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Lifeline Leadership Podcast Network. Good day, I'm Derek Hanna. And I'm Scott Sanders. Welcome to the one thing, a podcast designed to give you one solid practical tip for gospel-centered ministry every week and Scott, what's happening in the land of Sydney today? Well, we've got the warm weather's back. So it's bringing

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in the air and it's warm and I can get out and wear my shorts again. So I'm pretty happy I'm pretty enjoying it, enjoying the sun. I bet everyone else in Sydney is pleased to see your hairy legs get wet. White legs, they're very white. The legs are white at the moment. So I'm actually going for walks in the middle of the day and just soaking up the sun to try and get as many raises as possible. Yeah, okay, you're not thinking about investing in a sun bed or something like that. Just a thought, just a thought. Anyway, the one thing is brought to you thanks to

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Geneva Push, the Australian Church Planning Network and we are also proudly part of the Lifeline Leadership Podcast Network. We would encourage you to check out our new network, Pagodon iTunes. You can see all the other quality Christian podcasts that are available there, but for now, you have press play on another episode of the one thing and this one is Starfing for 2021. Scott, this is a tricky one. This is a tricky one. You know, you have been a similar situation.

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I've been talking to a lot of people about difficult staff moons, whether they're the ones moving or bringing people on or letting people go. This is a really hard area given the massive uncertainty we live in as to how to move forward. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to interrogate, I'm going to ask you a few questions to build a framework for the kinds of questions we might be wanting to think into as we think about Starfing in 2020. Is that all right? Can I do that? You can do that. And I just want to affirm it. It is a difficult context and I think it's

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made more difficult by the fact that there are new areas that we've had to push into, but also the realities we've got an existing staff team who we need to love and care for and they've had to pivot and change and the difficulty is, you know, they were hired for this role and brought on for this role, but they're having the flexible and change. And not everyone is as flexible as you Derek. Not everyone can touch their toes like you can. That's met. No, I actually have not found my toes for about 20 years, but I understand what you're saying. I understand what you're saying.

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So just before we're going to, there's four areas that we've kind of identified that will that'll help with the framework, thinking through stopping, staffing, starting, staffing, reinventing staffing and challenges problems with 2021 staffing. So I'm going to ask you just some questions, what we need to think about in each of those areas. Can we start with the stop staffing questions? Because for some churches, there are, that's a reality they're going to have to confront, stopping staffing. What questions do they need to be thinking about in that?

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Yeah, well, I think first and foremost, there's the caring for the actual staff person. And so you want to be communicating any, you know, any changes early, and they need to be the, you know, communicator, I think, in the context of where the church is at as a whole and the reasons, the reasons for, you know, the need to stop a particular role. So that needs to be, I think, communicators early as possible. And so I think we've talked a number of times about trying to be, you know, a couple of steps ahead of where things are. And so a part of, you know, part of that,

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the reason for stopping could be a number of reasons, you know, one, the role just might not exist anymore. Two, there might not be the financial resources potentially for a church to be able to employ someone, which does make it, you know, that's a really hard, hard question. And I think that's going to be a reality facing a lot of churches with, you know, JobKeeper stopping in the next, you know, in the next few months. So those, realities need to be communicated early and communicated in the context, I think, of the overall

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outcome of where the, you know, where the church is wanting to go as well. And, and then, you know, I encourage most churches to sort of have two months, you know, three months to cash flow. That enables someone to have, you know, enables you to have time so you can actually care for a staff business. They actually need to stop their role, you know, for, you know, for good. And you're actually making them redundant or, and they're leaving. So you need to check into the law on a redundancy and, you know, work with the domination, we don't have time in this podcast to go to all,

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all that discussion. But if you're stopping your staffing role because you actually need to, you know, change the role completely, then that actually does require you to, again, recast the job description, re-invisi just staff member so that they're actually on board for that new role and that new functionality. And that might mean, you know, training them and giving them a time to, to get up to speed on, I want that new role, you know, looks like. And I think I saw, you know, I've seen a number of different staff teams where whole staff teams have pivoted and

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changed roles. And there's been a realization that some staff have found that energising and exciting. Others have actually found that just too hard. And so I think as well as we think about stopping staffing, we've got to be, again, understanding of where people are at and how they operate, knowing that, you know, someone's sort of negativity or, you know, pushback might not be because they're not for you or for the bigger vision, but it could just be, they're just struggling with the change. And you need to do the work of actually, I think as a senior leader, as a leader in

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that situation, communicating that and committing that. A key part of that is to have clear job descriptions, aligning that again to your new goals and your overall goals. I think, you know, when someone is aware of the why and where it fits in the big picture, I think it makes it a lot easy to make those big changes that often need to take place. Okay. Can we talk about starting staffing, which might seem strange in an environment like this where financially, a lot of churches

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have been uncertain. Some have seen giving go up, but with JobKeeper in Australia, which has been a program for those who are not in Australia, to help keep people on a wage for while that's ending very soon or at least decreasing. There's an increased amount of uncertainty about what 2020 will look like. But for some people, it may be they do need to put people on in different roles. Talk to us about starting staffing, what questions we need to ask. Yeah. So I think it's important that you might need to just start staff for a specific time period.

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You know, so for example, we pivot and we moved across the live streaming. A lot of churches didn't have that capability. They either reach to existing staff members or they actually realise we need to pay a high level of volunteer or we need to actually get some outside helping you to do that role. So I think again on that, putting clear on how long that engagement is going to look like now, it looks like live streaming is here with us for some time. So I think a lot of churches are actually starting to staff in that AV sort of digital live streaming space. And I guess my encouragement

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would be as you think about that role, think about finding someone who is not just the ability to do the technical stuff, but has the ability to build a team. So whenever you're hiring someone, I'd encourage you to hire someone who can build a team. So hire someone who can not only do the work, but actually do the work through others. And so I think that's an area we need to potentially start, staffing for, but with a wider mandate of the online communication space. So hire someone who can actually help you think about not only just your Sunday live stream experience, but how can you

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actually create content and other online engagements with people via Facebook or via your website, where that is directing people into your discipleship funnel and creating a larger contact point. And so I think that's a key space, the sort of digital AV content production. Alongside that as well, I think is a comms person. We've realised that I think a lot of churches' communications structures

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have been really stretched in this moment. We've needed to overcommunicate. We've needed to do that, not only via email, but actually via sort of online updates. And so an important, I think, another important role that a lot of churches now are needing to staff is that comms role. So if you can find somebody who can do comms AV, then I'll be employing them and realising that that's a staff role that is actually going to continue on sort of post this event. Never more have we sort of seen the need for our front door being the website and our social space.

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All right, it's good. Let's talk about reinventing your alluded to just in there. But in reinventing the, either the staffing structure that you have, well, alternatively, people within there, as you've discovered different skills they have, or the churches, church has needed to move into different spaces. How do you think through reinventing your staffing as a whole? Yeah, I think churches are different to organising, even not for profit organisations,

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and even, well, they're definitely different to secular sort of organisations. You can't quickly just switch in people in and out. There is a sense of churches family, and so the loss of a staff member at any point in time has loads of impact across the whole church. Because ministry is relational, because ministry is pastoral, you know, the need to reinvent staff, I think, is kind of the easier win.

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It's also not like there's lots of people you can sort of pull off the shelf and bring into a staff role. I generally say to churches that take sort of at least six to 12 months to find a staff member for a role. There's not five communications persons out there, or 10 kids' workers that you can easily just sort of find and pull in, or the assistant pastor who actually works and interacts with your team. So you are going to need to reinvent your staff. One of the things I think you need to do is sit back and actually understand that reinvention

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does take time. I can remember personally during the pivot, during COVID, that we introduced a new management tool, and that just threw me out. I'm slow on getting into software, whereas you dare go like, you know, speedy guns, alleys and implement stuff really quickly and get across stuff like that. And so I think real, realizing that some people are going to need a bit of time to make those shifts, I think that's important. So give people time, realize that you're going to have

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to train them and equip them. I think, hopefully, you won't be using this time to reinvent staff to actually help move them up the pipeline. So we've talked about the leadership pipeline, lots on this podcast. The key concept in that framework is the shifts that people need to make in their time applications, in what they value, and then in the skills that they need. And so I think there's an opportunity, as you reinvent staff, to actually realise and sit down with someone and have that development conversation, where do you need to grow? And let's actually work over

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the next three to six months to actually grow you in those areas. And so, you know, pull out that ministry map that we've developed at the Registrar Conference a few years ago, pull that out and identify what person that layers its in and think about how you might move them up to the next late in this re-invention stay. So use it as a development opportunity. I think as well, thinking about the way you want to be. So realising that in churches, we've got often small teams.

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And so it's not like I've got the job description, you employ me to do this. I'm going to be doing this for the next five years. I think from the get go, helping people think that we want to be a church in five years time that's doing this. And so I'm bringing you on for this role, but I want this role to be a role that you grow into and that you build and develop others. And, you know, in the next three to five years, this is where I see you coming. If you've got that forward thinking, if you can see where they're going, then I think a bit of reverse engineering is quite helpful. So talk to us then about just finally problems, challenges with staffing in 2021.

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Well, I think as we come out of COVID, I think we've still got the issue of having remote staff teams. So that's just hard. Communications tougher. Things get lost in translation on the Zoom or the online call. We're not actually interacting much with others. So I'd be encouraging you to make use of the regular quarterly get together as much as possible, try and get all your staff team together on the one day during the week. So you can have those

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relational times where you actually get a chance to just sit and have those interactions that you've missed having. I think for the senior leader, I was reading an article on the weekend in Australia and it talked about the senior leaders in secular organisations having an increase of about eight hours per week on just check-ins and just relational time with their staff. So this period has actually created a need to be more invested in your staff team. So I see loads of

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staff leaders who are sort of there, the dump and run or they're just sort of set go. And they kind of wanting to be, they're wanting to lead as they like to be leaders and they don't want anyone sort of getting in their way. They're sort of the leaders who just want to get on with what they're doing. And I think in this time you've actually got to be checking in, I think more regularly with the staff team. I think the challenge in that as well is that we've lost a lot of the traditional release fows for conversations and relationships which we might have had beforehand. And so

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whereas you might have been, if you were someone who does want to just sit and get stuff done in your office and the relational stuff, you know, you need but not the same way as others, then you've lost an avenue whereby that would happen organically and to deliberately create that space on top of everything else you need to do is hard. That is exhausting. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen a number that's a really good point. And I mean, we've always had a culture at Geneva push of having

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sort of fierce conversations. You know, so just before we got on today, you know, Terrick kind of raised a conflict point with me. And that's really helpful to have that culture where you can push in and say, hey, you know, don't do that. Or let's talk about this is really important. Now, that's hyper people who don't like conflict. But I think you as a leader have got to work on creating a culture where you respond positively to that and and warmly to that and encourage that that healthy tension. I think that Lencee only talks about. Now, if church giving is dropped,

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there, you know, I know some churches have thought about actually taking a pay cut as a staff team. And so, you know, that's something that we at the start of this pandemic at Geneva push, you know, wrestle with as a leadership, but also wrestle with as a staff team. So that, you know, as you're putting your budget together, I'd be saying put it put a budget together that sort of 16, you know, 18 months out, you know, realise that this is this financial situation is going to be with us for, you know, potentially two years. So, so forecast out of further six to 12 months, so that you can work out well, do we as a staff team need to take a pay cut? What are what are

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some other ways that we can, you know, save costs in order to, you know, in order to mean that we actually keep our staff team together? Because there's a there's a huge loss when any any staff team members goes, there's a loss of just that all those intangibles of of people knowledge and even just that the the reality that it does take a while to restart your team and do the forming and storming again. And so you don't really, you know, you kind of think, ah, we've finally lost that staff member, we can kind of move ahead. But actually that you got to recognise there is a great loss in losing

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staff member. Okay, let me just as we before I throw the one thing Scott for you, let me just summarise and I'll put it again, the six questions we've got, we'll put them in the show notes, but here are the areas to dig into one is COVID given us greater clarity about a mission and what do we need to start or not start? Would we need to do question two? What were we doing that we don't need to do anymore? And how does that shape our staffing? Number three, where is the church growing? Where are we seeing that growth? Where are we seeing people in Gage and coming to? And therefore,

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how do we staff to that? For what new skills have we seen or discovered in staff during this pretty challenging time and how are we growing them in that? How are we growing them as leaders through that process? Number five, where do we want to be in five years time? Have that vision, have it laid out and then reverse engineer your staffing from that point? And six, lastly, what are the impact of finances in 2021 for staff pay? And how do you manage that process if there's some

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difficult decisions to make in there? That's helpful. Listen, what's the one thing that's got you want to lose with the staffing in 2021? Don't just staff to maintain the status quo. We're in a new context and new environment. That gives us the opportunity to think where we want to be in the next three to five years. Staff in line with that and start building a readiness for the growth that I'm sure God's going to give you. Excellent. Okay, what have you got for us in the toolbox today?

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Okay, so the first one, a book by Gary Macintosh, it's an older bit of goody, staff your church for growth. I've found that as a helpful book, just to push into and see some broader principles that will help you think about your own church. Then we've just got a couple of resources on the Geneva Push online resource library. Andrew heard talking about the right staffing model for growth and Mikey Lynch talking about the second staff member. They're both just helpful resources to again, spur you on and give you a bit of reflection as you think about your staffing plan for

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the future. And then final one, I talked about the Ministry map. We'll put a link in the show notes to the Ministry map. This is a tool that we've developed with a number of churches that really builds off Geiger and Pecs work in design to lead and the great work the life-way leadership team has done as well with their competency map. And so we've tried to contextualise that for our context and think into what does it look like. So check out the Ministry map and importantly, probably, you jump onto some of those resources from the Reach Australia Conference in 2019,

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just a link to the volunteer revolution or the serving revolution talks. They're excellent, just impression into that. Excellent. Well, if you have liked what you've heard today from the one thing, we'd appreciate it if you take a moment to read the show on iTunes and even leave a comment. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the one thing I'm Derek Hanna. And I'm Scott Sanders. Damn bone orgs of equality was drinking crop ethics offupbeat music perfectly either под numerous

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