Do you love your pastoral staff but wish you could figure out how to get them to accomplish more each day? Do you feel like something is off with how your team goes about getting work done? If so, welcome to the club. As pastors and ministry leaders, we are always trying to get more out of our teams because there is always more to be done. Instead of focusing on how much is on their plates, though, it is time to look at the culture of your team and make a change.
To design a productive culture for your pastoral staff, all you need to do is:
- Clarify Roles
- Communicate Expectations
- Offer Freedom and Accountability
- Model System and Process Usage
Introduction
When Jesus began His ministry, the Jewish community was far from where Yahweh wanted them to be. Relationship with Yahweh was more about performance, sacrifices, and obeying the rules than it was about knowing him personally.
Throughout Isreal’s history, the people relied on the priests to speak on their behalf to the Lord, to intervene for them, and ultimately to serve as a medium between them and God. The people did not understand what it meant to be in a relationship with the Lord, and Jesus intended on changing that.
Jesus came to earth to walk among his people. The disciples walked with Jesus daily for three years, asking him questions, listening to his teachings, and getting to know him. Over time, their loyalty grew to him, which naturally led to a deeply meaningful relationship between Jesus and the disciples.
This is evidenced in the moments when Jesus took care of his friends or had a tender moment with them that was more than could be expected from a distant deity or vengeful God.
The night that Peter walked on water to Jesus is a great example. Peter is making his way through the storm to Jesus when his attention was caught by the storm. In that moment he began to sink. As fear overcame Peter, he cries out to his friend, Jesus, “Lord, save me!.”
The writer, Matthew, conveys the moment beautifully. In 14:31 it reads, “Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught Peter.”
Jesus was allowing Peter to step out in faith and walk on the water. Likewise, he took advantage of a teachable moment after the ordeal, but in between, the relationship between Jesus and Peter was on full display. Jesus was saving Peter from certain death.
In this gesture of reaching out, Jesus was creating a shift in culture for the Jewish community, and the entire world, through his relationships with these twelve men. He was showing the world what it would be like to be in a relationship with Yahweh by using the disciples’ relationship with Jesus as an example. He was rewriting the operating system.
Jesus knew a major change was needed, and it would not be accomplished without a culture shift. So, he spent three years investing in the lives of twelve men who would carry on his mission and bring a cultural shift to the Jewish people and the world.
Why Create a Productive Culture
We have a mission. As pastors, we have been given an eternal mission with a ticking clock. Whether time runs out when we take our last breath or when the trumpet sounds, you and I have a limited time to complete the mission the Lord has given us.
Unfortunately, along the way, we trade busyness for fulfilling Christ’s commission. We fill our days with events, tasks, and projects that have more to do with maintaining our ministries than reaching our communities.
Then one day we realize we are burned out, we have lost our passion for ministry, we are looking for an exit, or we just can’t get out of bed to face another day of ministry.
I don’t believe this is what God meant for you and me when he called us into ministry. There is a mountain of things that need to be done in ministry, and we are never really done with everything that needs to be accomplished.
This is only exacerbated when we spend our days being unproductive and we have teams under us that are unproductive. They spend more time hanging out in each other’s offices ‘shooting the breeze’ rather than working ahead. They are just in time or late on their deadlines, and when they do accomplish something it is below their potential and short of your expectations.
This is part of the reason why when I mention living your dream life in ministry, you feel a small chuckle sneak up inside you. That’s assuming you haven’t laughed out loud yet. Spending more time with family, having a hobby, or traveling sounds great, but it just feels like an impossibility because there are so many things that need to be done and you don’t feel you can get enough of it done fast enough to find time for anything leisure.
Allow me to give you two reasons why you need to create a productive culture for your team in order to develop them into being highly effective.
Too Little Time
Time is the one resource we can not get more of. Once we spend that moment, we can not get it back. This is why I feel so privileged that you are spending these precious moments with me, and why I feel the responsibility to deliver helpful tools, resources, and trainings to you as quickly as possible.
If you are like me, you want to give your life to your ministry calling, but you also want to live life to its fullest. You want to reach as many people as possible, but also care for your family and friends. You want to work hard for the Kingdom of God, but also feel accomplished at the end of the day.
If that is the case, then you have to create a culture of productivity. A culture that squeezes every ounce of value from every working minute so that you can bask in the peace of every calm moment of your free time.
If you are spending your days unproductive, letting the minutes pass away, then you are missing the opportunity that has been entrusted to you. At the same time, you are creating the opportunity for your moments of free time to be stolen in the future when things have to be done and you are up against a deadline.
Team Needs Harmony
Are you familiar with a metronome? For musicians, the metronome keeps the time of a piece of music. It creates a standard with which the musician strives to keep up in order to play the piece of music correctly. If a band or symphony is unable to match the “click click click” of the metronome, then the music sounds disjointed and out of sync. The most beautiful piece of music can sound like a trainwreck if the timing is off by even one instrument. This is how harmony is achieved.
In the same way, your team is most likely come to you through several different avenues. Maybe you inherited your team or maybe you have built your team, either way, they will likely not find harmony together without you acting as the metronome and setting the timing for them to follow.
When you are the cultural architect of your productivity, it provides your team with the timing of how things should be done as a part of your team.
When you are highly productive, your team will follow your example and find harmony alongside you and one another. If they are not in harmony, you will see that and have the choice of investing time into them to help or allowing them to find another team for them to work in harmony with. Either way, your team needs to work in harmony with each other, and you creating a culture of productivity for them will be the quickest way to discover that harmony.
Let’s look at four things you need to do to begin creating a productive culture for your team to find harmony in and start becoming highly effective.
How to Create a Productive Culture
Clarify Roles
In my years as a pastor, I have served with a lot of different titles. One thing has been consistent with all the titles I have had…they didn’t really capture everything I was responsible for.
As a pastor, I am sure you know exactly what I am talking about. Whether you are the youth pastor, kids pastor, lead pastor, or just pastor, you are doing all kinds of things that are not really part of your job description. Assuming you actually received a job description when you were hired.
This is normal in ministry, and we all kind of laugh about it. The reality, though, is that in the absence of a job description, the members of your team are working in a high degree of ambiguity. Now, there are some things that fall into obvious roles such as the youth and kids areas. However, who is responsible for the graphics of the website?
Who’s job is it to follow up with new guests?
Who is responsible for throwing the 4th of July event?
By clarifying the roles of everyone on the team, you give them the gift of clarity, authority, and ownership. If you feel as though your team is always passing the buck, then that is a good indication that roles are not clearly defined.
You will struggle to establish a productive culture if you fail to provide clarity on roles. Team members will have a hard time taking initiative because they will not know if it is there’s to do. Over time they will learn to wait to be told to do something rather than stepping up on their own. Your team needs you to take the time to clarify roles for them.
I have observed some ministry teams where the Lead Pastor is frustrated because things are being missed and no one is taking responsibility for it. When he asks the team whose job it was to make sure such and such was done, they all look at each other with a dumbfounded look or they devolve into an argument about who was supposed to be responsible. Usually, these moments end with the pastor telling everyone to figure it out and then walking away.
It is not your team’s job to figure out who is responsible for what. That is the role of the leader of the team…you.
Serve your team by providing them with clarity on their roles. Give them job descriptions, assign projects to them, and provide them with the clarity they need. By doing that, you strengthen your culture of productivity.
Communicate Expectations
Once you have clarified roles, it is time to communicate expectations. I once had a pastor who would tell us “do it how I would do it”. However, none of us really understood how he would do it. When we would ask him how he wanted it done he would get frustrated with us, and if we just guessed he would make a million small changes along the way. It was a very frustrating and deflating experience.
If you fail to communicate expectations and things are not done the way you want them to be done, it is really hard to address it without making your team feel defeated.
When you communicate expectations, the primary thing it does is allow your team to move quickly. If you provide detailed expectations, then they know exactly what steps they need to make to meet your expectations. On the other hand, if you give them very broad expectations, then you allow them a great deal of freedom to be creative and problem-solve on their own.
My personal preference is to give 30,000-foot expectations and allow them to create and discover.
Even if they drop the ball along the way, they learn and grow, and it pays dividends down the road as they develop into better leaders, pastors, and servants. Whether you provide detailed or high-level expectations, you are giving your team clarity to move forward and get things done, reinforcing the productive culture you are establishing.
Offer Freedom and Accountability
Every team member wants freedom, and very few want accountability. These two go hand-in-hand though. Too many pastors lead their teams with a high degree of accountability and low degree of freedom. This is fine if that is what fits your leadership style, however, you will never have a highly effective team. In order for team members to be highly effective, they must have a high degree of freedom. Now, that freedom has to be in proportion with their experience level and your level of trust with them. But, team members who are highly effective struggle to serve under a heavy-handed, micromanaging leader. When they are given a high level of freedom to make decisions, be creative, try new things, and explore possibilities, they are not just highly effective but become high performing.
This high degree of freedom can not be left unchecked though. We all need accountability to keep our natural desire for power and authority in check, and every member of your team is no different. A highly effective team member with a great deal of freedom and almost no accountability will likely lead to a negative result. This is the environment that creates dysfunctional teams and church splits.
As the leader of the team, and their pastor, trust them with increasing levels of freedom. You are growing servants of the Great Commission, not managing a fast-food restaurant. Allow them to grow and flourish.
At the same time, give them the gift of accountability. There are so many instances where pastors fall into a degree of misconduct in ministry, and most of the time they will say they have no idea how they got there. We are all susceptible to making mistakes. By providing accountability to your team members, you communicate you care for them and want them to succeed.
Model System and Process Usage
Many pastors are big idea guys. We like living at 30,000 feet and seeing the big picture. We don’t like being bogged down by details. This includes the systems and processes of our church office environment. We create systems of efficiency and productivity for everyone else, but we just do things how we want to or how we have done them since before the iPhone.
The problem is that you communicate to your team that you have put in place systems for them to follow, but you can do whatever you want because you aren’t really part of the team.
If you are above learning and using the systems and processes of your church office, then you are communicating you are above everyone who follows them.
Eventually, the systems and processes you put in place to establish and develop your productive culture will be abandoned by your team members which will undermine your efforts.
You must model the usage of systems and processes in order to communicate their value to the team and establish your part as a member of the team.
Conclusion
Developing a highly effective team is the best thing for your community, for your congregation, for your team, and for yourself. But, you will not be able to lead a highly effective team if they are not operating in a culture that values productivity.
Creating a productive culture begins with you as the leader. When you put in the work on the front end to get the pieces in place and set the tone that productivity is vital to everyone’s healthy ministry service, you will be well on your way to living your dream life.