The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
We're all about helping create a healthy, positive, and spiritually positive environment for church staff members and leadership teams.
The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
Chemistry: The Secret Sauce of a Great Hire
What is the secret ingredient that transforms a good hire into a great one? As we conclude our insightful series on the Five Pillars of a Great Hire, I, Todd Rhoades, co-founder of Chemistry Staffing, promise you'll uncover the crucial role chemistry plays in ministry teams. Chemistry isn't just an added bonus—it's the vital component that ensures a harmonious fit and prevents disruptions in team dynamics. Together, we'll explore how chemistry is about collaborating and building relationships, not uniformity in thought. By observing team interactions and trusting our instincts, we can assess this essential pillar and foster a team that's excited to work together.
In the latter half of our discussion, we pivot to practical strategies for evaluating and nurturing chemistry during the hiring process. Discover how informal candidate meetings with current staff give invaluable insights into relational dynamics and how open-ended questions can reveal a candidate's ability to navigate team interactions. Even if you're not in hiring mode, now is a prime opportunity to reflect on your team's health and address any relational challenges. Remember, hiring is about building a cohesive team where chemistry serves as the secret sauce. Stay tuned as the Healthy Church Staff Podcast continues to inspire and guide you into 2025!
Have questions or comments? Send to podcast@chemistrystaffing.com
Be sure to subscribe to The Healthy Church Staff Podcast wherever you regularly listen to podcasts.
- - - - -
Is Your Church Hiring?
If your church is searching for a new staff member, reach out to Todd for a conversation on how he might be able to help.
Are You Looking for a New Ministry Role?
If you are open to a new church role in the next few months, add your free resume and profile at ChemistryStaffing.com.
Hi there, welcome back to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. I'm Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders over at Chemistry Staffing, and I'm your host here on this podcast, the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Today we are finishing up a series that we've been doing a little over a week called the Five Pillars of a Great Higher, and so far we've talked about theology as pillar number one. Pillar number two was church culture and DNA. Pillar number three was personality. Pillar number four was skills and abilities, and today we're wrapping up with the last pillar, and it's one that really doesn't get enough attention, in my opinion, and that's chemistry. I know what you're thinking chemistry. Isn't that just a bonus if it's there? No, it's not. It's much more than that, and that's what we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 1:Chemistry, I think, in a lot of ways is the secret sauce that makes everything else work. You can have a candidate with the perfect skills, a great theology and a solid personality, but if the chemistry isn't there, you're going to be setting yourself up for some challenges. So let's unpack that today what chemistry means, how to assess it and how to spot it when it's missing. Okay, so let's start with the big question what is chemistry anyway? Chemistry is that natural connection between candidate and the team and the leadership and the culture of your church. It's that intangible fit that makes someone feel like they belong. And let me tell you, when chemistry is there, you'll feel it. When it's not, you'll feel it, too, in ways that you don't often anticipate. Now chemistry is a little bit different, as the fifth pillar, than the first four. Okay, when a church works with us, we concentrate on, we communicate these five pillars with the church and what we tell the candidate and the church is that look, with our interview process and our assessment process that we do at chemistry, we feel pretty confident that when we take a candidate to a church, that we can pretty much get it right on theology and on culture and on personality and on skills and abilities. Okay, we can match those up pretty good. What we tell churches and candidates that we cannot do for them they have to do this on their own is figure out if there's chemistry. So, if the first four, if you've got the theology and the culture and the personality and the skills and abilities, if all of those are green flags and you're ready to go, you need to make sure that the last one is there Chemistry. You've got to have all five there or else you're going to be in trouble.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's talk about why chemistry matters, and here's why it's so important. Ministry is relational. Your team spends hours together, planning hours together, problem solving and praying and doing life and leading spiritually. If someone doesn't click with the rest of the team or, worse, creates friction, it can disrupt the entire dynamic. It can disrupt the entire dynamic If you've ever worked on a team that had someone that didn't have chemistry with the rest of the team. What that friction feels. And it's not a good thing and it works against the dynamic of the entire team. Think of chemistry maybe like oil in an engine okay, without it, things grind and overheat, but when it's there, everything runs smoothly, all right. So that's why chemistry matters.
Speaker 1:How do you assess chemistry during the hiring process? Chemistry isn't one of those things that you can just measure with a test or a checklist. You can't assess for it. It's something that you observe and you feel, and here are a few ways to assess it during the hiring process. The first is just team interaction. We always say that you find out whether or not there's chemistry by actually having boots on the ground, like, not a Zoom call you can determine some of chemistry on a Zoom call but really face-to-face, shaking hands, sitting across the table, sharing meals together.
Speaker 1:Team interaction Bring the candidate into casual settings with your team. Maybe it's lunch, maybe it's a brainstorming session. Watch how they interact. How are they engaging? Do they seem comfortable? Maybe bring them into a conflict scenario. Ask questions that reveal how the candidate handles conflict or differing opinions. For example, tell me about a time you had to disagree with a staff member. How did you navigate that?
Speaker 1:Chemistry isn't about always agreeing. It's about how you work through your disagreements. And the last thing I would say here on how to assess is sometimes it's just a gut instinct. Trust your instincts, trust your team's instincts, trust what God is telling you. If multiple people say and I've heard this before, I can't put my finger on it, but something just feels off, don't ignore that. Okay, I'm telling you, don't ignore that there's a reason. There's a reason, probably, that you're feeling that One of the one of the key ways that I assess chemistry or I relate to both candidates that are going for an on-site visit and churches that are bringing candidates in is is this the type of person that you would love that.
Speaker 1:You really think you're excited about the prospect of doing ministry with them for the next five years. Is this a person who having them or their family over on a Tuesday night for a barbecue is something that you would enjoy, or would you like kind of cringe at that thought? If you are genuinely excited after the on-site visit and you're excited about the prospects of working together and what this person could bring for the team, you don't have any checks in your spirit, then that's a good indication that there's some good chemistry there. A couple other things here. Chemistry is not about sameness, okay. So I want to clear up a common misconception. Chemistry doesn't mean that everybody has to think the same way or have the same personality. Okay, diversity of thought, diversity of style is absolutely healthy, but what you're looking for here is alignment in how people work together and communicate and solve problems. So you just need to make sure that everybody is going to be able to they're not exactly the same, but they're going to be able to play together in the same litter box, okay. Sandbox, I guess, would be a better illustration, all right.
Speaker 1:And then, finally, what do you do when chemistry is missing? What happens if you ignore chemistry altogether and you think, okay, todd, I hear you, I hear you. But man, this person matches us theologically. They match the culture of our church. They're funny. I love their personality and they do have the skills to check all the boxes. We're going to go ahead. I got a check in my spirit on the chemistry thing, but the first four they're great on. Let me warn you, if the chemistry is missing, you can have all of the other four pillars be remarkable matches, but if the chemistry isn't there, you're going to end up with friction and over time that friction is going to erode trust and damage morale and make your team less effective. I'm just telling you, chemistry is vitally important.
Speaker 1:Okay, so practical application what do you do with this for today? If you're in the middle of a hire, create opportunities to observe chemistry. It could be scheduling an informal meeting between the candidate and your staff or volunteers. Make sure you ask open-ended questions during the interview process on how they build relationships, navigate those team dynamics and then, lastly, trust your instincts and the instincts of your team. If the chemistry feels off, dig into why before making a decision.
Speaker 1:And if you're not hiring right now, this is a great time to take a moment, especially here at the end of the year, to reflect on your current team and its health. Is there someone who might need a little extra support to improve some relational dynamics? That's something that we can help with here at chemistry. You can reach out to me. I've got either myself or somebody on my team that could probably come alongside and help you with that. Chemistry is tough to assess, but it's absolutely critical and if you need a little help, you can reach out to me. My email address is podcast at chemistrystaffingcom.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's it for today and I hope you've enjoyed this series. When it comes to chemistry, hiring isn't about just finding somebody who can do the job. It's about building a team that works in harmony, and chemistry, in a lot of ways, is kind of that secret sauce. It's absolutely worth taking the time to get it right. Okay, thanks for spending a few minutes with me today. I hope you'll come back here tomorrow. We're here every day, monday through Friday, every weekday anyway, and we will be into 2025. I'm happy to say that we'll be back again next year for season two of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Talk to you tomorrow, you.
