the overall health and direction of where we’re heading as a church.
And sometimes when you’re having that level of conversation, you almost have to set aside your specific ministry area in order to focus on what’s best for the church. It’s the type of person that can come to these conversations, not representing their ministry, but representing the entire church. And then, lastly for today’s conversation, at least, let me just say, you need strategic thinkers here. So if not, can they execute? If you give them a set of priorities to accomplish, we’re not even asking here, can they build a team to get that done? We’re really looking for leaders who can understand this is where we are today. This is where God’s calling us in the future. What is it gonna take for us to see that future become reality? So it’s people that can get beyond the daily details, but really focus on the bigger picture for where we’re heading as a ministry. Now, Amy, we go through a lot of other exercises to help churches think about the right level of leadership capacity for different roles in including the senior leadership team. And Amy, we’re gonna go through this in our upcoming webinar, but one of the tools that we look at to measure leadership capacity is called the leadership capacity assessment. Could you just talk through, give us an overview of what that assessment looks like?
Amy:
I just did this actually for a group of 35 church leaders at a church I was serving, training their managers on how to assess leadership capacity. And it was a great conversation. Basically referencing our tool, we help people think about how people on their team are behaving right now related to leadership. And I won’t go through ’em ’cause we’re gonna have it on the webinar, but are they a doer? Are they someone who is an individual contributor? Are they wired more like a team leader where they’re modeling how things should get done? Or are they, this gets into leaders of fifties, are they actually recruiting and building successfully teams of volunteers? Or are they really a developer of other leaders, meaning that they’re really focused on caring for and raising up other leaders? So we talk about where they’re behaving today, and then the next conversation is, where do you see their potential based on their current performance?
Where do you see their next level potential? And by the way, sometimes they don’t see next level potential and that’s not a bad thing. We are not all given the same leadership capacity. And the worst thing you can do is promote someone who doesn’t have the leadership capacity into higher levels of leadership. That just doesn’t end well. So it’s a sober minded assessment to say, who are we seeing that God has given a higher capacity in leadership? And those conversations, when you have them start to inform who are the leaders that we need to give stretch assignments to, and who are the people in our pipeline for future senior leadership team.
Tony:
Amy, it’s interesting. I know that that’s a core part of our process. I would think senior executive pastors specifically are so invested in those relationships that they would already have a keen sense of who has the right level of leadership capacity for these different roles, including a senior leadership team. But why do you think it is that having somebody facilitate this conversation is helpful for them to really confirm do we have the right people on the team?
Amy:
That’s a great question, Tony, because as you were saying that, I think there are some leaders who are too optimistic about people’s abilities. And then I think there’s some leaders who are too pessimistic, they don’t want to give them a try. So I think the secret sauce here is that I don’t just have this conversation with the leader of the team, like the lead pastor or just the executive pastor. We strategically put two to four voices around this conversation so that we can have a safe space to get different viewpoints on different people, because lead pastors are gonna see staff differently because staff are typically on their best behavior. Maybe even that’s for the executive pastor. But you bring in a few other key leaders to provide input and facilitated by someone externally to ask the right questions. I think we get much closer to the truth when it comes to people’s current capacity and their potential capacity. Alright, well, let’s wrap up some next steps that our listeners can take, Tony. So there’s a great question you ask in one of your ebooks that we offer through the Unstuck Learning Hub called Take the Lid Off Your Church. Do you remember that book?
Tony:
Yeah, that was years ago, but yes, I remember that.
Amy:
Do you remember the quote?
Tony:
You’re asking me something along these lines because I’ve asked this question many times of senior pastors and executive pastors. Here it is, it’s an easy question, but you’re going to have to wrestle with this. Here’s the question. Do you believe your current senior leadership team offers you your best chance to achieve the mission and vision that God has for your church right now? Let me repeat that. Do you believe that your current senior leadership team offers you the best chance that you have to achieve the mission and vision that God has for your church right now? I would encourage you in the coming days to really process through that, pray through that, where appropriate, if you’re the senior pastor talking with your executive pastor about that, or vice versa.
But I think you have to wrestle with that question because it’s a stewardship question. We have a significant mission in front of us, and we just need to make sure that we’re being the best stewards we can of the resources we have, including the leadership resources that God’s given our church. Secondly, let me just offer this. We know that staffing and structure is one of the priority issues that churches wrestle with, especially the largest churches that we serve. And because of that, though staffing and structure has always been a component of the full Unstuck process, we are essentially doubling down on the type of help that we provide to churches around staffing and structure. In fact, we have just developed a new, it’s really a robust just specifically staffing and structure consulting process that we have begun to offer to churches.
Included in that full process is helping teams think through the senior leadership team specifically. And a big chunk of the time that we’re going to focus on is just making sure that we get that team at the top doing what it should be doing with the right people in the right seats so that we really can move the mission of the church forward. So, if that is of interest to you, please reach out to us because we’d like to walk you through what that new process looks like, to help your, help you and your team get the structure right and get the right people in the right roles so that you can accomplish God’s mission for your church. Amy, I’m going to flip the script here a little bit. Any final thoughts you want to offer before we wrap up today’s conversation?
Amy:
You know, just as you were talking, when we talk about strategic planning, just how important it is to set aside a few days to get clarity around what this next ministry year is going to look like. What are the most important things we need to work on the next 12 months? I just want to reflect the same payoff comes when you invest a couple days into really thinking about your structure and thinking about your staff. To get off that treadmill of ministry and through some facilitated exercises, work through a lot in two days, but your people are really your most important asset. And getting them in the right seats, in the right roles aligned to your strategies, it just, it’s a new day for the churches we work with that go through this process. Is there some tensions you have to work through, some hard decisions? Sometimes there is, but you’re probably already aware of that if you’re thinking about this. But getting on the other side of it, when you’ve gone through two days where you get to just think about this side of your ministry, it’s really just such a support to the strategic plans that you’re trying to activate. So that’s just, I guess I’m putting my endorsement on our process, but I’m telling you, I talk to lead pastors all the time and they’re so grateful for what God revealed and how God was with them and let help them lead through the changes that they needed to make.
Tony:
That’s so good. And then finally, let me just remind you about our How to Restructure Wisely webinar. It’s coming up on June 20th at 1:00 PM Eastern Time. We’re going to go a lot deeper on the topics from this podcast series. Share some visuals to help you get a sense of what we’re really talking about through some of this podcast content, and hopefully give you some tools that you can use in your ministries. And then finally, we want to take the opportunity to answer some questions during our live Q and A. Here’s the deal. People problems are uniquely challenging on a ministry team. I get it. Leading your staff through them is hard work, but it’s necessary work. And in this webinar, we’re going to help you learn how to solve staffing challenges with both wisdom and grace based on decades of experience on our team. So register for that webinar at theunstuckgroup.com/webinar, and we hope to see you there.
Sean:
Well, thanks for joining us on this week’s podcast. At The Unstuck Group, our goal is to help pastors grow healthy churches by guiding them to align vision, strategy, team, and action. In everything we do, our priority is to help churches, help people meet and follow Jesus. If there’s any way we can serve you and your church today, reach out to us at theunstuckgroup.com. Next week we’re back with a brand new episode. So until then, have a great week.
