Inside this value of trust, sometimes you are the person with more influence and sometimes you are the person with less influence.
To increase trust in your staff culture:
- Those who have more influence must lean into your character to not embarrass, reject or punish others.
- Those who have less influence must lean into your courage to be real, honest and speak up.
2. Consistent and Unwavering Honesty
When you build trust, your staff team can be honest.
We often don’t speak up, or speak with complete honesty, from fear of conflict. This leads to poor decision-making and an unhealthy staff culture.
When we don’t speak up, we grow to distrust each other because we sense a lack of candor, or later learn in a hallway conversation that someone was holding back.
Conflict is inevitable in any organization because it’s inevitable in any relationship. Two things are important. What (not who) you make the target of the conflict, and your ability to resolve the conflict.
Honesty always leads back to trust.
3. Christ-like Grace
Just like no relationship can survive a lack of grace, no church staff team can thrive without grace as well.
Isolation over intimacy reduces grace. Isolation isn’t just physical distance, it’s also emotional distance. It’s about feeling alone, indifferent and like your voice doesn’t matter.
Different forms of isolation shrink your world, which shrinks your thinking and can skew your perspective.
When you add your pressures and problems to the mix, grace is greatly diminished and judgment takes its place.
When judgment overtakes grace, your staff culture is headed in the wrong direction.
Fight for grace:
- If I offend you, let me know. I want to apologize.
- If you wrong someone, go make it right.
- If someone just bugs you, extend grace, seek unity—not judgment.
4. Aligned and Strategic Clarity
5 things staff members want to know:
- Where are we headed?
- What is expected?
- How am I doing?
- Am I appreciated?
- How can I get better?
Make these consistently clear and communicate them well and you will enhance your staff culture in noticeable ways.
5. Skilled and Joyful Dependability
Trust, honesty, grace, clarity… “That’s all good and important, but are you ever going to talk about staff actually doing their job.”
Yup, I am.
The value of dependability is huge. It addresses core issues such as:
- Can your teammates count on you to show up and be all in?
- Can your teammates count on you to pray, love people and make the team better?
- Can your teammates count on you to do your job and do it well?
- Can your teammates count on you to become a better leader and do your best to advance the mission of the church?
- Can your teammates count on you to solve problems and make the church stronger?
How would you assess yourself or your team with these questions?
