Handling a Toxic Staff Member
Nothing will slow down a growing church faster than a toxic staff member. What makes a person toxic? One definition is that it’s an individual who is unsupportive, negative, or even abusive.
Toxicity can be demonstrated through sarcasm or mockery, disrespect or insubordination. It can be overt or it might be covert.
Nothing will slow down a growing church faster than a toxic staff member - someone who is unsupportive, negative, or even abusive.
It might be that you inherited him/her. It could be that you actually hired him/her.
Either way, they are both poisonous and present. And that poisonous presence takes its toll through the negative attitudes they display and the disruptive actions they take.
Churches don’t set out to hire toxic leaders — but it happens. (Pretty often, too.)
Just to be clear from the outset, these hires aren’t inherently bad people. They may in fact be highly gifted and may seem to carry great Kingdom potential.
A toxic staff member is someone who chronically detracts from your church’s efforts to accomplish its ministry goals. It’s the person who has been corrected but isn’t improving, stirs up strife on the team, creates more work than they perform, or just grieves your community in some way.
So how can you deal with such a staff member? There are at least two things you can do that might preempt the problem.
Preempt the Problem
1. Thoroughly vet the person before they join your staff. It’s rightly been said that the best way to handle toxic people is to never hire them in the first place. Make sure that, in your contacts with their references you not only ask about the person’s competence but their character. How they respond to leadership. How they deal with conflict.
2. Candidly share with the person the values of your staff culture. I wrote about how to create these in last week’s post. In your interview process, go through the established values and confirm that the candidate both understands and affirms each one of them.
Taking Action
So, let’s say you do all of this, and the staff member still displays attitudes and behaviors that are toxic. Then what can you do? Here are some suggestions.
1. When the attitude or action occurs, deal with it immediately. It will be tempting to “let it go” or to “turn a blind eye.” Resist that temptation. By failing to address that issue immediately, you are reinforcing the conclusion that it will be accepted.
Deal with toxic attitudes or behaviors immediately. Turning a blind eye gives the impression such behavior is accepted.
Having said that…
2. Meet with them one-on-one. As you do, have an “envelope conversation” with them. You can read about this in detail HERE. In short, the idea is to begin with how you value the relationship, then move to the problem that needs to be addressed and then end with how you look forward to continuing the relationship.
As you speak to the problem, don’t use accusative language (“Why would you do such a thing?”) but investigative language (“I’m curious why you would say/do such a thing in light of our cultural values.”)
3. Remind the staff member that he/she agreed to your group values and that to violate them is to betray the team. Underscore the fact that to continue doing this would result in serious consequences.
4. Document each step you take, each conversation you have, every attempt you make to salvage the relationship and redeem the ministry. If you receive any blowback in the future for your actions, having such documentation will be critical.
5. If the behavior continues, meet with the staff member one more time, with the warning that “three strikes and you’re out.” At this time, it would be wise to let the elder team know that there is a staff member at risk.
6. If and as that happens, terminate the staff member. Ongoing betrayal of cultural values must not be tolerated. To do so is to lessen their importance in the eyes of all the rest of the staff.
As I reflect on my forty years of ministry, I am so grateful that I had some wonderful staff members. Sadly, I also had some toxic ones. My mistake was to not deal with that toxicity immediately. As a result, not only did I suffer from it, so did the rest of my staff.
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