The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
We're all about helping create a healthy, positive, and spiritually positive environment for church staff members and leadership teams.
The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
What If You Staffed for Curiosity, Not Competency?
Curiosity, not just competency, may be the most underrated asset on your church staff team. Hiring curious people can transform your church culture and foster innovation from the inside out.
• Curious staff members ask better questions like "why do we do it this way?" rather than settling for status quo
• Skills like ProPresenter, Canva, and planning systems can be taught, but curiosity is intrinsic
• In a rapidly changing post-pandemic church landscape, churches need explorers, not just maintainers
• Curious staff build better culture by creating safer spaces for innovation and staying teachable
• When interviewing candidates, ask questions that reveal curiosity: "What have you changed your mind about in ministry lately?"
• The most dangerous staff member is one who has stopped asking questions
Reach out to me anytime at podcast@chemistrystaffing.com if you're looking to hire a new staff person or if you're stuck in the middle of a staff search.
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What if you've been hiring the wrong way all along? Today on the podcast, we're going to unpack why curiosity, not just competency, is what I think one of the most underrated assets on your church staff team, and we're going to talk about and hopefully learn a little bit about how a curious team member can actually unlock the rhythm and foster innovation and actually create a healthier culture from the inside out. All right, so whether you're hiring a new youth pastor, you're adding your creative team or you're just rethinking your staff culture, hopefully this episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast will help challenge your assumptions a little bit and give you some framework for evaluating what really matters. And, spoiler alert, what really matters most of the time is not the seminary degree. All right, we're going to talk about that today. Hi there, my name is Todd Rhodes. I'm one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffingcom and your host right here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast.
Speaker 1:What if your church, your next church hire didn't need to be the most experienced person but the most curious? Because, let's be honest, skills can be trained, okay, but curiosity, that's culture shaping gold. So stay with me. I'm going to show you how hiring for curiosity can actually shift, or at least begin to shift your whole staff culture. All right. Curiosity really changes the questions. Most church interviews when you're hiring for a new role, revolve around competency. Things like hey, can you build a team? Can you run a team? Do you know, pro presenter, can you teach middle schoolers without everything in the room dissolving into chaos? But what if we flip that? What if we flip those questions? A curious staff member walks in asking things like why do we do it this way? What are we not seeing? How can we better serve our community? And curiosity reshapes not just the answers, but the questions. And the questions are where the growth starts.
Speaker 1:So curiosity almost always fuels innovation, and here's why Curious people don't settle. They're not satisfied with the whole boy. I hear this all the time in the church. We've always done it that way. Curious people don't settle for that. They tinker and they explore. They ask sometimes some wild questions like could we live stream our small groups? Or what does our kids? Why does our kids check and feel like the DMV in a post-pandemic church landscape that's shifting incredibly fast. I've never seen culture and church landscape change and shift faster. In that kind of a culture, in that kind of a landscape, you don't need maintainers, you really have to have explorers. You need to have curious staff, because curious staff are going to push your church to experiment in healthy and spirit-led ways. So I already mentioned this.
Speaker 1:But skills can be taught. You can hire for skills. Curiosity though, that's something and not so much. You can't really teach curiosity. Either people are just kind of baked into their personality and their DNA. They're either a curious person or they're not.
Speaker 1:And don't hear me say I don't want anybody to email. You can email me. But don't email me and say, todd, competency matters. You're throwing competency out the window. I'm not doing that at all. Absolutely. Competency matters when you hire and when you're adding people to your team. But honestly think about it.
Speaker 1:Most job-related skills can be learned. Planning center that can be learned. If you don't know planning center, canva Can be learned. Sermon planning rhythms yeah, even those can be learned. Even conflict resolution that can be learned. Sermon planning rhythms yeah, even those can be learned. Even conflict resolution that can be learned.
Speaker 1:But curiosity, that's a posture, it's not a process. It's an intrinsic desire to grow and adapt and uncover better ways to do the mission of your church. And you can mentor a curious person into almost any role, but no amount of training can ignite curiosity in someone who just wants to punch the time clock. Okay, curiosity is going to build your culture and if you don't have a curious person on your staff, your culture I would almost guarantee it is. I don't want to say lame, that seems like too strong of a word, but it's not active, it's not going anywhere. Churches often talk about culture fit. We talk about it at Chemistry Staffing all the time, but sometimes churches talk about this culture fit as some type of mysterious vibe. But one of the best predictors of a great culture in your church how many curious people do you have on your staff? Curious people ask better questions in meetings and they create safer spaces for innovation. And curious people lean into other perspectives and they stay teachable and emotionally healthy. Culture isn't just about fun staff retreats. It's about people who stay open and curious, and curious leaders do that All right. So you kind of got me thinking here, todd, about the whole. Skills can be trained, but you can't train for curiosity. So how do you take this and do something with this with your next hire? Here's how.
Speaker 1:Okay, you want to know who's curious. Stop asking things like what did you do at your last church and start asking something along these lines what's something that you've changed your mind about in ministry lately? Or tell me about a time when you asked a hard question nobody else was asking. Ask this question. When was the last time you tried something new and failed? Those might sound like gotcha questions. I interview a lot of people. These are not gotcha questions. They're mirrors, okay, of you. A lot of people. These are not gotcha questions, they're mirrors, okay. They reveal who is still learning and who's curious, and those that have just given up and going with the status quo.
Speaker 1:The most dangerous staff member, in my opinion, it's one who stopped asking questions. So I want to be clear. I want you to hear me. Competency matters, but competency can be trained. Curiosity cannot be trained, but curiosity it multiplies. Curious staff grow faster, they build better teams and they actually expand your church's potential. Expand your church's potential. If you've ever hired the most qualified person, the most adept person, only to be disappointed, maybe it's time to change the playbook.
Speaker 1:I love topics like this because it takes what we think are best practices and turns them on their side or turns them over and says I did this, that's what we do all day at chemistry staffing is we work with churches and we work with candidates, and curiosity is one of the things that we go after really hard, and we've trained our team to know how to do this, and our team themselves are curious people, because we want to find out as much about your church and about every person that we talk to that we can. If there's any way that I can help you. Maybe you're looking to hire a new staff person. Maybe you're in the middle of a staff search and, honestly, you're just stuck. You can't find the right person. It just seems I'd love to have a conversation with you.
Speaker 1:Reach out to me anytime. Podcast at chemistrystaffing is my email address. With you. Reach out to me anytime. Podcast at chemistrystaffing is my email address. Podcast at chemistrystaffingcom. All right, thanks so much. I will be back here again tomorrow. I hope you'll join me. This podcast is really starting to take off, really starting to grow, and I love hearing from everybody that's listening and just saying Todd, thanks so much for all that you and chemistrystaffing are doing. I love our time together and would love to hear from you. Podcast at chemistrystaffingcom. All right, thanks so much for joining me today. I'll be right back here again tomorrow. Hope you'll join me on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast you.
