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In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, host Todd Rhoades discusses the complications that arise when employees report to multiple supervisors, emphasizing the need for clear lines of communication and decision-making to avoid confusion and inefficiencies.
• Employees reporting to multiple supervisors face confusion and delays.
• This communication setup leads to unclear accountability and stalling.
• The importance of defining a single decision-maker for staff members is emphasized.
• The 'two inboxes, no owner of yes' scenario traps employees in inefficiency.
• Todd suggests selecting one clear decision-maker for seamless operations.
• The episode addresses structural challenges in church staff operations.
You told them to keep both of you. That's not a recording item. That's a trap. With two different inboxes, they send the update of what they're doing and how they're doing twice. And they wait for two yeses or two no's or two different inputs from two different people, be it one yes and one let me think about it. Then they are the problem for moving too slow. If this kind of line of communication sounds familiar, we're going to talk about that today here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Thanks for joining me. My name's Todd Rhodes. I'm one of the co-founders over chemistrystaffing.com, and I'm so glad you joined me. I look at this really as an opportunity to spend some time one-on-one with every person that listens to the podcast. So welcome, friend.
Now, I'm not going to talk today about being a control freak. This is really an episode that talks. I want to talk to both sides, right? I want to talk to the supervisors that you've got an employee, but you own half of them for lack of a better way to say it, and somebody else owns half, right? They report to two different people. Okay. And maybe that was how it was set up in the beginning. And you met really well, right? You didn't want anybody to feel left out. So you just said, hey, keep us both in the loop. And what the employee heard is that I've got to report to two different people. Two people can stop this. They heard I work for you, but I also work for this other person. And they're also thinking, hey, if I had to pick one, which one do I pick? And if I if they don't agree, am I disloyal to one over the other? The loop here is not a boss. The loop is a hallway that kind of has two doors in it. Think of your church staff hallway. You've got two different doors with two different people and two different ideas. And that person has to report to both of those doors. So you're really putting your employee into a place where you have to start every single request or email with a carbon copy, a CC, right? You write emails designed not to pick a side, and
that's not communication, it's self-defense. And you can see it in two chairs on your team right now. Maybe you've got a kid's pastor that has two bosses. Maybe the kids' pastor reports to the executive pastor, but there's also a line of reporting to the senior pastor. Because kids are too important to have just one line. And because you both care, and because the org chart got drawn in a meeting and never finished. So they get notes from both of you. Different priorities, different timelines, different definitions of what things look good on a Sunday. And when they follow the XP, the senior pastor feels skipped. If they follow the senior pastor, the XP feels undermined. They're not confused because they're weak, they're confused because you built two yeses into one job. Maybe worship is running the same kind of amaze. Maybe you've got a worship pastor, a campus pastor, a creative. The worship reports to the campus pastor and the creative arts director. Hey, keep both of them in the lube. We're going to work together. We're a team. But here's where it gets tricky. One wants the room to serve the campus, one wants the room to serve the overall church and the branding. The staffers write smack dab in the middle trying to translate both of that. I talk with candidates and in my coaching work with staff people. This triangulation happens a lot more often than you'd
think. And they're like, if I please one person, I don't please the other person. If I don't please this person, I'm not. So a lot of times they just delay. Or they pick the lottery inbox that week. You call that a maturity issue. But it's not a maturity issue. It's a design issue. Nobody owns the yes, and everybody owns the follow-up. So I know you're trying to keep everything all connected. You didn't want a silo. You thought two leaders in the loop meant better care for the person and better alignment for the church. You're a family, it's a team. I that seems good. It could be also that you this is how you guarantee no one will own the decision. That's the downside, right? You give care that splits the yeses into not cares. It's two bosses and a staffer who, as hard as they try, just can't seem to win. And that's what I want to talk about today on the podcast. Both reporting to both people is how nobody owns it. Clarity is one name, not a committee of two with a shared calendar. When you can say yes, when both can say yes, both can also stall. Okay? Todd, we're on the same page 90% of the time. Okay. Okay. It's the 10% of the time that's going to really mess with this employee's head, right? And they're not going to know what to do. When you both can say yes, both can stall. When both can say no, the staffer never knows which one is the real no. And in worst case scenarios, it almost feels like it's two against one. It's both of my reports against me. It's two of them against one of me. And what happens is that they delay because they don't know what to do. They spend the week trying to manage you. Not the ministry. They're not leaving kids, they're not leaving worship. They're refereeing the two of you, and that's not the teamwork that you had planned. That's really the trap that you keep saying is, hey, we're all a team, we're all collaborating here. Pick one person this week and
end that split. If you've got somebody that reports to two different people, and you can tell that they're frustrated from time to time. This week, for that, let's try something different. Name one decision maker, pick one person with two bosses, and name one decision maker. Write it down. Not, hey, we'll try to do better about communicating, just write a sentence who they report to, who owns the yes, then tell both bosses, then tell a staffer, same sentence, same day. The other leader can still be in the conversation. You don't have to shut the person out. But they do not get a second veto. Okay? If you cannot name one decision maker, you've already named the trap. Alright, two inboxes, zero owner of yes. Here's the bottom line for today. Keep both in the loop is not a reporting line. It is not an org chart, okay? It is a trap with two in boxes and nobody who owns the yes. I know this one feels maybe a little bit more structural than some of the ones that we've done, some of the episodes we've had here, but I also know that you actually want people who can get a clean yes. And that's one of the things that we wanted to try and do on the podcast today.
Hey, quick question before we wrap up for today. When you're casting vision and dreaming about the future, who's actually in the room? Okay, on our next podcast, we're going to be talking about why your operations team needs to be at that table, not just cleaning up after the party. Okay, so that's on the next episode on Monday. Okay, so I hope you'll come back and join us. If you're not subscribed, go ahead and subscribe wherever you're listening to this now. And if you've got a couple minutes now or sometime over the weekend, I'd love for you to head over to Church Staff Assessment, churchstaffassessment.com. Take our free healthy or our church staff assessment. That's absolutely free. Take about 10 minutes, and your feedback will really help my team at Chemistry Staffing as we get a pulse on what's happening in churches all across the country. Need to get a hold of me? I'd love to work with you and your church. Let's have a conversation. Podcast at chemistry staffing.com. All right, that's it for today. Have a great weekend. We'll be right back here on Monday.
