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 Second Chair Struggle: Why Your Associate Staff Are Quietly Burning Out
This episode of the Healthy Church Staff podcast, hosted by Todd Rhoades, explores the 'second chair crisis' within church staff hierarchies. It reveals a significant disparity in how senior leaders and other staff members experience church life, based on a church staff health assessment involving over 3,400 participants. Key insights highlight the experience gaps between roles and the critical importance of senior pastors understanding perspectives from those in 'second chair' roles.• Introduction to the 'second chair crisis' within church staff structures.• Significant experience disparity between senior pastors and other roles, with a notable score gap in health assessments.• Structural factors, not character, drive differences in church experiences between senior and associate staff.• Highlight on creative arts staff facing critical challenges, including invisibility and lack of voice.• Recommendation for senior leaders to actively seek and listen to the perspectives of their staff.
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Alright, got a question for you today. What if the person sitting right next to you in the staff meeting this week is experiencing your church completely differently than you are? Now it's not because they're less committed, and it's not because they're weaker, it's because of where they sit in the org chart. That's what we're talking about today on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Hi there, my name's Todd Rhodes. I'm one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffing.com. And we're in the middle of a series, part three today, part three of ten, unpacking some of the discoveries, 10 different discoveries that we've discovered during this year's church staff health assessment. Matter of fact, over the last three years, we've had over 3,400 church staff members just like you take this same church staff health assessment. So what we're doing over the podcast for the next three weeks is kind of unpacking some of the things that we've learned, not just this past year, but cumulatively over the last three years. And today we're going to talk about discovery number three. And what we're calling discovery number three is the second chair crisis. Okay. The second chair crisis. And we're talking about how people on your staff maybe view your church completely differently according to where they are on the org chart. Now let me give you an example. Okay. These are numbers from this past year's survey. Okay. Senior pastors, out of a score of 250, average about 193. 193 out of 250 on our church staff health assessment. That's actually pretty good. Associate pastors, about 169. So 169 for associate pastors, 193 for senior pastors. That's like a 25-point gap. Same building, same church, same mission, but it could be totally different worlds. So I want to share with you some insights for today based on this discovery of the second chair crisis. Again, is what we're calling it. Insight number one is the view from the top is not necessarily the view from the middle. Okay. Senior pastors and executive pastors, you combine those. Those are kind of the top, right? The top of the leadership structure. Senior pastors, executive pastors combined, averaged about 194. Solidly healthy. Associate pastors, legit associate pastors, also different types of associate pastors, worship pastors, youth pastors, on average, uh about 169. Worth worship pastors, 169, creative arts people, 153. Those were the lowest. But it's it's really interesting that uh and the main point here is that if you look at if you're a senior pastor and you think everything's hunky-dory, it could be that not everybody else agrees with you and your executive pastor. Honestly, here's why. And we're going to talk about this here in a second. You being at the top, the senior pastor, the executive pastor, you're the one that's making the vision, right? You're the one that's carrying, you're the one that's kind of saying, hey, here's where we're going. So of course you like the vision. Of course you like what's happening. But the people supporting the vision sometimes are far less healthy than the people that are casting it. So if you're a senior leader, your experience of your church is real, but that doesn't mean it's universal. That doesn't mean that everybody agrees with you. Okay, insight number two. Why does this gap exist? And here's the clue: it's not because of character. This isn't about who's stronger. This isn't about who's more spiritual. It's really structural. Different roles experience the same organization differently. Senior pastors, executive pastors, a lot of times have a lot of autonomy. They get to control their calendars. Second chair people, associate pastors, worship pastors, youth pastors, anybody that's not a senior executive pastor, a lot of times they work within somebody else's framework almost entirely. So when the speaker, when the senior pastor speaks, a lot of times the room shifts. And when the associate pastor speaks, maybe, but usually not. You know, senior pastors know the why behind the decision. Second chair pastors, and we're going to talk about this in one of our later discoveries. Second chair pastors and staff members often get just the what and not the why. So senior pastors get thanked publicly. Second chair laborers, uh they're relatively anonymous at times. And that gap isn't just uh a failure of character. Matter of fact, it's not a failure of character. It's just the reality of the organizational gravity, the hierarchy, and the org chart in your church. And your church might be different than everybody else's, but that reality still exists. Okay? Here's insight number three. If you have a creative arts person, maybe a worship person, somebody maybe a communications person, those are the areas that really stood out to me in this year's assessment. Because this has crossed from over the last three years from kind of a concerning to almost a critical stage. So creative arts staff members scored about 153 average. That's 40 points below senior pastors, and only 38% of creative arts staff. And granted, our our sample was smaller for creative arts staff, but only about 38% are in healthy cat in the health of healthy territory. About 75% have some kind of flight risk, which means hey, they're they're actually thinking about going somewhere. Why is that? Well, subjective evaluation, everybody has an opinion on fonts and videos. And the creative people like to be able to choose those. Sometimes they're invisible labor. I mean, 40 hours of work for sometimes 15 seconds of visibility or maybe even none. And oftentimes they're they're almost, even though they're on your staff, they're treated as vendors, not as staffers. So if you have a creative team, they're probably probably you need to check in on them. They may not be okay if your creative people kind of trend toward the national trend. They might not feel safe telling you, but they might not be okay. You really do need to check on them. Here's insight number four. I call it the I had no idea problem. And here's how this goes. Most senior pastors genuinely don't know that their team is struggling. And it's not because, if you're a senior pastor, it's not because you don't care. It's because you're evaluating culture through your own experience. And through your own experience, you're scoring 194 out of 250, right? Your experience is really good. It's healthy. Things feel good from where you sit. And here's the here's the truth, though. Staff don't announce that they're struggling to the person who controls their employment. They just don't. They smile in meetings, they deliver on Sundays, they process privately, and then comes the resignation letter, and you say, I had no idea. And sometimes you just really don't. You can't address what you don't see. So here's the bottom line for today. If you want to know how your staff culture is really doing, and you're a senior pastor, or you're an executive pastor, if you want to know how your staff culture is really doing, don't look at your own experience only. Look at theirs, especially the people in the second chair. So this week, I would love for you to ask one of your second chair people, maybe your associate pastor, maybe your your worship pastor, oh, maybe your creative lead, ask them one question. What's something about your experience here at the church that you don't think I fully understand? And and listen to them because you know I it can be an honest question, because you, as a senior leader, don't know everything. At least I hope you don't think you know everything. So just ask them, hey, what's something about your experience here at the church? You've been here for a while. What's one thing that you wish I understood better? And then listen, don't defend, don't explain, just just listen. Because that 25 point gap, maybe it's not that much in your church, maybe it's more because that 25 gap is average. That 25 point gap or whatever it is at your church is not going to close with program. It's it's gonna close with awareness and it's gonna close with intention. So this is just one of the 10 discoveries from our church staff health assessment from the past year. We have compiled everything. I mean, we have broken this down. Took us a long time to look at all of the entries and crunch all the data. We've compiled everything into an absolutely free 200-page download, a PDF download. It's got all the data, all the trends, all the practical insights, and you can download it for free right now. Just head over to churchstaffhealth.com, churchstaffhealth.com. I hope you'll do that today. I hope you'll read it. I hope you'll give me some feedback. Podcast at chemistry staffing.com. I'd love to hear your feedback on it. You know, the view from the top chair is good, so make sure that you know what it looks like from the second chair. That's it for today on the podcast. Hope you'll join me again tomorrow where I'll have discovery number four from this year's church death help. I'm praying.
