The Communications Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight

This episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, hosted by Todd Rhoades, addresses the critical topic of communication within church teams. Rhoades highlights how poor communication can cripple staff effectiveness and lead to misaligned priorities, resentment, and reduced initiative. He discusses the importance of strategic communication, emphasizing systems like weekly updates, decision logs, and pre-meeting briefs. The episode encourages listeners to audit their information flow, ensuring all team members have the information they need to succeed. For improvements, churches are invited to reach out for guidance and strategies. • Poor communication leads to misaligned priorities and resentment. • Strategic communication is more effective than increased communication. • Key structures: weekly updates, decision logs, pre-meeting briefs. • Unclear staff become insecure, leading to a lack of initiative. • Audit information flow to identify communication breakdowns. • Contact Chemistry Staffing for advice on improving communication.

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Transcript

When Staff Learn News In The Lobby

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Your youth pastor just found about a building project from a parent. And your worship leader learned budget cuts that are about to take place. They learned about those budget cuts on Sunday morning from somebody in the lobby. And three staff members are working in the same event and nobody even knows it. Your executive pastor is asking questions about decisions that they've never even heard of. This isn't just chaos. A lot of churches, this is Tuesday, and it's slowly killing your team's effectiveness. If this sounds familiar, you're in the right place. We're going to talk about it today here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Thanks for joining me. My name's Todd Rhodes. I'm one of the co-founders, along with Bastien over at chemistrystaffing.com. Today we're talking about communication. And communication is not just about sharing information, it's about creating shared reality. When your staff operates with different information, they start to make different assumptions, and different assumptions lead to conflicting priorities, and conflicting priorities create quiet resentment. And believe it or not, resentment leads to teams just getting killed faster than any personality conflict could ever tear apart a team. And this is where it gets a little bit tricky because you think you're communicating because you sent an email. But in reality, half your staff, you know this, skims their emails between meetings. You think the leadership team meeting counts as communication, but that information stops at the table. Sometimes you assume that, as Felix Unger used to say on the Odd Couple, you know what happens when people assume, but you assume people will ask if they need to know something. But the reality is, and deep down you know this, most staff are not going to interrupt you for clarification. They're just going to guess. And their guesses over time become your problems. Now, listen, I know you're not trying to hide information. Sometimes leaders do. We know that. And it's I I'm not a proponent of that. I don't think you should hide information from your team. You should be as free with communication as you sound, as you as you can be. But a lot of times pastors and first chair leaders are not trying to hide information. You're just drowning in information. You've got so much information. You don't remember what you've communicated, when you've communicated, who you've communicated it to. So you need a bit of a reset. This is communication is important. Communication, as we told our kids, communication as they were growing up, communication is key. And it's true with raising kids, it's true with families, it's true in churches as well. And that's the one thing, the last three years, all three years that we've done the healthy staff assessment, healthy church staff assessment, every year. The number one thing that bubbles to the top, the number one thing that churches and leaders could fix is getting better at communicating. So your team may just need a communication reset. And part of it is just setting up regular communication rhythms, not just communication events. Weekly all-staff updates that actually update everybody, decision logs that track what was decided and who needs to know. Pre-meeting briefs so nobody walks into a meeting with surprises. Clear channels for different types of information. The goal isn't necessarily, and you might think this is odd, but the goal isn't necessarily more communication. It's strategic communication. Strategic communication. So here wise here's why this matters more than what you think. The reality of your staff is this. When people don't have information, they start to make things up, they start to create stories. They're not doing this maliciously, they're doing it because they don't have the real information and they need to do their work. So they start to assume, they start to create stories. And those stories are usually worse than the reality. Unclear staff become insecure staff. And I'll tell you what, if you don't give anything out of today's talk about communication, this is what I want you to take away. When you don't communicate, when you don't strategically communicate the right things, unclear staff become insecure staff, and insecure staff become defensive staff. And defensive staff stop taking initiative. They wait for permission instead of taking ownership. We've talked about this on the podcast before. Your communication crisis becomes a leadership development crisis. Here's the bottom line for today. Bad internal communication doesn't just create confusion, it creates a culture where people stop thinking like owners and start acting like employees. So here's your challenge this week. Audit your information flow. Pick one recent decision and track how it traveled through your team. Who knew what? Who knew what when? Where did the information stop? That gap is costing you more than you realize. And another thing you can think about this week when was the last time somebody came up and asked you about a decision? And you were taken back. John, you should have known that. John didn't know that. And it's because your communication strategy broke down somewhere along the way. But your staff, for the most part, your staff wants to win together. So give them the information that they need to make that happen. We have some people on our team at chemistry staffing that are really great at communication. Uh matter of fact, uh that's one that's one of the things they're really passionate about. So if there's if if you feel like there's just a communication gap going on in your church and you're not quite sure what to do about it, you're not quite sure what how to make it better, uh, reach out. Love to have an initial call with you, tell you how we um how we help churches with communication channels and to make sure that they're communicating strategically. Uh, love to have that conversation with you. You can reach out to me, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. We're here every day, uh, you and me, every day, Monday through Friday, for uh this time that we call the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. I'm so glad that you joined me. If you haven't subscribed, maybe this is your first time listening, wherever you're listening, hit that subscribe so that you don't miss tomorrow's episode. Let's see what we're talking about tomorrow. It's always I always like to look ahead. We're talking about the part-time, full-time expectation problem. Oh, that never hits any churches anywhere ever. I hope you'll join me again tomorrow. We're going to talk about that here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Have an absolutely sounding grateful day.