Starting Off on the Right Foot

Dear incoming congregational boards,

Your staff may be a bit anxious right now. Not because it’s the start of a new congregational year, although that is real - because how do you start with hope and energy in this environment?

But no, that’s not the real anxiety. Their anxiety is in not knowing how you will treat them.

You see, everyone says they are going to be supportive and share the ministry and work together, but sometimes people get on the board because they don’t actually trust the staff or the minister or the rest of leadership. And to prove their mettle, they will exert some of their newfound authority. Often, it begins some curious questions about hours, or job duties, and lines of authority. Then comes the review of contracts and job descriptions.

And this board soon finds itself questioning the contracts and letters of agreements that the previous board(s) worked hard on and settled and have been operating just fine under.

Which leads to staff members having to justify their work, their hours, their benefits. Lines of reporting get muddied, and staff finds themselves working more to satisfy what they perceive as a power trip by a new board trying to exert power.

And then the trouble begins.

You see where this is going. You want to cause a rift between professional and lay leadership? Do this.

Sigh.

Now this isn’t to say it isn’t a board’s responsibility to ensure contracts are working and in line with both the congregation’s mission and the employee’s role. But there is a way to do this that does not keep your staff on tenterhooks: Have an open conversation. With the staff and their supervisors. Check in. Are they feeling supported? Does the contract/letter of agreement still work? Are their adjustments that need to be made? Only then, maybe, examine the documentation.

But do this in ways that are supportive and don’t require the kind of accounting of hours or work product or presence that creates and atmosphere of distrust. We learned during the lockdown years of the pandemic that people worked well from home and managed their workloads, output, pastoral support, and their family/health obligations. So maybe we can continue to trust them now without requiring them to sit in empty church buildings on the off chance someone comes by, which they rarely do without an appointment?

Trust is key to good relationship, and the best way to creating a trusting, healthy relationship that reduces at least some of the anxiety we’re all dealing with, starts with trusting your staff. And if you start with a perspective of trust, imagine what you can actually do together.

Imagine if your staff had one less thing to be anxious about…. if they felt supported… What a wonderful world this would be.1