The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
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The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
The Trouble with Triaging Everything
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Is your church leadership always in firefighting mode? That is still you're not alone, but it's not healthy. And today on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, we're gonna look at the hidden cost of triage style leadership. We're gonna explore how a constant state of urgency creates burnout and short circuits long term, and it's gonna cause some issues with your long-term growth and sustainability as well. And ultimately, it's gonna kill any clarity or morale that you may be building. So stay tuned. We're gonna talk about that today here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. I'm your host, Todd Rhodes. I'm also one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffing.com. What happens when your team never gets a break from the urgent? I don't know if you've ever been on a staff like this. I've served on a staff like this where just everything is on fire every week. There's never a dull moment, that's for sure. But there's uh everything just escalates to the urgent stage. Every week feels like a fire drill, and every Sunday feels like a scramble. And the truth is you're not leading. You think you're leading because you're busy, but you're really triaging. And that kind of leadership it works until it doesn't. And we're going to talk about triage mode today and how that might be breaking your church and your staff and what to do about it. All right, here's the first issue and the first problem is that kind of triage leadership, as I like to call it, it feels like leadership, right? You're busy, you're active, everything is urgent. It feels like leadership, but really it isn't. Ministry often starts in cheat in triage, okay? So maybe it's a crisis, maybe it's a vacancy, maybe it's a surprise conflict. The problem, it stays there. Leaders confuse constant responsiveness with good leadership. But if everything's urgent, nothing is strategic. Here's what that looks like. Maybe you're reacting, but you're not directing. You're dousing the fires, but you're not designing the systems that will make sure that there are no more fires in the future. Maybe you're surviving, but you're not building. Triage mode feels productive until you wake up one day, you look around, and everybody is just so stinking exhausted that you don't know how you're going to move forward. Triage, the truth is, it will wear down your team. Staff members don't just burn out from workload, they burn out from chaos. And that's part of what triage culture produces. It produces perpetual uncertainty and poor communication because honestly, there's no time to explain. You just gotta get it done, right? It produces a lack of rhythm or stability, always starting with over energy. And every week just seems like it's a panic. And your best people after week of this triage leadership, your best people are either gonna just shut down or they're gonna leave. Okay. So if you're in a state like this and you know you are, if you're just extremely tired and you know you've got a to-do list that goes from here until next Thursday, you need to break the cycle before it breaks you and before it breaks your team. So, how do you do that? Partly is I think just building a good rhythm. Not everything is urgent. You just have to stop. Just stop and look at everything on your list. Look at that next thing that you're gonna do, and you need to ask yourself, is this really urgent? You need to block time for planning and renewal. And if it's not urgent, don't do it. Move on to the next thing. And then, and I love to do this. This is just how God wired me. I love to systemize repeatables, right? I love automation, I love systems. I love, I always think if I'm doing one thing like more than two or three times, how can I come up with some kind of a system so that I don't have to do that mundane type of work all the time? What always needs doing? Turn it into some kind of a system, turn it into a checklist, turn it into an automation if you can. That's gonna help you break the cycle that you've always got to be constantly busy doing something. And then you need to communicate what isn't changing. Stability creates space for create for clarity. So when things are more stable, then there will be more room for people to actually get some clarity on what things are moving forward. And then you need to prioritize that clarity once you start to see that over speed. It's okay if decisions take longer, as long as they're better decisions. You don't have to stay in triage mode, but you do have to decide to get out of it because until you decide to get out of it, you're gonna be in an ever-ending, you're gonna be wearing your firefire hat a lot. So here's the bottom line for today. Your team doesn't need perfect leadership, but they need peaceful leadership. I'd love to hear from you. Have you been leading from peace or from panic? Is your stuck, is your church stuck in kind of a triage leadership phase? If so, I'd love to hear from you. Reach out to me podcast at chemistry staffing.com. And if there's any way I can help, maybe a discussion on how to get your team back on track, how to get your leadership back on track track, I would love to hear from you and talk to you. Reach out to me podcast at chemistry staffing.com. All right, that's it for today's podcast. Thanks so much for joining me, and I'll be right back here tomorrow on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Have a great day.
