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
The Trust Vacuum: What Happens When Leaders Disappear
In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, Todd Rhoades discusses the issue of leadership vacuums within church staff, where the absence of visible, trusted leadership leads to eroding trust and staff disengagement. He highlights the signs of a trust vacuum, its impacts on staff culture, and strategies for rebuilding trust through visible and relational leadership, emphasizing the importance of communication and clarity.• A leadership vacuum occurs when there is a lack of visible and trusted leadership, leading to a decline in staff trust and motivation.• This vacuum often results in delayed decisions, conflict avoidance, and staff uncertainty.• Erosion of trust leads to increased gossip, anxiety, and potential disengagement among staff.• To counteract a leadership vacuum, leaders should focus on being visible and relational, clarifying mission, expectations, and communication lines.• Rebuilding trust requires acknowledging the lack of leadership and actively working towards transparency and engagement.
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When church staff feel like no one is really in charge, like no one's really re-leading, trust begins to unravel. And doesn't always happen overnight, but over time, a vacuum forms where direction and safety and accountability used to live. And today on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, we're going to talk about how leadership vacuums develop, how they impact your staff's trust and motivation, and what pastors and executive pastors and leaders can do to rebuild what's been lost. Hi there, my name is Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders over chemistry staffing.com, and you're listening to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. What happens when no one's leading? Not in name, but in real visible trusted leadership. Someone's on the org chart, but nobody on your team feels safe or clear or confident. That's what I like to call a trust vacuum. And it's way more common than you think. So stick with me because if your church is in one right now, your staff may be losing trust by the day and by the week. So let's talk about what a trust vacuum even looks like. Okay? When you're in a trust vacuum, certain things happen, or maybe don't happen. Okay. So for example, maybe decisions get delayed. Or maybe they're made, but they're made in secret and just come down from the top with no rationale. So decisions are impacted. Maybe staff don't know who to talk to about really hard things. Maybe leaders avoid conflict. We just did an episode on this yesterday. Go back and listen to it. It's really powerful about how to avoid conflict or how to work through conflict. So maybe leaders are avoiding conflict and hiding behind structures that can absolutely produce a trust vacuum. Maybe people start making up their own narratives. When there's no visible active leadership, the vacuum kind of fills itself. And usually it doesn't feel its fill itself with really good things. Okay? So let's talk about if there's this trust vacuum that's happening in your church right now, or maybe you've seen it at other churches in your career or in your past. What is the impact on staff culture? I've already mentioned that trust will erode over time quietly. The gossip grows, the anxiety can spike, the morale can drop. And here's what happens. Those that are doing the best job, they're really high performers, feel unsafe because they're not sure what in the world's going on. And quiet quitters, those people that you kind of wonder, you they're on the bubble anyway, when there's this vacuum of trust, they disengage even further. And people the people that are holding everything together during this time are starting to ask, why what am I doing? Why am I still here? Alright, so how do you rebuild this trust? When the trust has been lost. If you're the leader, you just have to be visible again. Leadership isn't directional. It's it is directional, but it's not just directional, it's also relational. You need to re-clarify the mission and the expectations and the lines of communication because for some reason those have vanished, and that's why there's this vacuum of trust. And you need to acknowledge the silence and name that gap and don't pretend like it just didn't happen or it doesn't exist. You need to rebuild this in public with your team, with your staff, and let the people see that you are trying to establish and rebuild trust. Not that just that there's a plan to do it, not just that you hope to do it in the future, but that you're actually doing it, that you're actually starting to rebuild that trust as much as you can. Leadership absence created the vacuum, and leadership presence is gonna help rebuild the bridge to take away that vacuum. Okay, here's your bottom line, here's your big thought for today. The leadership vacuum, if you're experiencing it right now in your church, it didn't happen on overnight. And honestly, if I'm being totally frank with you, it's not gonna be fixed overnight either. But this is a big butt. I like big butts, and I cannot lie, I don't know why I had to say that, but if we're serious. Your next move can be the start of something really real again. Okay, let me rephrase that because I broke it up with a really bad reference to how old I am. The vacuum, if you're fe experiencing a vacuum right now, it didn't happen overnight and it's not gonna be fixed overnight. How you make your next move can be the start of something real again. I would love for you to drop me a comment, pop me an email, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. What's one way that you've seen trust rebuilt on a church team? Maybe you found yourself in a leadership vacuum and you fought really hard to rebuild it, and it worked. I'd love to hear your story. Reach out to me, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. And if there's any way that you think I can help you and your team, maybe just with a conversation, maybe with a longer-term coaching or partnership, maybe it's helping you find a new staff member. I'd love for you to reach out to me, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. Tell me what you're looking for. Maybe I know somebody, or maybe I can help you uh in any way to build a healthier church team exactly where you are. All right, that's it for today. Thanks so much for joining me here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. We're here every day, Monday through Friday. And today is episode number 458. Hey, if you don't have anything to do for the rest of the day, start with episode one. I'm just kidding, you that would be that would be a horrible existence if you had to listen to 457 other episodes today. But uh, we've seriously we've talked about a lot of different things that could be helpful. You can go to the podcast page and kind of search through all the different topics that we've talked about and see what can be helpful to you today. That's really what we're here for. All right, thanks for listening, and we will be right here tomorrow. Go join me.
