Jason Daye
Welcome to FrontStage, backstage. This week, we have a hand-picked highlight that we believe you will find valuable. If you do, we invite you to listen to the full conversation. You can find the link to the complete episode in the description, as always, please Like, Comment, Subscribe, and share so we can continue to bring you meaningful ministry content, helping you, pastors, and ministry leaders, just like you, flourish in both life and leadership. Are you ready? Let's go so. So tell us. Leonce, a little bit about this idea of trust. How do we what are some ways we can build trust and develop an environment, even you know, through our own leadership of trust, and whether it's paid staff or key volunteer staff, regardless, you know, building that team and understanding that piece of trust in the in the importance of that.

Leonce Crump Jr. 
Yeah, if I go back to the Bible for a minute, I think the foundation, I know, I think the foundation of trust comes out of First Corinthians, love believes the best, right? So if we can establish a culture of grace, from paid staff to unpaid leaders, you know, down to, you know, the person who takes care of the facility, and I would say, across to actually, let me correct that, because down is hierarchical, across to the person who takes care of the facility. If we can establish a culture where we are insistent that love believes the best, and so even if I'm rubbed the wrong way, even if I'm irritated, even if I'm right that you are totally out of line. I want to extend the runway of grace to believe the best until I actually know the worst. So that's kind of the foundation there. I think the next piece that you build on from there is psychological safety, and a lot of that is going to be created by whomever is considered the point leader, and the way you build psychological safety. Just a few examples is how you respond in conflict. Do you power up when you feel challenged? Are you Invitational and welcome to challenge, even if you have to rebut it when people are out of line, how do you respond to them? Do people feel free to share their actual opinions, and not just the things that aren't going to rub you or someone else the wrong way? So that's cultivating psychological safety. The next layer up from there is vulnerability, right? Transparency, I would say, is different than vulnerability. Transparency is allowing you to see into me some things that are not otherwise obvious. Vulnerability is giving you information with which you can harm me, right? And so I think the next layer is, is vulnerability that we have spent time sharing some of the corners of our hearts that if they were otherwise shared in any other environment, they could be incredibly harmful to me. And then I think kind of the last layer on top there is radical candor. And once you have psychological set, once you once love believes the best, and you have psychological safety, and you've created an environmental vulnerability, then you can have radical candor, where I can say to you exactly what I'm feeling and exactly how I'm seeing it, and you don't take it personally. You actually take it in a way of receptivity, because you know that I'm not pulling punches and I'm not shading the truth in order to make you feel better, but I'm actually saying it as it is because I think it's going to move our relationship, the project, the culture of our team, forward.

Jason Daye 
Yeah, yeah. I absolutely love those layers, and as you're describing them, they all make sense, and they all sound beautiful, but in real, in real time, it's messy, as you said. I mean, you've said this, we know it's messy. People are messy, so lay on as we look at this and like that. I think that first layer, you know, oftentimes people can, can process through. They can get through. They get maybe to the psychological safety layer. And oftentimes people don't feel say, you know, so they never get to that candor layer up top, because they don't feel safe here, like they can speak into hey, here's something you know, that that I see you know, just to be able to talk about it, because they fear like it might come back to bite them, right? So, so in ministry, with our teams, if we're going to build a resilient team, we have to overcome that. We have to we have to fight for that. So, what are practical ways? You know, as a pastor, ministry leader, watching along, listening in right now, you know, reflecting on. On, on our teams. What are some practical ways that we can help, you know, build that psychological safety so we can continue up those layers and get to that just radical candor?

Leonce Crump Jr. 
yeah, I would say the first thing is to go to your team. If you are senior pastor, lead pastor, founding pastor, point leader. You know, Vision guy, you know, we've got about 20 different titles now for the person who's up top, but I would go to your team and ask outright, do you feel safe to say exactly what you feel in a meeting or to me privately, do you feel like you can challenge me and and not in a dishonoring or disrespectful way, because we wouldn't want to do that to anybody, regardless of their position, but, but do you feel like you can say that's wrong, or I don't agree with that, or I think that the reverberations of that are going to be incredibly costly, and it may be depending on how unsafe, because the word toxic is thrown around so much now, so I'll say it depends on how unsafe, and maybe not Even unsafe, but, but how un communicated that safety is the method of asking those questions may be different. It may be a 360 review, it may be an anonymous survey. It may be a direct one to one with the person with whom you think you have the most trust on the team, who can give you an evaluation of the rest of the team, but they're, you know, multitude of ways that you can get at this, to actually understand how safe your team feels with each other, and then with you, who may be considered the point leader,

Jason Daye 
And then once you learn that, hey, people may not feel as safe as I think they should. You know, I might be like, Hey, I feel like, you know, you could tell me anything you know, because we say that and we might believe it, but they may not feel that way because of past experiences or, you know, different things they've seen. What? What are some steps you can take at that point to make it safe, to kind of start building that, that trust level in?

Leonce Crump Jr.
yeah, I think there's a couple of ways that you can go about it, and some of it depends on your governance. You know, for us, we have overseers, which are an external board, in addition to our plurality of elders and our overseers, come and do cultural assessments a couple of times a year from the outside, and they interview staff members and team members, and I am, you know, completely removed from that process. And then they give me a report and give me feedback on where things are and where things need to change and and so at times and in periods in the life of our church where there has been low psychological safety that has been assessed and evaluated, and in one of those instances, we brought in an outside therapist to do some group sessions and also Do some individual sessions to kind of get at the root of it, because if it's tied to something that you can't control as a point leader, then then there's really nothing you can do if it, if it's childhood trauma, if it's, you know, residual wounds, like those, are things that have to be dealt with inside the person. But if there are things you can do to alleviate activating those things in your environment and create as much buffer as possible, then you should be able to do those things. So we had a man named Ben come in. He owns his own practice in St Louis. He did several group sessions. He did several individual sessions, and he came back on the other side and he said, here are the six or seven things I think you can do to make this a healthier and more psychologically safe environment.

Jason Daye 
FrontStage backstage is a ministry of PastorServe. Here at PastorServe, we love walking alongside of pastors and ministry leaders if you'd like to learn details on how you might qualify for a complimentary coaching session with one of our trusted ministry coaches. Please visit PastorServe.org/freesession now FrontStage, backstage is more than just another podcast. In fact, we create an entire toolkit that complements every single conversation. You can find this toolkit at PastorServe.org/network for this episode, and for every episode in the toolkit, you'll find a number of resources, including our ministry leaders growth guide. In the growth guide, you'll find both questions and insights that are pulled from the conversation that you and the leaders at your local church or ministry can process together to consider how this content. It relates to your particular ministry context. Again, you can find the toolkit at PastorServe.org/network. Now we hope that you are finding this content valuable, and if so, we'd love for you to share, comment, like, follow, subscribe, that engagement is incredibly important, and also please take a moment to give us a review on your favorite podcast platform, your engagement and your reviews help other pastors and ministry leaders help find this valuable content. I'm Jason Daye, and I'm encouraging you to love Well, live well, and lead well. Thank you, and God bless you.