Dealing with an Ineffective Church Staff Member
One of the greatest joys in ministry is working with a great staff. But if there are challenging staff situations, it can also be one of the biggest frustrations in church leadership.
It’s one thing if the challenge is due to a moral failure, blatant insubordination, chronic complaining, or disregard for policies and procedures. If you have a good policy manual, dealing with such matters is more clear-cut.
The greater issue is when the staff member hasn’t done anything terribly wrong, yet also hasn’t done much terribly right. They have a position, but they are failing to perform.
Why you have underperforming staff
There are a number of reasons why you might have underperforming staff:
You inherit them. Whether you take a leadership position in a new church or you move up to a supervisory position in your current church, you now find yourself in the role of “evaluator.” And what you see by way of production in those you are tasked to lead is less than admirable.
The job demands more than it did before. Another way of putting this is that the job outgrows the person. What had been acceptable is no longer sufficient. And the staff member doesn’t have the capacity to handle the new reality.
Their passion dissipates. Passion is seldom stagnant. Over time it either grows or shrinks. This is indicated by enthusiasm, creativity, and willingness to sacrifice. When passion dissipates, so does performance.
Their life situation changes. Staff members do not minister out of a vacuum. Put another way, they are people before they are pastors. When there are personal challenges – marital problems, health issues, etc. – performance often suffers.
When passion dissipates, so does performance.
When underperformance happens out in the marketplace, it is typically addressed quickly. The costs to the company’s effectiveness, team morale, and financial investment are owned.
Yet, senior leaders in a church tend to hold on to people who are ineffective or even harmful.
Here are a few possible reasons why:
Why church leaders hold on to ineffective staff
They want to be kind. Churches define themselves as “families” more than “corporations.” Employees are our brothers and sisters. Leaders don't wish to hurt other people’s feelings or cause them hardship.
They recognize that everyone genuinely likes the person. Some people are not good at their job, but that doesn’t mean they’re not great people. This can be especially difficult if the staff member has served the church for a long period of time.
They worry about the church’s image. When the reason for making a tough call on the retention of a staff member is underperformance, it’s not something that is broadcast. Out of love, a leader doesn’t want to come out and say, “They just weren’t doing the job.” In that vacuum of information, those on the outside, especially when they love the employee, will be quick to criticize and even condemn the church.
They are concerned that the timing isn't right. There’s never an ideal time to confront or fire a staff member. Something seems to always be scheduled, and the church calendar is too full to make a switch on staff. Summer events, big seasonal weekends like Easter and Christmas, or other special events make it a challenge to time out a staff transition.
They feel blameworthy. Sometimes church leaders feel badly for hiring the person in the first place, for whatever reason. Or there’s the sense of personal failure: “I wasn’t the right kind of leader. I didn’t give them what they needed to succeed.”
They don’t want to deal with the extra work of re-hiring. Hiring, done right, takes a lot of time and energy. Sometimes it feels easier to put up with an ineffective team member than to spend months finding a new one. church leaders are not trained in effective practices of hiring staff.
The thing is, failure to act when there is underperformance can be terribly costly.
Failure to act when there is underperformance can be terribly costly.
In his national bestseller, Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about how an organization is like a bus. It’s got a destination in mind and it has a passion to get there.
The leader is the “driver” of the bus. Yet he/she also needs others on the bus to help accomplish the vision.
These “others” are analogous to a church staff. Some of them are great fits. They obviously want to be on the bus and their effectiveness demonstrates that they are in the right seat on the bus.
Then there are the underperformers. What then?
Evaluating Underperformers
When it comes to evaluating those individuals who are underperforming, Collins suggests asking a series of questions:
Should the person have ever been on the bus? (Were they a poor hire in the first place?)
Are they in the wrong seat on the bus? (Can they be placed in another position where they can perform well?)
Has their time come to exit the bus? (Neither positional changes nor training will improve the situation.)
These are tough questions and they require tough answers. Answers that can be hard to act on.
Collins writes:
“We’ve all experienced the following scenario. We have a wrong person on the bus and we know it. Yet we wait, we delay, we try alternatives, we hope the situation will improve…but the situation doesn’t improve.
“When we go home we find our energy diverted by thinking (or talking to our spouses) about that person. Worse, all the time and energy we spend on that one person siphons energy away from developing and working with all the right people.
“We continue to stumble along until the person leaves on his/her own (to our great sense of relief) or we finally act (also to our great sense of relief). Meanwhile our best people wonder, “What took you so long?”
“Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the right people.”
“Waiting too long before acting is equally unfair to the people who need to get off the bus. For every minute you allow a person to continue holding a seat when you know that person will not make it to the end, you’re stealing a portion of his life, time that he could spend finding a better place where he could flourish.
“Indeed, if we’re honest with ourselves, the reason why we wait too long often has less to do with our concern for that person and more to do with our own inconvenience.”
This issue certainly raises more questions:
How do you handle and correct underperformance?
How do you terminate a person if there is no change?
How do you communicate such a staff transition to the Body at large?
I hope to address these in future blogs. But, for now, simply review your current situation honestly. Do you in fact have an underperforming staff member? And, if so, what should be the next step you take to address it?
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