Talking About Staff Team Health

What words would you use to describe the ideal staff team? I frequently pose this question to church leaders and the two words most frequently offered are collaborative and accountable.  We want our staff teams to be cooperative, to demonstrate an ease and naturalness in working together that capitalizes on the strength and ingenuity of team members.  At the same time we want the staff to accomplish worthy work that is both effective and efficient. We value a team that fosters both individual and group accountability. Most staff teams function somewhere along a spectrum that favors either collaboration or accountability.
The healthiest staff teams find a way to foster both attributes.

Teams that embrace collaboration over accountability tend to produce cultures of hyper-collaboration that are not healthy. Every member of the staff team feels personally responsible for every aspect of staff life and work. On the surface, these teams appear to have something remarkable going on. Staff members are always available to support and assist one another and the congregation. But when you look beneath the surface something more troublesome is happening. There are no clear boundaries around roles and responsibilities and no clear feedback on performance. Without role boundaries staff members aren’t free to say, “That’s not my area of responsibility or giftedness and I wouldn’t be the most effective person to lend support, but let me point you to the person who could help.” Staff members don’t end up working in their areas of passion and skill. Talented and responsible staff members end up burned out in a culture of hyper-collaboration. They feel personally responsible for the success or failure of everything that the staff team undertakes, and are seldom honored for individual excellence. At the same time, underperformance is seldom addressed so that slackers and competence thrive and flourish.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the team that values accountability over collaboration. We often use the term “silo” to describe how these teams function. These teams consist of highly skilled individuals, each working with excellence in their own area of expertise. They engage one another to coordinate when necessary.  However, these staff teams are really working groups as opposed to teams. There is no real synergy in their work beyond what they accomplish as individual performers. Staff members do not reach out beyond their own work areas to think generatively or work cooperatively. Team members feel free to say, “That’s not my job” and are comfortable leaving tasks undone and colleagues unsupported.

Staff leaders can generally recognize when their team is out of balance on the collaborative/accountability spectrum.  However, recognizing the problem doesn’t do much good if you don’t know what to do to promote better balance.   I have found that the best approach to consulting with a team that is out of balance is providing them with language to talk about their health. A team that can articulate what is not right, and what health would look like, is well on its way toward fixing the problem.  To that end, I have developed 30 markers of staff team culture that describe overall health.  These descriptors unpack the assumptions we leave unstated when we use terms like collaboration and accountability.

1. As a staff, we have a compelling vision for the future of the congregation and our place in that future.
2. We have a clearly defined and well communicated statement of purpose as a staff team.
3. The size of our staff team is appropriate for the size and growth aspirations of our congregation.
4. The configuration of our staff team is appropriate for our congregation; we have the right people in appropriately defined roles.
5. Our work is managed against goals and objectives.
6. We recognize and celebrate our accomplishments as a team.
7. When priorities are revised, the need for change is discussed and made clear to the team.
8. Individual roles, relationships and accountabilities are clear to everyone on the team.
9. Team members are technically qualified to perform their jobs.
10. Each member of the team has clear and effective supervision.
11. Each member of the team is held accountable for his or her individual performance.
12. Individual performance is recognized and appreciated.
13. Our approach to problem-solving results in effective, high-quality solutions to issues.
14. Staff meetings are productive.
15. Policies and procedures that we rely upon are helpful in the accomplishment of tasks.
16. We are able to respond to a crisis in the congregation quickly and flexibly.
17. There is room in our decision making process for discernment of God’s Spirit.
18. Our work as a staff team is grounded in God’s Spirit.
19. We coordinate our work with a spirit of collaboration.
20. Staff members appreciate and capitalize on each other’s differences, strengths, and unique capabilities.
21. Communication within our team is open and above board.
22. Staff members defend/support one another when criticism arises from within the congregation.
23. We are able to resolve our conflicts and disagreements openly and honestly.
24. The staff team has fun together.
25. Staff members use humor freely and appropriately.
26. We communicate effectively with the congregation, its governing board and committees.
27. We are aware of and attentive to the needs and desires of the governing board and committees as we make decisions and plans.
28. The governing board and committees are aware of and attentive to our needs and desires as they make decisions and plans.
29. The staff team is appreciated and supported by the governing board.
30. The staff team is appreciated and supported by the congregation.

 

Leadership Systems in Motion

The large church is managed through five interdependent leadership systems. When change occurs in one system, it tends to produce
change in the others. These systems include:

1. Clergy Leadership Roles
2. Staff Team Design and Function
3. Governance and Board Function
4. Acculturation and the Role of the Laity
5. The Formation and Execution of Strategy

As daily changes occur in the life of the congregation, these systems adjust but remain relatively stable. Leaders come and go, policies are formed and adapted, groups form and dissolve, but the basic interaction of the five systems remains constant.

However, every leadership system has a capacity limit, a point beyond which it can no longer effectively function. When the activity
level of the congregation significantly increases or decreases, leadership systems hit their limits. A senior clergyperson assumes a particular leadership role that is highly effective in a church with weekend worship attendance of 700. The clergyperson is surprised to discover that the leadership role begins losing its effectiveness when the church adds an additional worship service and  now hosts 850 in weekend worship. Or, a staff team that was humming along eliminates a few part-time staff members due to a budget decrease, and suddenly the overall department structure of the church no longer works. The staff team maintains  momentum but notices how much more energy it suddenly takes to function well across departments.

One of the remarkable things about leadership systems is that they tend to reach the outer limits of their effectiveness at predictable
moments, based on worship attendance or budget size. We often refer to the period of time that a congregations approaches or moves through these limits as a transition zone. Some refer to transition zones as “attendance ceilings,” because they observe that a congregation’s weekend attendance repeatedly climbs to a predictable level and then drops back down. When a congregation hits one of these transition zones, it must intentionally adapt all of the five leadership systems, or the congregation won’t be able to accommodate added complexity. The systems have reached their effectiveness limits and cannot accommodate additional growth without being repurposed.

In the large church there are natural attendance and budget zones where the five leadership systems stabilize and accommodate complexity
and growth without shifting.  Each of  these zones operates with a basic organizing principle and with predictable characteristics
in the five leadership systems.

Congregations occupy a stable size zone when they operate with an annual budget of between $1 MM and $2 MM or when weekly worship attendance remains between 400 and 800. I refer to this size zone as the professional congregation, because most of its behavior is driven by the need to professionalize operations. The congregation realizes that the church’s programming has outgrown the managerial capacity of its lay leaders to both sustain excellence in existing programming and introduce new programming, so the demand for a staff team of specialists emerges. The growth of this size church is related to budget capacity, which limits the ability to add staff. The pastor is learning to let go of a purely relational style of leadership and adopt a more managerial focus. The staff team is moving away from a generalist orientation and toward a specialist orientation. The board is learning how to govern by setting policy and creating systems of performance management.

The strategic congregation emerges as the stabilizing zone once a congregation is operating with a budget between $2 MM and $4 MM or maintaining average weekly attendance between 800 and 1,200. This congregation requires a more intentional orientation towards strategy,
growth, and alignment. In this size congregation there are so many decision-making groups at work that it is easy for the church to drift out of alignment and for tremendous energies to be wasted. The pastor is learning to maintain strategic focus.  The staff team is learning to function in aligned departmental structures, with the oversight of an executive team.  The board is growing smaller in size and is learning to delegate daily management of the church to the staff, so that it can focus more clearly on strategy formation and oversight.

The church that worships with an average weekend community of 1,200-1,800, or with a budget of more than $4MM, is known as a matrix congregation. The presenting organizational challenge of this size category is decentralization. The careful work that was done to align church structures in the previous size category suddenly gets in the way of the more organic leadership style needed to function in this very large category. The matrix size church takes its name from the shape of the organizational chart that often characterizes this size zone. Growth in the
matrix-sized church emerges and is managed everywhere, all at the same time.  The senior clergy leader focuses primarily on the overall strategy of the congregation, teaching, preaching, and fund-raising. She has fully delegated the management of the staff team to one or more executive ministers.  The staff is learning new ways to coordinate its decentralized decision making.

A congregation approaching the upper or lower limits of any one of these stabilizing zones will experience leadership stress. Rightsizing the
systems requires a fundamental paradigm shift in how the church functions. The congregation that tries to avoid the difficult work of adapting its leadership systems risks stagnation in growth and/or the ineffective use of congregationa lresources.

The Village Elders

All congregations are faced with decisions that can be made by a small leadership body (the governing board, the staff team, a committee) and decisions that must be taken on by the collective body. In the small to medium sized congregation, when full congregational decision making is required, a church-wide meeting is scheduled and a significant percentage of total membership shows up.  In the large congregation, leaders are continually frustrated by the small percentage of members that turn out for a “y’all come” meeting. It’s not unusual for a congregation with membership exceeding 2000 to have only 120 people show up for a congregational meeting where important decisions are being made.  Why is this? I believe that the answer has something to do with group threshold limits, and the number of people who identify themselves as the “village elders” at any point in time. Let me explain.

The full leadership body of the church is a self identified group of leaders who feel “responsible” for the overall well being of the congregation.  This typically includes members of the staff team and board members. It also includes an inner ring of leaders who are not currently serving in either of those capacities, but still feel a strong sense of leadership responsibility for the church. This group informally functions as the “village elder” body, keeping a watchful eye on the direction of the congregation.  It’s not an officially appointed body, and membership seems to self adjust over time. However, the size of the group always remains rather constant; somewhere between 75-150 people.  This seems to hold true regardless of the size of the total membership body.

Why doesn’t the informal leadership group ever grow larger than this number, even in the very large congregation?  Humans are known to have a cognitive upper limit to the average number of individuals with whom they can form cohesive personal relationships. That limit, known as Dunbar’s Number, is around 150 people.  Having enough memory space to remember people’s names and faces is not enough to manage 150 relationships. It is about integrating and managing information about the constantly changing relationships between individuals within a group.  When a group grows larger than 150 people, members of the group lose their ability to track relationships, and the group loses its capacity to function well as a community.

I would argue that in the large congregation the leadership body is always subconsciously reforming itself around the Dunbar limit. The leadership body must be able to think of itself in some cogent way as members of a single community. This requires that people know one another well enough to communicate around important congregational issues.  In response to this natural group dynamic, leaders are continually stepping into the informal village elder group and removing themselves from the village elder group, based on life circumstances.

In a medium sized congregation, if 150 people show up for a congregational gathering it represents a significant percentage of the membership body. In the large church it may represent less than 10% of membership.  The small percentage may be interpreted as a sign of apathy, but it’s really just the village elder system organizing itself to fulfill an important leadership role on behalf of the congregation.

How does this compare to your lived experience?

Photo Credit:  The Earth Tribe

Tags: Assimilation, Church Leadership, Collaboration, Governance, large congregation, Membership Assimilation, strategic leadership, volunteerism

Large Church, Small Board

I’ve heard this question recently from several of you.

Q:  I’ve always heard that the governing board of a congregation should grow smaller as the church becomes larger. Why is that? Is there an ideal size?

 A:  Effective boards in every size congregation must tend to three types of work: fiduciary (tending to the stewardship of tangible assets), strategic (working to set the congregation’s priorities and seeing that resources are being deployed in accordance with those priorities) and generative (problem framing and sense making about the shifting environment of the congregation). See Chait, Ryan and Taylor,  “ Governance as Leadership: Reframing the Work of Nonprofit Boards” for more about these definitions.

In the large congregation many of the fiduciary responsibilities of the board are better delegated to others. The board can never abdicate its responsibility for fiduciary oversight, but it can rely on board committees and the staff team to do much of the fiduciary work on its behalf. As congregations grow larger governing boards must increasingly focus their time on the strategic and generative work of the congregation, if the congregation is going to thrive. This type of work is best accomplished by smaller decision making bodies, with specific skill sets in strategic leadership.

The board of the multi-celled congregation (200-400 in weekend worship attendance) is often consumed by fiduciary work. The staff team is not yet large enough to assume the full managerial responsibilities of the church, and lay leadership is still actively involved in the management of ministry. Governing bodies in this size congregation are often representational in nature, consisting of the people who are doers and managers of the ministry alongside the staff team. Much of the monthly board meeting is wrapped up in planning for and reporting on ministry management. This board often needs to make special provisions for strategic planning work, outside of the context of their monthly meetings.

The governing board in the Professional sized congregation (400-800 in weekend worship attendance) is intuitively drawn towards a more balanced focus between fiduciary and strategic work. The largest struggle of the board is figuring out how to be more strategic and generative on a regular basis. The staff team is becoming highly specialized and is better able than the board to tend to operational management. The board must avoid micro-managing the staff.  Congregations in this size category feel the need to reduce the size of the board in order to move away from reporting out/operational management and into more strategic and generative work.

Healthy congregations in the Strategic size category (800-1,200 in weekend worship attendance) have generally learned some things about delegating the fiduciary work of the board, in service to more time spent on strategic and generative work. The governing body in this congregation has typically been downsized to create a more nimble decision making body. The voice of the staff team is represented by the senior clergy leader and the executive pastor. Other professional staff members attend board meetings only when invited, to evaluate or reflect upon a particular aspect of ministry that rests within the staff member’s sphere of influence. 

What size is the right size?  A group trying to engage in effective strategic decision making faces two key challenges. The first is the management of communication. The second is decision making accuracy.  Generally having more people in a group will increase the likelihood that someone will have the information needed to make the decision and someone will propose a correct choice or solution. However, more people produce more opinions that have to be communicated and discussed. This makes the management of communication process more difficult, which ultimately ends up reducing decision making effectiveness.

The difficulty of managing communication within a small group is roughly proportional to the number of possible social interactions within the group. With two people there is only one possible social interaction.  With three people there are three possible two-person interactions and one three way interaction for a total of four possible interactions. The number of possible social interactions begins to explode in groups with more than five people. 

Most of us cannot imagine reducing our governing bodies down to 5 individuals, but the closer we can get to that number, the more effective our problem solving will be.  Larger groups require skillful leadership and formal structures in order to function effectively. Formal structures, such as parliamentary procedures, work by deliberately stifling many of the possible social interactions.  Unfortunately, this can also stifle creativity which is critical for strategic and generative work, and it also insures that most decision making will be dominated by the most politically influential individuals in the room, whether or not they have the best ideas.

Executive Assistance

Many of the senior clergy leaders I encounter are overburdened with administrative detail that they can’t figure out how to delegate. The common battle cry is, “It’s just easier to do it myself.” Many administrative assistants report having excess time on their hands, but they can’t get their clergy leaders to give them more meaningful work to do. What’s going on here? I suspect that many clergy leaders can’t figure out how to effectively work with an executive assistant (EA) because no one has ever taught them how to do so. When I encounter a high functioning clergy/admin team I often ask them what the key is to their good working relationship. More often than not, the clergy leader tells me that the executive assistant trained him in how to work effectively with an assistant. Let’s face it. This is not one of the skill sets that we learn in seminary.  And it’s not necessarily intuitive.

The good EA often knows how to diplomatically wrestle work away from the senior clergy leader that could more effectively be done by the EA. A good assistant is fierce, but appropriate, in guarding access to the senior clergy leader. A good working relationship between the senior clergy leader and her executive assistant saves the clergy leader valuable time. But the relationship can be so much more than that.

The effective EA functions as an extension of the senior clergy leader.  People will often regard a conversation with the EA as a point of contact with the pastor. Good EA’s provide an invaluable pastoral care function, listening compassionately and making careful decisions about who needs to see the senior clergy leader and who can be directed elsewhere.  Through the use of basic listening skills the EA often communicates the presence of the pastor, without the pastor actually having to be present.  A good EA is invaluable at triaging situations and figuring out when to intercept someone who is simply looking for help and doesn’t know where to find it. People learn to respect the fact that a message delivered to the EA is as good as a message delivered to the pastor (maybe even more reliable!)

Here are some of practices that seem to contribute to an effective working relationship between clergy and their executive assistants:

• Be absolutely clear about the lines of responsibility and authority. What responsibilities can the EA assume without needing any involvement from you? In what situations do you need to be consulted before a decision is made? In what situations can the EA make a decision and simply inform you after the fact?
• Meet daily to review your calendar, review your to do lists, establish priorities and communicate around deadlines. Make your wishes clear about how you would like him to handle situations anticipated on that day.
• Have your assistant attend all staff meetings so that she understands key issues, workflow and the expected timing of things.
• Give your assistant authority to process your inbox and your email inbox.  Your assistant should be able to go through your physical and your email inbox to cull out the garbage, identify and process the routine stuff and forward only those things that need your personal attention.
• Train your assistant to handle all routine correspondence. An assistant armed with the knowledge of your policies, your preferences, your style and a few good templates can handle routine items. You can maintain control, if needed, by personally signing everything before it goes out.
• Listen to your assistant. A high functioning assistant will often have a better feel for the pulse of the congregation than you do. He will know who needs attention, a personal contact, or how to best approach a potential conflict scenario.

Think of your executive assistant as a manager, not as clerical support.  The EA in the large congregation is a powerful position with lots of decision making authority. Your EA should function as an invaluable member of your team.

Photo Credit: kogakure

Tags: Administration, Church Leadership, Staff Team, Supervision

Admin Staff & Mission Ownership

Most of us expect our clergy staff to demonstrate a strong sense of commitment to the mission of the congregation. We use the language of “called, not hired” to describe the over the top commitment we seek. We also expect our non-ordained program staff to embrace the mission of the congregation.  Most program staff are members of their congregations, and consequently are called upon to demonstrate some passion for the congregation’s purpose and identity. 

What kind of expectations do we carry about missional ownership among our administrative support staff? Many congregations are very intentional about not hiring church members to serve in administrative support roles. They believe that the relationship is neater and cleaner if the people serving the church administratively have a pure employment relationship with the congregation. That way it will be easier to fire people that aren’t working out (or so we tell ourselves). That way it’s always possible to determine which part of time spent on church activity is paid activity versus volunteer work. That way it’s easier to prevent members from knowing things that could get dicey, like the giving patterns of other members. That way we can keep relationships with administrative staff purely professional and avoid the unpleasant triangulation that can occur when staff wears employment and membership hats simultaneously.  

Unfortunately, an unintended consequence of separating the employment and membership relationship is that our administrative staff often fails to embrace the mission of the congregation. When working with staff teams I frequently ask members of the team to evaluate the extent to which the following statements describe their team:

• As a staff, we have a compelling vision of the future for the church, and our place in that future.
•  We have a clearly defined and well communicated statement of purpose as a staff team.

I am surprised by the frequency of negative responses that administrative staff members provide in response to these two statements. Administrative staff will often tell me that they don’t think the mission of the congregation, or the staff team, has anything to do with them. After all, they are employees, not members. They believe that missional commitment is something that belongs to the clergy and program staff, not to them. Their job is simply to keep the members of the congregation happy.

Is this really the mindset that we want to promote among our administrative staff members? I can appreciate that our employees who are not members will have less of an attachment to the mission of the congregation. But can they ever really remain detached from the mission and still be effective employees? Doesn’t an administrative staff member need to embrace the mission of the congregation on some very basic level in order to serve as a member of the team? Have we gone overboard in trying to protect ourselves from the potential downsides of combining membership and employment?

I believe that every member of the staff team should have an awareness of the congregations’ mission and strategic direction. They should be able to articulate an ownership of that mission in a way that feels genuine to them personally, and in a way that clarifies their relationship to the mission. That doesn’t mean that our employees need to share our theological, religious or polity orientations. They do need to support the basic work that the congregation is engaging, and they do need to understand how their role functions in support of that work. One of our jobs as heads of staff, and as supervisors, is to help our employees articulate how their role connects to mission, vision and values. Are you doing that with your employees?

Photo Credit: darwinbell

Tags: Church Leadership, large congregation, Membership Assimilation, Staff Team

A Word of Thanks

I began this blog a year and a half ago, in part to help give birth to a book I had in mind about the large congregation. My hope was that the blog would allow me to actively try out ideas and find my voice about life in the large congregation. This week I finished the manuscript and sent it along to my editor (Phew!). The working title of the book bears the same name as this blog, “Inside the Large Congregation”, (although any of you who have published a book can appreciate that the title will change numerous times between now and publication).

The book is about five leadership systems that remain in motion in the large congregation, and how those leadership systems must be right sized to accommodate different threshold limits of complexity.  The book defines four new large church size categories. For each of the new size categories it explores: clergy leadership roles, staff team function and design, governance and board function, acculturation and the role of laity, and the formation and execution of strategy. I expect that the book will be published through Alban sometime in the fall of 2011.

I want to mark this moment by stopping to thank you, my readers, for your part in helping me get this manuscript written. The discipline of crafting weekly entries for the blog has kept me on task, forcing me to articulate what I am learning. Many of you, and you know who you are, have contributed to the birth of this book by presenting me with interesting case scenarios, by challenging me to think and talk about things that weren’t being addressed elsewhere, and by encouraging me in my consulting, teaching and writing. Thank you.

I fully intend to continue the blog, even though the manuscript is done. I have discovered that the discipline of noticing what my clients are struggling with, and translating those observations into written commentary, is invaluable to my own learning process. I hope you’ll stay with me and continue to challenge me with your ideas and observations.

I also want to invite you to consider joining me, in person, this fall to explore the collective learning that came with writing the book.  I’ll be facilitating an Alban sponsored seminar, “Inside the Large Congregation” on October 25-27, 2011 in Norcross Georgia.  You can read more about the event and register online at http://alban.org.  I hope to see you there!

Photo Credit: maher berro

Tags: large congregation