Master lass How to uild a Happy and Productive Staff · How to uild a Happy and Productive Staff...

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MasterClass How to Build a Happy and Productive Staff Hey, John Finkelde here from Grow A Healthy Church inside the Members Hub and we're teaching today on How to Build a Happy and Productive Staff.

I've found over my years of ministry that building a staff around me was one of the most rewarding elements of my 30 years in pastoring. The sense of team spirit, shared achievement, working through problems together and the great sense of love and respect you have for each other on a church staff was just fantastic.

You knew you were in the trenches with people that you loved and you cared about and also who reciprocated that to you and there was this sense of doing something great together, something significant together. I found it deeply rewarding at a whole number of levels during my pastoring years.

However I've got to say it's not for the faint hearted. If you're going to cultivate a happy, productive, high performing team, it's going to really sharpen up and help you develop interpersonal skills.

You're going to have to learn to handle people with different personalities and different styles and different methodologies to you. You're going to need a fair degree of emotional intelligence, maturity in your emotions, handling your emotions, learning to work with people who think differently and operate differently to you. People who also are going to let you down, they're going to disappoint you at times, they're going to fail miserably at times and you’re going to have to work with that and cope with that as well.

There's a whole process around hiring and firing that you have to be able to cope with as well. Learning how to put people off staff as well as recruit people onto staff. You need a robust spirituality for that. A walk with Christ that will take you through the various ups and downs of having staff.

It also requires a deep and significant shift in thinking. When you are called to ministry, when you are called to be a pastor, you don't actually think about building a staff. You think about things like preaching, praying, counselling people, evangelism, maybe planting churches, missions trips, all those wonderful things and teaching the Bible and doing all those great things of ministry.

But in reality, once you have a church that grows, and you don't need to grow that big before you need to put someone on staff and suddenly you've got HR, Human Resources issues, you've got industrial relation laws and compliance and all sorts of different technicalities that come into play, let alone the interpersonal relationship stuff and it does


require a shift in thinking to realise that I'm not only a pastor, I'm not only a leader, but I'm also a boss in a workplace. That requires a bit of a shift of mentality and to realise there's a hat you wear that has BOSS written across the front of it and it's important to get a hold of that thinking.

What constitutes a staff member?

Who do you include in your staff? This is a really important question to wrestle with. Is a staff member only people who are paid salary, are they staff? Or is it paid members of staff and volunteers? Maybe you have an office where people come in and volunteer time to do admin or events or youth or kids or any area of voluntary work. What do you see them as? Do you see them as staff members even though they're volunteers?

Make that decision

I think it's important to make that decision in your heart and mind of my staff is only going to be people who draw a salary, who are paid for a staff position, but you know what I have people who come around the office who volunteer and I'm going to put them on staff. What are the advantages of including volunteers with the paid staff when you talk about staff members?

Advantages of including volunteers in staff

Well there's a number of advantages of including volunteers, there's also some disadvantages that I'll cover in a moment.

Healthy Connections

One of the advantages is the healthy connections you build by bringing people into that relationship of being a staff member, of saying you’re a paid member of staff and you're a volunteer staff member and there's a good connection of team that you're trying to build rather than saying we don't pay you therefore you're not on staff. I think that's an advantage that is helpful.

Ownership

There's also ownership. There's a stronger ownership of culture and values and mission when you have volunteer people who come into your office maybe half a day, a day or even more during the week and you say hey you're a volunteer, I want to make you part of the staff. We're not going to pay you but I consider what you give and bring to us, I'm going to start treating you as a staff member. It increases their ownership of the mission, the values and the culture of the church.


People feel honoured

People definitely feel honoured when you include them in that whole sense of I'm a staff member, I'm part of the team on the staff of the church and there's an honour that comes with that and that really makes a good impression and a lift and a boost to people.

Accountability

Also accountability. If someone becomes a staff member as a volunteer, then you're heightening accountability. You're expectations are going up. You're kind of lifting the bar for them and for you, how you handle them and how they approach the role.

Disadvantages of including volunteers in staff

I think there are disadvantages also to including volunteers and this is a good process when you're thinking through and when you’re talk about staff.

It’s difficult to get people together

Sometimes it's difficult to get people together. If someone comes in on Tuesday for a couple of hours and someone gives you a Friday afternoon and someone a Wednesday morning then trying to get them together to have a sense of cohesion as a staff, that can be quite difficult when they're doing volunteering together.

It can be overwhelming

Some volunteers can feel overwhelmed by being called a staff member. They're happy to give the hours, they're happy to be consistent and regular with those hours and do the work but some people can feel oh man I'm on staff now, I'm not sure if I want to be on staff. You may need to think that through when you're walking through this with various volunteers if you're going to include volunteers in your staff profile.

Disproportionate staff numbers

Sometimes with a smaller church, you can feel disproportionate if you have a staff of 7 people in a church of 90 and you feel like my goodness, almost 10% of the church is on staff around here. You may want to think that through as well when you start counting volunteers as staff members.

The dynamics relationally in a small church are very different to a medium or large church and it may feel a bit weird if you say all our staff are here today and about 7 or 8 people are acknowledged as staff members when on a Sunday morning there's 45 people in the congregation. It can kind of feel out of balance, out of whack.


Inappropriate expectations

People can think oh I'm a volunteer, now I'm a staff member volunteer, I wonder when they'll start to pay me for this staff role because they'll be on staff with people who are being paid for their role and they'll be an unpaid volunteer.

I think if you're going to move people into being a staff position who are currently volunteers in your office you need to think through these disadvantages and think can I work around them and I think with this last one, be very clear about your expectations that this is not a stepping stone to a paid position.

In fact, you can tell them this will never become a paid position and that can draw the line for them. Even if you think down the track yeah I might kind of move them into that one day, it's probably better to be a wet blanket about that expectation so they enter into being well I'm a staff member now, a non-paid volunteer staff member, but this is not a doorway into being paid. I think that's a really important distinction to make.

Keep an eye on those disadvantages that people might even feel within themselves or as a group if you're going to make volunteers on your staff.

Who should you put on staff?

Primary staff roles

So who should you put on staff? Is there an order about who should come on staff in a church? Well I have some biases here, some personal preferences that I think when you're employing people in the life of the church that you should think through this very clearly.

Let me break this down into 3 levels of staffing for small, medium and then a little bit of large churches, but with a large church there's a really different vibe around staffing.

Pay your pastor first

To me primary staff roles is to pay your Pastor first. Get your Pastor onto as close to full time as you possible can on salary. Unless they have a particular bent, I would move them out of the bi vocational way but some pastors do bi vocational very easily and very well and are able to make that happen but they're a rare breed.

Bookkeeping

I think outsourcing bookkeeping. If you have a very good bookkeeper who will do it voluntary in the life of the church, fantastic. But I think the levels of compliance and making sure that your finances are very well structured and done well, I think it's worth putting staff


money into bookkeeping and I think there's nothing wrong with outsourcing that staffing role.

Admin support

Then I think this third aspect of a primary staff role is admin support. Someone who helps with rosters, events, all various bits and pieces that require the running of the church and you can get buy on volunteers for so long in this area, but you might need after a while, someone who comes in as an administrative assistant. Whether they're the Pastors PA, whether they're a business manager, whatever role it is - they come in and look after a whole range of things that have to do with administration and management of the church’s day to day and week to week.

So I think they're the primary staff roles. So you've got the bookkeeping sorted out, you've got the Pastor and they's a bit of admin support there, where do you go next?

Secondary staff roles

Well the secondary staff roles that I think are absolutely vital are in these four areas:

• Children's Ministry

• New People

• Volunteers

• Events

When I'm talking to a pastor and they say I'm on the staff, we've got the finance and a little bit of admin support sorted out, who would you put on staff next? I would say look in these four areas and see where your biggest need is.

Children’s ministry

If your children's ministry is growing or maybe it's even struggling, have you got someone who can put a few hours in a week that you pay them to boost that whole area because if you have a strong and healthy children's ministry it becomes a growth engine for the church.

New people

Another area, and these are all part time roles initially in any church, is new people. People who are getting born again, coming to Christ, new Christians, but also people who are visiting your church. To pay someone 3 or 4 hours a week to oversee that area, make sure New Christians are getting discipled, moving into water baptism, making sure visitors are


getting followed up, cared for and catered for, moved into small groups or volunteering, I think is vital.

Volunteers

Also the area of volunteers. I think in a church that's going through 150 - 200 to think of employing someone, again 2 or 3 hours a week, not a full time role but a very small part time role, organising the rostering, volunteering, watching over the whole church and finding out how can we move people into serving.

Because moving people into serving will give them greater ownership of the church and again that actually becomes a growth engine for your church. When a new person comes in they get cared for, the volunteer director who gets paid a few hours a week they make sure that the new person is serving somewhere because when they get serving they start to build relationships. When they build relationships they'll stay in the life of the church.

Events

Then I think events is an area worth considering and you may have someone who’s doing new people and events or volunteers and events but if you're a church that's going through that medium size, events become fairly critical for the life of the church and you might want to throw a bit of money at that.

Tertiary staff roles

The tertiary staff roles, I see, is when you employ someone to look after small groups, youth, worship and pastoral care.

Now why do I put these down to a third tier? Well I think it's easier to find volunteers in these areas than in some of the other areas I've mentioned. I think you can find plenty of people who will run a small group without paying them and even do a bit of coaching and overseeing of small groups without paying them.

I think the same in youth work. I think you can run a youth ministry up to a decent size by people who just love doing youth ministry. Same in worship and music and singing. This is a great way for people to develop singing and musical skills by being a volunteer in your church, music and worship departments.

So I don't think you necessarily need to pay anyone to do these areas. Same in pastoral care. Find people with a shepherding gift, release them into the life of the church and I think while some of these areas may have been considered more important in years gone by, in my mind and this is just my bias, I think these areas can do very well even in a medium size church without any staff monies being given to those areas.


How many staff should we have?

Here's a key principle to remember when you’re looking to employ staff.

Large staff numbers tend to lower volunteer numbers.

So you need to be careful with having too many staff, I'm talking about paid staff, because a church that is overloaded in staff they tend to find, generally this is across the board, that the volunteerism in the church is lower.

Now you don't want to get to low in your staff numbers and then you start to burn people out at the volunteering level so when it comes to working out how many staff should I have I prefer to work off the income ratio of the church. I’m not a huge fan of saying it should be X number of staff members per hundred members or per hundred attendees. I don't think that's a great way measure it.

The reason that I say that is that you may be in a high wealth area, high socio economic giving and you may have a lot of money floating around compared to an area that's in a working class or a low socio economic area where you don't have as much money and I think ratios of staff to members or attendees is something that you can get really out of balance pretty quickly.

So this is what I prefer when you're asking the question how many staff should we have? We don't want to have too many because I don't want to lower volunteerism in the church but I don't want to burn volunteers out by having to few so what I tend to say to pastors is think of your salary budget being 40% - 50% of average Sunday giving.

So in other words, if your average Sunday giving is $3,000 a week then you need to be spending 40% - 50% of that so $1,200 - $1,500 a week going on salaries. If you get more than 50% you find you're going to limit yourself in the areas that are related to ministry activities, what you can do with leasing and buying buildings. If it's lower than 40% you find you might actually have staff stretched too thin, things not getting done or volunteers starting to burn out a bit because not enough staff has been given, not enough money is being spent.

I find this a better way to work than number of staff members per hundred members of the church, or attendees of the church because it's related to income that will be a reflection of the socio economic area your church is in. So that's my general ball park figure and if you can hit around 45% that's a nice deal. Sometimes you have to go higher for a season, sometimes you have to go lower but I think that's a good ball park figure to work on.


Recruiting staff members

Let's talk about recruiting staff members. I want to talk first about the four C's. A few things about recruiting staff and I will cover how to fire staff before we've finished in this session today as well.

The Four C's are

1. Chemistry

Hire people that you have a good chemistry with. When they walk into the office, when they walk into the room, you're going oh I'm glad you're here. There's a feeling of lift and boost, not oh no they've turned up.

If you get that feeling, do not hire that person. Let the chemistry be good.

2. Character

You want to employ people who have high integrity. You can train skills, people can develop a skill set and be trained in that, its harder work to train people in character than it is in skills. So if someone does not have all the skills you want but they have high integrity, high loyalty, they have things like punctuality, they're honest, they speak well of other people, they've got a bundle of the fruit of the spirit of gentleness and self-control and kindness and joy and peace and those wonderful fruits of the spirit.

If they've got character and integrity - look for a high level of that even if the skill set is lower than what you want at the moment because you can train that into people.

3. Competency

You want them to be able to do things. You want them to be able to work, to produce fruit. You want people who even have a track record of fruitfulness. People who have maybe started and run a business. People who have gone to a high level of education and achieved in that. You want some level of achievement that shows this person is diligent, this person is productive, and this person is moving well into their future by what they achieve.

You want competency.

4. Culture

You want people who relate to and understand your culture. That they know what sort of church you are, the style of church and they'll fit into that culture and it think this is really


important in the process because it does take new staff members quite a while to get traction in their staff role, especially if you're putting them into a pastoral leadership role in the life of the church.

If they come from elsewhere, it's going to take a couple of years for that relational traction to take place. Especially if they've come from a different culture, then that also is going to be a bit of a challenge. The culture may be exactly the same sort of church as you, but from a different part of the nation, a different part of the city, that culture shift also can be challenging.

There's the 4 C's - Chemistry, Character, Competency and Culture that you want to measure when you're recruiting staff.

The Big 5

Now there's also a personality test called The Big 5. The 5 factor model of personality assessments. It's different to Myers Briggs, it's different to the DISC system if you've heard of those two personality assessments. In fact some people say that The Big 5 personality assessment is the most accurate in predicting an employee's level of success. That's a pretty big statement but you'll find some research backing that statement.

I'll put a link in the notes and in the whole framework here, you'll see it below the video, a link to The Big 5. You can take this assessment and use it whenever you're recruiting staff. You may want to use if for your current staff that you have as well. This runs through 5 different areas

• conscientiousness vs carefree;

• likeable vs tough minded;

• unconventional vs rules orientated;

• extraversion vs introversion; and

• stability vs sensitivity.

This is a great little test for people to take and you can use it when you're recruiting people. There's a tip from John that you can use in recruiting!

Interviews

Also when you're recruiting people, interview them. Even if they're coming from within your church and you know them well and you know that you actually want them, take them through an interview process.

Use the HR people you've got, if you've got a human resources person in your church get some ideas and tips from them on how to do the interview. If possible use them in the


interview process because they'll know how to throw some interesting case studies or curly questions that really will extract all that you want in the interview process.

Especially if you're bringing someone in from the outside, definitely use the interview process to let things emerge that other points like references, which I don't put a huge stake in references - they give you a framework but I'd rather do an interview than get references because you can read body language, you can see how people handle it when you give them a left field idea, a case study, what would they do, unroll it, unpack it.

You're thinking how do I get all this expertise? If you don't have a HR person in your church ring a local large church in your city or area, they will have HR practices that if you ask them nicely, they'll give to you. They may even have a series of interview questions they'll give to you. Large churches do this sort of process and generally have a pathway for it. I'm sure they'll help you out in your city. Find a friendly, nice, large church business manager, take them out for lunch, and get them to help you in the interview recruiting process.

It's always better to go slow when you're hiring, hire slowly fire quickly is generally the proverb to take notice of when you're doing this process and an interview will help you slowdown that process in a good way.

Use a job description

When you're recruiting people use a job description. Now here's the job description that I really like. I like this style of this job description and I'll put this in as a PDF so you can download it as well, it will be below the video, you'll be able to see it and download it.

It's broken up into three areas and this job description also serves as a goal setting, target setting document you can use in helping someone with their job, with their work.

• Task on the left hand side

• Standards in the middle column

• Targets on the right side

This example is for a New Peoples Director in a church, it's not comprehensive but it gives you an idea.

Task follow up first time visitors.

Standards proactively follow up new people with a warm and winsome manner. Ensure you are engaging and helpful.

Standards are the qualitative feel that we want when this task is done. So that's qualitative, not really measurable but qualitative.


Targets text on Monday morning, phone call if warranted, postcards sent out on Tuesday, second come back to church text on Friday

The Targets are measurable.

Task updating the database

Standards accurate entry of the details

Targets details entered on Monday, second and third visits to be noted

You can see with this style of job description, it just doesn't list tasks, it lists a qualitative feel that you're after which gives you a grid, a framework, when you're thinking who could do this job, can they meet those standards?

Can they be warm and winsome, can they be helpful, are they more a developer of people than a doer of ministry. So it gives you a framework and a guideline, a pathway to walk down to choose someone but also gives them clear expectations as they come into the job.

I think this style of job description is worth gold. You can develop your own around all the areas of staff members.

Internal or external

Should I bring people in from the outside or should I recruit from within my church.

Well it depends on the skill set. If you have the skill set within the church for the role I think that's always very advantageous. Occasionally when you don't have the skill set, look externally.

I think the advantages of someone who is coming in from the inside, someone that's been raised up through the life of the church is that you've seen the four C's - the chemistry, the competency, the culture, the character. You've seen all those things in operation over a period of time so you know what you're getting.

The advantage of someone from the outside is you're getting fresh eyes on everything that you're doing. You’re getting expertise that you currently haven't got and someone can look at things through a whole different grid and really freshen things up. I've brought people from the outside, the majority of staff I employed over the years of pastoring were from inside the church and I'd have to say that I had greater success from internal recruiting than external but some of my best staff were also external.

Its horses for courses, think it through and when you need to get outside expertise maybe just go a bit slower and be more thorough in how you do that. I have to say the worst staff


appointment that I ever made was an external one and I wasn't thorough enough in my analysis and assessment before I employed that person but that's a story for another day, but a warning for you.

Be the boss

Let’s talk about an area that is the shift we mentioned earlier on in this MasterClass, be the boss! I think this is a big shift for pastors. This is a huge change for pastors. You're now more than the pastor of this person, you're now more than their leader, you're now their boss and that adds layers of complexity to your relationship.

Let's face it, churches are unique workplaces because we have this legal compliance, industrial relations, HR policies and all that going on around this area that we have to comply with, but also these colleagues, these employees, these people I'm working alongside are my brothers and sisters for whom Christ died.

So I have a family of God connection as well as a boss connection and there are boundaries and ethics and policies and legalities related to the workplace but there's this complexity that doesn't exist elsewhere where these are my brothers and sisters.

You have to get that into your spirit and heart that there's going to be some tension there, that you won't be able to always resolve but it can also lead to tremendous joy of shoulder to shoulder with brothers and sisters in Christ achieving brilliant things for the cause of Jesus.

You have to acknowledge this change. You do become someone's boss and that is a different relationship to being a brother or a sister in Christ.

Set the tone

Also when you become the boss it's important to set the tone of your "boss hood". The tone inside your office where you're the boss. What's the tone you want? What's the atmosphere? What's the vibe? Do you want it formal or informal? Do you want it fun or serious? Distant or connected? Corporate or community? Peaceful or chaotic? Raucous or calm? Sensible or frivolous?

There's a whole mix there and I know some pastors who want distance and a disconnect, they want to remain the boss and separated even physically. I know pastors who've had offices physically removed from the rest of their staff. You have to work that out. I didn't like that idea. I liked having an office that was close to other staff and interaction, a bit of fun and frivolity, seriousness and a whole mix together. You have to work out your tone.


I always wanted a tone in our office of I want people to want to come to work. I want them to come to this place going I'm happy to be here, regardless of what's going on, I want to be here.

Set the tone, model it, encourage it, reward it, amplify it and your staff will be able to work out that tone which becomes the culture of your office.

Protocols

Also work out some protocols. I found this teaching a number of years from another leader in Philippians 2:25. Paul call Epaphroditus his brother, his fellow worker and fellow soldier and these are three types of relationships that we have with staff members.

Brother, we're part of the same family of God. Fellow worker, there's a job to be done. Fellow soldier, there's a hill to be taken.

I describe these in three different caps. The brother is the baseball cap, the little cap you wear when you're out with the family. The worker is the hard hat of a construction site. The solder is the battle helmet, you're going into a battle, into a war.

I think it's important to do this teaching with your staff. Even use those three hats, get those three hats if you can, the battle helmet might be a bit hard to get hold off! Get down to your local army surplus store and grab one!

But to explain to them, there are three hats that we wear when we're working together. There's a family hat, there's a work hat and there's a battle hat. At times I'm going to put on the family hat and we're just hanging out and having coffee. At other times I'll put the hard hat on of work, construction, things to be done. At other times we've got to take some mountains and some hills and we've got to forge ahead and I'll have the battle helmet on leading the charge and I want you following me.

It's important to explain to your staff, don't wear the wrong hat in the wrong meeting. Don't think when you're coming to a work meeting, we've got to do some planning, we've got a big event coming, don't come with your baseball cap on. Come with your hard hat on.

If I'm there sharing vision, this is about battle helmets on, let's go take that hill. It's not about the work hat of tactics and little bits and pieces, I want you in behind me, we're right with you boss, we're right with you pastor. Let's go do this thing.

It's important to explain this teaching, unpack it, discuss it as a staff but sometimes even in a situation with a staff member you might have to say you know what, I've got my work hard hat on today, let's talk around that area. Or hey I've got my baseball cap on, let's just go and hang out and do family. Train your staff to recognise different protocols for different meetings and different situations.


Boundaries

I think connected with this is boundaries. Work out the boundaries of friendship and work relationship. Don't allow staff to get so familiar with you they disrespect your authority as their supervisor and their boss. Don't swing that pendulum so far the other way they tip toe around you, fearful that you're going to berate them, that you're the boss and they need to be scared of you.

This is quite complex, quite emotionally demanding so give yourself space and time to learn the right balance for you and your team. When you feel someone is disrespectful, taking you for granted, saying things around people or to you that you don't think is right, I think you're lowering your respect and honour of me, address it. Talk about it, be involved with them in dealing with that.

What sort of meetings should I have with my staff?

Let's press on to another area that I find I'm often talking with pastors about. What sort of meetings should you have with staff members? I've got 3 types of meetings you should have with staff members.

Staff meeting

There's the corporate meeting, a staff meeting. I reckon you need these about once a month. I don't think you need weekly staff meetings, to be honest, I'd have all the staff gathered for the meeting, you can waste an awful amount of time with staff meetings especially when you're employing someone 3 or 4 hours a week, I don't think you want them in a staff meeting for 1 hour, 25% of their time every week. I think that's a waste of time. You can do quick catch ups with them week by week but I think corporate staff meetings, I would keep to once a month.

Supervision

There's supervision meetings. I've got a document that you can download about how to run a supervision meeting. Well it's a template for the various activities and various elements of a supervision meeting. I think you should have a supervision meeting about every 5 or 6 weeks with a staff member. It might be 4 weeks, it might depend on their role, their responsibilities, but I don't think you need to do it any more than once a month.

You can download the document and have a look at the elements there but it covers things like goals and targets, ministry activities and concerns. This is a meeting for catch up,


communication, problem solving, supporting, encouraging. Again, I'd run that at the max once a month, 45 minutes supervision meeting.

If the role is not as burdensome or such a heavy responsibility, you could probably push it out to every 6 weeks. You can have them setting targets that they're going for like that job description profile we talked about a bit earlier in the MasterClass. Talk through some of those goals and activities, solve problems and generally supervise their work.

Don't just leave them to their own devices never meeting with them. That will not give you fruit when it comes to staff. Too many pastors do that, they give someone a role and they never meet with them again to talk through their role. It's all ad hoc and spontaneous and sometimes it's just problem orientated rather than giving strength and support through regular supervision meetings.

Development

The third type of meeting is development meetings. Getting together to mentor and to coach those leaders. There's a separate MasterClass on How to Mentor and Coach People and you'll see it on the "I want to develop leaders" page. Get into that MasterClass. I'll actually put a link to it also below the video so you can have a deep dive into mentoring and coaching.

Don't just have monthly staff meetings and monthly supervision meetings, have mentoring and coaching times and moments. Some will be informal but some will be formal as well where you're developing your team.

Productivity

Let's look at the area of productivity with staff.

We want staff to be productive, we want them to be happy, we want them to be enjoying the workplace but also we want them to have a high level of productivity. We want them to be fruitful and successful in what they're doing and there's a number of things that impact on that.

We've talked a lot about culture and that aspect of recruiting rightly then putting frameworks around their development but there's a couple of areas of focus, I would say, that really impact on productivity and getting your staff to focus on the key things you want them focused on and also what they're passionate about being focussed on is vital to make them productive in a way that makes you happy, as their boss, but also makes them happy as a staff member.


We all want to have that sense of achieving, I'm moving towards what I want to do. So how do you get productivity happening in a way that a staff member feels good about what they're doing but also you as their boss feels good.

Here's a couple of small techniques that I've utilised over the years.

6 x 6

This is 6 things in 6 weeks. What you can do with a staff member is say let's look at the next 6 weeks of your work, now it can be a 4 x 4 if you want you can play around with the numbers but the concept remains consistent, what are the 6 things that you want to achieve. What are the specific things that you can do?

I tend to think of 3 areas when you're setting up a 6 x 6: personal development, ministry areas and leadership areas.

So personal development might be an exercise program, it might be listening to a podcast, reading a book, a study program, it's about personal growth.

Ministry is about skills that you might want to make sure that you're doing a few pastoral visits or a few connections with new people.

Leadership is I'm spending time with a younger leader to develop, mentor and coach them. Or a group of younger leaders. So that's a leadership thing more than a ministry thing.

You can get that person checking in with you every week just to give you an update and that can be done by email or text or what's ap or a quick chat but at the end of the 6 weeks you're going to rate them. How many did they do well on and then you're going to keep a record of that so there's a rolling record or productivity or achievement, under achievement, over achievement and spot on achievement.

Occasionally in a 6 x 6 you want to throw a BHAG in, a Big Hair Audacious Goal, something's that's kind of like wow, am I really going to have a go at this high risk, high reward one. And if they fail at it, so be it but its good to throw that in occasionally as well.

You don't want them achieving 6 things exactly ever 6 weeks. You want a bit of stretch in there and the occasional one that drops to the ground. At least then you can relax knowing their focussed on the things I'm interested in and their interested in and mutually agreeing on those 6 things is vital.

Annual goals

There’s also the aspect of annual goals. I think if you just have annual goals that don't get checked on, I think they're quite weak in producing productivity. If you set annual goals,


again around personal development, ministry areas and leadership areas then you can set someone up for the year but then you have to be doing that chat that we talked about, that connection with them every month, supervision chat, so that they know I'm giving you an update and a report on this.

What you can actually do is fashion the 6 x 6 in with the annual goals so they work together. The 6 x 6 is like a subset that you're moving towards targets, objectives, outcomes that you're aiming for.

The key thing to remember about any goal is that it must have a number in it to be a goal. If it's not numerical, if you can't measure it, then it's actually a wish, an idea, a concept. It's not a target, an objective, an outcome, a goal that you can measure.

These couple of little tools will help people be able to go, you know what I'm achieving what I set out to achieve, I'm getting to where my targets are and if you couple this with that job description that we talked about that we used with recruiting someone, there's some qualitative stuff in there as well as the quantitative.

Qualitative is feel, the atmosphere, the things that are hard to measure but you can put it in with the quantitative goal orientated stuff so you've got a mixture of feel, qualitative, as well as hard data numeric quantitative when you're measuring productivity.

Firing a staff member

So we've talked a fair degree about recruitment, creating the culture, about meetings with staff, productivity with staff. Let's talk about the thing that we don't want to do. You're fired! When you have to fire a staff member. When you have to dismiss a staff member, let someone go, whatever language we use but the point has come where that person needs to move off staff.

There is a maximum that is probably important to remember - hire slowly, fire quickly. I don't know if it would be a mistake but one of the processes I'd tend to do was to fire a little bit too slowly but I'll show you a reason why I did that. But be slow in hiring and we've talked a lot about recruiting staff in this MasterClass.

Let me give you 5 tips, 5 processes, 5 things you need to think about when you're going to fire a staff member, dismiss a staff member or come to that point where you say I think it's time for that person to move on to a different place other than being on staff here.

1. Make the decision

If you're the pastor or the leader, make the decision about that staff member. Think it through. Base it on facts, is the chemistry not working any more, has the character dropped.


You know those 4 C's we talked about. Is the competency not at the level you want it, is the culture fit not working anymore, is there performance not coming to where you want it to be over a period of time. What facts do you have in place?

Don't just let this be a chemistry, emotive thing but what facts do you have in place because if you're going to move someone off staff, whether it's a firing or a dismissal or whatever the feel around it is, you need to base it on truth. It needs to have integrity behind the decision. So work out why you're making that decision.

Sometimes to sit down with a piece of paper or a computer and do a dump out of your brain of all the reasons why you want that person to move off staff.

2. Legals

Have you covered all the industrial relations laws required in your particular state, nation or province? Wherever you are what are the legal requirements that you have to do? In Australia we have industrial relation laws that you have to obey. If you're going to fire someone there's a process you must go through. A process that will include all sorts of areas of making sure that it's a fair and equitable decision.

If someone has been grossly immoral, done unethical or illegal things, of course you have the right to dismiss instantly. I've had to do that on one occasion during my pastoral life but generally when I've let people go, dismissed people, it's been because of other areas rather than something that's been illegal, unethical or immoral.

So check your legal’s and make sure you've got that covered.

3. Assessment

Have you had an assessment process that we've been talking about in this MasterClass, where you have had an assessment process, 6 x 6 or annual goals or performance reviews, where you're able to have a track record of a lack of performance, a lack of character, a lack of that competency that you want. Where people have set some targets, outcomes and objectives and people haven't reached up to that level.

Do you have an assessment process in place? If you don't then I think it's very hard to fire someone, to dismiss someone based on your recollection of how things were. But if you have an assessment process then you'll have in place an objective third party, if you like, that you're able to put on the table and say we've done these reviews over the last 6-12 months and this is where you have not met the standards that we mutually agreed on. I've signed off and you've signed off and you haven't come up to that standard and that's the reason why you're leaving.


Check your assessment processes. This is why it's so important to have an assessment process with your staff.

4. The second mile

Jesus said go the second mile. I think the second mile principle is important especially in a church staff. Are you going the second mile? Are you giving grace and mercy in this process? Now again if someone has done something illegal, immoral or unethical I don't think there's a second mile chance there, I think you need to act swiftly, quickly and decisively. But if it's someone's performance level, extra mentoring, extra coaching, maybe even a bit of micro managing for a period of time, upping the support, upping the guidance.

What second mile things have you done?

5. The chat

Now the chat is that thing where you have to sit down and say to the person here's what we're doing, you're leaving the staff. The chat may have followed a number of years, as I've done with an older staff member in our church, of sowing year by year that the chat's going to come eventually where I'll ask you to go part time and then off staff. So I sowed knowing there'd be a harvest down the track which eventually happened.

Or the chat may be a bolt out of the blue for the person. They may know through the assessment process they're not doing well but they may not know that you're going to pull that trigger.

So when you have your chat, here's a bit of advice. Keep it short, keep it to the point, keep it factual and don't enter into discussion. There's been a process going on, we've reviewed your performance and we don't think at the moment that you need to be staying on staff. So you'll be finishing up in the next week or two, or maybe it might be quicker than that, it depends on the scenario, but you'll be finishing up, we'll pay you out your entitlements. Keep it short and sharp.

Don't enter into discussion, don't let it get emotive from you. The person might cry, the person might yell, they may get upset but dial it down, do not engage with that. Finish the conversation, send them out of the room and even get another staff member to follow up with them in that process but you have to prepare for the chat.

Prepare well, it will be nervous, it will be anxious, it will be awkward but do the chat well and make it short and sharp.

Well that's it. The MasterClass on how to have a happy and productive staff. I hope and pray you'll never have to dismiss anyone from your happy and productive staff.


God bless you, thanks for joining me in the MasterClass.

Master lass How to uild a Happy and Productive Staff · How to uild a Happy and Productive Staff...

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