From 'Confused' to 'Confident': Helping Staff Align with Leadership
May 07, 2024Season 1Episode 87
Todd Rhoades
Struggling with a lack of direction and support in your ministry role? You're not alone. Tune in as I, Todd Rhodes, co-founder of Chemistry Staffing, delve into the results of our 2023 Church Staff Health Assessment. With heartfelt stories from over a thousand church staff members, we uncover a critical truth: leadership clarity and supportiveness are non-negotiable for a healthy church staff. Our conversation promises fresh insights and tangible strategies for those who lead and those who follow, ensuring no one feels left behind.
This podcast episode is more than just numbers; it's about the lived experiences of real church staff members. We celebrate the 57% who feel well-guided, but we also shed light on the 23% longing for clearer direction. Join us as we dissect the essence of effective communication, transparent decision-making, and accessible leadership. No matter where you fall on the spectrum of church staff satisfaction, this episode offers a path toward a more supportive and direction-driven ministry environment.
Struggling with a lack of direction and support in your ministry role? You're not alone. Tune in as I, Todd Rhodes, co-founder of Chemistry Staffing, delve into the results of our 2023 Church Staff Health Assessment. With heartfelt stories from over a thousand church staff members, we uncover a critical truth: leadership clarity and supportiveness are non-negotiable for a healthy church staff. Our conversation promises fresh insights and tangible strategies for those who lead and those who follow, ensuring no one feels left behind.
This podcast episode is more than just numbers; it's about the lived experiences of real church staff members. We celebrate the 57% who feel well-guided, but we also shed light on the 23% longing for clearer direction. Join us as we dissect the essence of effective communication, transparent decision-making, and accessible leadership. No matter where you fall on the spectrum of church staff satisfaction, this episode offers a path toward a more supportive and direction-driven ministry environment.
My name is Todd Rhodes, I'm one of the co-founders over at Chemistry Staffing and you are listening to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast and I really appreciate you tuning in. Today we are in the middle of a series, a longer multi-week series on church staff health, and this week we're talking specifically about leadership. And today we're going to tackle a crucial aspect of working on a church staff and that's how well our leadership provides direction and support. Yesterday we talked about in our first installment if you didn't listen to it, go ahead and go back and listen to it. I think you'll enjoy it. We talked about overall. I think the leadership of my church serves our staff and congregation. Today we're taking it a little bit further and we've asked all the respondents of our church staff health assessment last year to respond to this statement. I feel that the church's leadership provides clear direction and support for staff. So today we're going to tackle how well our leadership provides direction and support, and it's all about moving from feeling confused sometimes to feeling confident in our roles. So let's dive right in.
Speaker 0:
Last year, on our 2023 church staff health assessment, we asked and got over a thousand people church staff people to respond to this statement. I feel that the church's leadership provides clear direction and support for me as a staff person. And here's the good news we always start off with the good news, right. 57% of those thousand a little over a thousand people that responded reported feeling pretty well guided and supported by their leadership, and that's more than half, at least last time I checked. I think. I'm not good at math, but I think 57% is more than half. That's good, but 57% when we're asking hey, the church's leadership provides clear direction and support, that leaves a little bit of room for improvement. As a matter of fact, it leaves a lot of room for improvement. So 57 or so percent said yes, I feel supported. On the flip side, 23 percent, almost a quarter of everyone, all the staff members, reported that they feel like they're not getting the direction or the support that they need. And about another two and 10, 19%, almost 20%, are hanging out in the middle. They're not quite sure, they're neutral, they're on the fence. The some days they may feel like they're getting the support direction they need, other days they think, nope, I'm lost, I have no idea what I'm doing here. So let's look at, let's break this down a little bit for those that are getting the positive responses. What help and maybe you're one of those what makes you in that 57%?
Speaker 0:
What we heard back on the assessments and the answers when we drilled down with the respondents was that number one was clear communication. They feel like they are getting clear communication from their church leadership. The second thing is they feel like they're getting transparent decision-making. That means when decisions are being made, first of all they make sense and second of all, if they're not necessarily making sense, on a certain level the leadership is coming and saying, hey, this is what we're doing, this is why we're doing it. So they're being very transparent.
Speaker 0:
And the third thing that really stood out from some of the interviews that we did after the assessment last year was that to be in that 57% where you feel like your leadership is providing clear direction and support, there is a certain level of availability of leadership. It the leaders are accessible and that's really important. It's like having a GPS on your car. You might know how to drive, but it sure helps to have clear directions on how to get to your destination. And, taking this analogy maybe a little bit farther, you need to have some input into what you're putting into the GPS. So those in the 57% feel like they're getting clear leadership and clear communication, but also there's the reciprocal part of that where they feel like they're able to speak into some of those decisions and have some input as well. So that's the 57%.
Speaker 0:
But let's talk now about the 23%. And maybe you're listening and you think I haven't taken the assessment this year yet, which I'll give you some instructions in a bit on how to do that. But maybe you're thinking, if I was to take that assessment today and I was posed with that statement about whether or not my church's leadership provides clear leadership and support, I would say no. So maybe you're in the 23%. You just feel left out in the fog. If you're a leader of a team, it's crucial that we make sure that we can see and try and see through that fog. And that might mean again we talked about what the 57% are liking doing more of that kind of thing ramping up your communication channels, making sure when you make decisions that you are transparent about it, that there are no surprises, that if you're making a decision that's going to be unpopular, that you explain that and have the necessary conversations around that. It means providing more frequent updates, probably about the church's direction and where you're headed.
Speaker 0:
It may be that you need to create some more space for staff to voice their concerns and contribute their ideas, but the one thing that we hear from the people that are in that 23%, where they're just in a fog, is that they don't have any direction. They don't feel like there's any direction either coming from leadership or direction in the church, and they sure as heck don't feel supported. They just feel like they're maybe an employee or somebody that comes in and does a job, but there's no real meaning there. And when there's no meaning, that's when people fall into that 23%. So those are people that we really need to work in, work on and work with to make sure that we can get them moved up to the 57%.
Speaker 0:
But let's talk, too, about the neutrals. What about those people that are fence sitters? So these are people that neither feel supported or feel unsupported. Are that neither feel supported or feel unsupported. Maybe one day they feel supported, the next day they're like I don't know what the world's going on. They're the fence sitters, and these are the people that you really need to engage and, honestly, these are the people that are. It's easier to get somebody from neutral to supportive than it is to get somebody that's negative to supportive. So the neutral people are people that maybe, with just a little bit of extra care, just a little bit of extra communication into some of the decisions that are being made, maybe just a little bit of extra time to clarify their roles and how they're contributing.
Speaker 0:
Last week we talked a lot about celebrating victories. Maybe just a little bit more hey, attaboy, good job. Hey, this is something that really moved the dial. Just knowing some of those things and communicating some of those things to those that are feeling in the mumbo-jumbo fence sitter area those may be just enough just to tip the scale to make your place and your staff a much healthier place. All right.
Speaker 0:
So I mentioned yesterday and I want to mention it again today we have the 2024 Church Staff Health Assessment that we're in the middle of. We're only going to keep that open, I think, for about two and a half more weeks, so there's a limited time that you can take it. We would love to have you take the assessment. It's about 50 questions, probably take you 10 or 15 minutes to complete, absolutely free, but it will give you as a staff member, it will give you a score at the end of it between zero and a hundred in seven key areas on how we think you're doing as a healthy staff member and give you some ways that you can maybe become healthier. So you can absolutely take that for free. You can go to churchstaffassessmentcom and take that.
Speaker 0:
And if you are the leader of a staff let's say you're the senior pastor, lead pastor, maybe you're the executive pastor, maybe you're a board member and you want to know hey, I think it's important for me to know what my state of healthiness is. But also I would like to know what the rest of my leadership team thinks, maybe what my staff thinks of our leadership, maybe what our board or governing body thinks, how they think things are going and how healthy they think we are. We have a premium edition of the church staff health assessment that if you will just email me at podcast at chemistrystaffingcom that's podcast at chemistrystaffingcom I can send you more information on that. But the key to that, if you're the leader of a team, is that we all have blind spots and this kind of overall organizational church staff health assessment will help you identify some of those blind spots that you didn't even know maybe needed to be worked on.
Speaker 0:
If you would like more information on that again podcast at chemistrystaffingcom, just say Todd, I'd be more interested. I'd be interested in having a conversation or at least learning a little bit more about that. I would be happy to do that, as always. Thank you so much for listening to the Healthy Church Staff podcast. My words are all coming out here, as best I can. Tomorrow we're going to continue on the podcast talking about leadership issues and we're going to talk about how to help our staff members and, if you're a staff member, how to move from confused to confident and helping our staff members align with our leadership. So I hope you'll join us again tomorrow right here on the Healthy Kids Step Podcast.