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 Myth of the High-Capacity Leader
Have questions or comments? Send to podcast@chemistrystaffing.com
Be sure to subscribe to The Healthy Church Staff Podcast wherever you regularly listen to podcasts.
- - - - -
Is Your Church Hiring?
If your church is searching for a new staff member, reach out to Todd for a conversation on how he might be able to help.
Are You Looking for a New Ministry Role?
If you are open to a new church role in the next few months, add your free resume and profile at ChemistryStaffing.com.
Churches love to talk about high capacity labels, but what if that label is sometimes doing more harm than good? Today on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, we're gonna dig into how the term high capacity can actually sometimes be a trap, creating burnout and inequity and unhealthy expectations that will quietly wreak havoc on your team. So let's rethink the way we reassign responsibility and get honest about how to build a more sustainable leadership culture. I'm glad you're here. My name is Todd Rhodes. I'm one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffing.com, and you're listening to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. What if the phrase high capacity leader is actually setting your staff up to fail? We toss that term around a lot. I used to work at Leadership Network and we work with large churches, mission vision-driven churches all across the country. And one of the things they always talked about was they wanted to find high capacity leaders. Matter of fact, you needed to be a high capacity leader to be on any of the teams at any of those churches. We toss the term around, it's like it's a compliment. But under the surface, what it really means sometimes, not always, everybody has different definitions, but I've seen it happen. What high capacity sometimes mean is look, we're gonna dump a lot of things on you. You never get to say no. You work until you break, and you work without breaks. And today I just want to put it out there and question this myth of the always-on, absolutely high capacity leader, and maybe rethink what healthy leadership could actually look like at your church. We love the term. We love high capacity leaders because honestly, they make things happen. You don't want to be a low capacity leader, right? High capacity leaders are the first volunteer, they stay late, they rarely complain, but the hidden truth is that if you call somebody high capacity often enough, it becomes a kind of a license to overuse them sometimes. It skips conversations about bandwidth and boundaries and burnout. Churches say, Man, she's a machine, or he can handle it, but those phrases often precede collapse. A lot of times that's what you say about leaders right before they kind of lose it. And there are some big consequences of the label high capacity leader. I mean, it it can create a healthy imbalance on your team. The same two or three people can carry 80% of the load. If you are a high capacity leader and you are surrounded by people that maybe aren't high capacity leaders, guess who gets all the new work? Guess who gets all the new challenges? You do, because you can get her done, right? You're the high capacity leaders. Unders others get those underchallenged or overlooked kind of things. Resentment will start to build quietly because you just start to get tired. And high capacity often becomes shorthand for overfunctioning and under-resourced and lack of clear strategy. And worst of all, it makes rest feel like failure because you feel like you've got to always be on, you've always got to be moving forward, you've always got to be taking that flag up to the top of the hill. And people who carry more start to feel guilty when they don't carry at all. It could just be a culture killer. So, what if we looked at a better way moving forward? What if we define capacity not by how much somebody can carry, but maybe we define capacity by how well they steward what really matters, okay? Maybe you need to rethink job design, maybe spread weight across more people. Maybe you need to create boundaries, not just busyness on your team. Maybe you need to redefine hero behavior, heroics, right? Don't reward burnout with praise. And maybe you just need to develop others, you just need to lean on the go-to's. Or don't just lean on the go-tos, you gotta lean on other people too and make it a really team effort. Truth is, a healthy team doesn't need heroes. It needs humans who can thrive, not just today, but over the long haul. And to be able to do that, you need to be healthy. Alright, final thought. The myth of high capacity leadership sounds really noble. And I'm not saying you gotta strike that word from your comp from your vocabulary. We all want to have high capacity leaders, we all want to be high capacity leaders, right? That's built in, the language is built in. But just know that you can't be always on all the time. And if you're trying to be a high capacity leader 24-7, it's gonna create some unrealistic expectations. And if you push your team to do that over and over for lengthy periods of time, it's also gonna produce an unhealed unsafe ministry culture. So I propose to you today, what if we stopped using that label and started talking about sustainable leadership instead? I'd love to hear from you. What's one way your church can build a more healthy and balanced church staff culture? Maybe you have got an answer for that. I'd love to hear it. Podcast at chemistry staffing.com. Maybe you're like Todd, I don't know. Let's have a conversation about it. Reach out to me, podcast at chemistrystaffing.com if there's any way that I can help your church. All right, thanks. That's it for today. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of the podcast. Remember, you don't have to always be on. You don't have to be the high capacity leader all the time. Matter of fact, if you are and if you do, and if that's what you're striving for every day, chances are you're gonna burn it out. I've seen it over and over again. All right, have a good day.
