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
The Leadership Culture Your Staff Can’t Thrive In
Church culture is defined by how your team experiences leadership every day, not just through perks or events, and toxic leadership environments can slowly push away great staff members despite their calling.
• Constant urgency where everything feels like an emergency
• Avoiding necessary hard conversations
• Celebrating success while ignoring burnout
• Critique consistently outweighing encouragement
• Staff never feeling caught up with their workload
• Staff silently question if they can speak up without punishment
• They wonder if anyone cares about their wellbeing
• They question if their ideas matter or if they're just "doers"
• They worry about growth opportunities versus endless grinding
• Normalize check-ins that go beyond project status updates
• Celebrate both results and people equally
• Own mistakes and model humility at all levels
• Build margin—not everything needs to be urgent
• Build trust through clarity, consistency, and care
• Remember that healthy cultures aren't about perfection but intentionality
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Culture is more than coffee in the break room or a fun staff retreat. It's how your team experiences your leadership and your church's leadership every single day. That's culture. And today, on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, we're going to unpack the signs of a toxic or an unsustainable leadership culture, especially in churches, and how to build something healthier, because nobody thrives where trust is thin and communication is unclear, or where expectations are sky high with absolutely no support. Hi there, my name is Todd Rhodes. I'm one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffingcom and I am your host right here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Do you ever feel like your team is smiling on the outside but quietly breaking down on the inside? Churches don't always lose staff because of pay or because of calling. They lose staff because the culture slowly crushes them. So today we're going to talk about leadership environments that seem fine but actually push great people away.
Speaker 1:Okay, First of all, I'm going to talk about a few red flags of unhealthy leadership culture. So think about your culture and see if any of these are active in where you're at right now. The first is maybe there's just a constant urgency. Everything is on fire all the time. That's a red flag. Maybe leaders are avoiding hard conversations. They know they need to have, you need to have, but you don't. That's a red flag. Maybe you feel like success is celebrated but burnout is ignored. You're running so fast, so long, you're achieving great things, but you're tired and everybody is burned out and they just ignore it. That's a red flag. Maybe critique outweighs encouragement that's a red flag. And maybe the staff never feel caught up. They just always feel constantly behind. That's a red flag. Now, these signs aren't always loud. Sometimes they're very subtle, until somebody burns out or somebody quits unexpectedly or somebody flames out.
Speaker 1:Okay, so we need to consider what our staff are really feeling like and what you're really feeling like and what your staff is really saying, really asking, but maybe not even saying. They're asking it but they're not saying it. Things like can I speak up without being punished? That's a big one. Do they have the freedom to speak up? Does anybody care about how I'm really doing? Will my ideas be heard or am I just a cog in the wheel? Am I just a doer here? Is this a place where I'll grow, or is this a place where, like now, it's just always going to be a grind? And I tell you what if the answers are unclear? Staff over time will emotionally check out long before they physically leave, All right.
Speaker 1:So how do you build a leadership culture that's worth staying for? And you may be listening or watching and you're at the head of the org chart, right, You're the senior pastor, you're the elder chair, You're the one that has to lead the culture. Maybe you're watching or listening to the podcast today and you're on staff, like you're a few levels down in the org chart. But these are really important leadership culture questions that everybody should be asking whether you're the leader in your organization or whether you're one of the employees, one of the church staff members Okay, employees, one of the church staff members? Okay, Normalize check-ins that ask more than just project status okay. So if you're the leader, you need to ask for those. If you're the staff member and you're not getting check-ins, ask for the check-ins. It's very important Now you can only do what you can do, but you can at least ask for a check-in, Say, hey, how's it going? This is how I'm feeling. It's really important.
Speaker 1:You need to celebrate both results and people and you need to own the mistakes that you make. If you're a staff member and you make a mistake, own it. If you're one of the top leaders and leadership has made a mistake, you've made a mistake, own it. You need to model humility. That's really going to go a long way in kind of enhancing or improving the leadership culture.
Speaker 1:And then you need to build some margin. Create some margin. Not everything needs to be fast or flashy. Not everything is urgent. Not everything has to be done by two o'clock today. Not everything is an emergency. You got to create some margin and allow people a little bit of time to kind of rest and regroup sometimes, Because you're going to here's the truth you're going to build trust through clarity and consistency and care.
Speaker 1:Healthy leadership cultures are not about being perfect, they're about being intentional. So here's the bottom line for today no matter where you are on your church staff, whether you're the leader, whether you're a staff member, you can't inspire a team into health. You have to lead them there and, yes, if you're a staff member, you can help, be a part of the solution. It starts with the culture that you create or the culture that you tolerate. It all starts right now.
Speaker 1:All right, I'd love to hear your thoughts, ideas, suggestions, pushback, criticism. Whatever you want to send my way. I would love to hear from you Podcast at chemistrystaffingcom. And one more book plug. I'm a pretty avid self-promoter here but I am pretty excited about the new book. It's called Silent Alarm and it's all about church staffing of your church staff member. If you're somebody that hires on the team at your church, I think you would find it extremely helpful. You can get your copy at chemistrystaffingcom. Slash silent alarm. All right, that's it for today. Thanks so much for joining me and we're here every weekday here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. I hope you'll be back and join me again tomorrow. You.
