Leadership & Conflict: The Conversations Nobody Wants to Have

In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, Todd Rhoades discusses leadership and conflict management within church staff, drawing insights from the recent Chemistry Staffing Church Staff Health Assessment. Notably, only 54% of church staff surveyed believe that leadership handles conflict constructively, indicating a significant issue with conflict avoidance culture in churches. Todd explores the difference between peacemaking and peacekeeping, highlighting how unresolved conflict can lead to staff departures and ultimately damage team dynamics. He provides practical advice on addressing conflicts early, emphasizing the importance of direct and kind communication.• 54% of church staff believe leadership handles conflict well, leaving 46% who disagree.• Unresolved conflict is a major factor in staff departures.• Many churches exhibit a peacekeeping culture, which avoids addressing real issues.• Leadership should focus on peacemaking rather than peacekeeping.• Address conflicts early with direct and kind conversations to prevent issues from escalating.

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Transcript

Welcome And Report Teaser

SPEAKER_00 0:07

Hi there, thanks for joining me on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. My name is Todd Rhodes. Check out our work over at chemistrystaffing.com. I'm one of the co-founders over there. And today we are unpacking, continuing to unpack the 10 discoveries that we discovered in our Chemistry Staffing Church Staff Health Assessment that we've just completed. We've just released the results about a week ago. If you stick around to the end of the podcast, I'll tell you how to get a free 200-page PDF report, all of the findings that we found from almost 1,200 different staff members just in this past year around churches around the country. Today we're on discovery number eight, and it's about leadership. It's about leadership and conflict. Okay? Every church has conflict. If I always say if you've been in ministry longer than, oh, I don't know, about five minutes, you've probably entangled yourself in some kind of a conflict across the church. And the one today touches the thing most church leaders try to avoid, and that's conflict. Conflict, if it's not at your church right now, chances are it's February. Guess what? You're probably going to have some kind of conflict this year, if not even by the end of this month or this week, or even the end of today. The question isn't whether conflict is going to happen, it's whether it's when it happens, and it's how you as leadership or how your church's leadership will happen will handle it. And here's here's the number that kind of launched our discovery that we're talking about today. 1,200 church staff people took the assessment this past year. Here are the results. It's really kind of stark. Only 54%, just a little over half, 54% of staff believe that leadership at their church handles conflict constructively. That means nearly half, if I'm doing my math right, 46% or so. Might be a little more, might be a little less in your church, but national average, about 46%, almost half of your team watches conflict unfolds and sits back and kind of rubs their chin and think this probably won't end well. Now, from our participants, 24% are in the red zone. They've seen enough to know leadership avoids or mishandles conflict. And the truth is, unresolved conflict is one of the leading drivers of staff departures. I hear all the stories all the time. As one of the co-founders at Chemistry Staffing, I talk with candidates, people all the time that are in the middle of a transition, and the reason is because their church doesn't know how to handle conflict or they just avoid conflict altogether. Matter of fact, a lot of churches are just absolutely terrible at it. So I'm going to take and hopefully unpack four different insights today on this idea of leadership and conflict. Okay, first insight in this discovery is look, churches, not every church, but a lot of churches are just uniquely bad at conflict. We preach about grace and forgiveness and turning the other cheek. Sometimes we just spiritualize avoidance, right? We call it, maybe we say keeping the peace, but there's a difference between peacemaking and peacekeeping. Peacemaking confronts the issue and works toward the resolution. Peacekeeping, however, pretends that the issue doesn't even exist and just hopes that it goes away. And most churches, a lot of churches anyway, I don't want to stereotype or overemphasize this point. Most churches, though, are peacekeeping cultures. And it's destroying teams. Patrick Manzioni, you know him, he's a big business writer, says that the opposite of conflict isn't harmony, it's artificial harmony, and it's toxic. So that brings me to insight number two. What staff actually experience in a lot of our churches? And this is what we heard through their narratives. We asked them, hey, tell us a little bit more about your situation. This is some of the things that they told us as a result of taking this year's church staff health assessment. And again, at the end, if you stick around, I'll tell you how you can download that whole report for absolutely free. Here's what staff actually experience, right? They watch problem employees get ignored for years and they see the toxic behavior tolerated because the person is either gifted or connected. Or maybe they raise concerns and nothing happens. So they just stop raising concerns and they think about moving on. Maybe they're sitting in meetings where everybody knows the elephant in the room, but nobody will name it. Have you ever been in one of those staff meetings? Nobody, everybody's afraid to speak up. They hear, let's just pray about it. When really what's needed is nope, we need to do a little bit more than pray about it. We need to have a hard discussion here. No, listen, praying's good. Don't put me down as saying praying about it isn't a good thing. But prayer isn't a substitute for leadership. And sometimes I think we kind of think that it is, and it's not. When staff, when your staff see conflict avoided, they learn the real rules. And these are the unspoken rules. Don't rock the boat. Let's just keep everything comfortable. Okay. Over time, though, and this is my insight number three. Over time, if you do that, if you just try to be the peacekeeper, the cost of conflict is going to show up. Unresolved conflict, and you know this. You tell yourself it'll get better. You know what? It doesn't. Unresolved conflict does not disappear. Ever. It metastasizes. It gets worse. Small tensions become silent resentment that becomes public explosion. Your best staff leave because, quite frankly, they're tired of working around the problem because everyone pretends it doesn't exist. Meanwhile, the difficult person, they're the ones that stay because no one will address them. You lose your healthiest people to protect sometimes the most dysfunctional people. That's not grace. That's just can I call it out? It's just leadership failure. Every departure that you didn't see coming, there's a good chance that unresolved conflict was somewhere, had something to do with it. Okay, so insight number four. What does healthy conflict leadership look like? Okay? I'm gonna give you some advice. It's always easier said than done. And it's always easier to look back in retrospect at what you should have done or what you could do better. Okay? I'm not saying that this is easy, and I'm not saying that I'm giving you anything that's like rocket science here, okay? It's really pretty simple. It's just easy, it's just harder to do than it is to say. Here's the reality, you just need to when you know there's an issue, you need to address the issue. Right? That doesn't seem it's it doesn't that's not rocket surgery at all, right? If you know there's an issue, address the issue early. Address the issue when it's small and when it's manageable. Have that conversation that everybody needs knows needs to happen, but nobody wants to initiate. That's part of leadership, is having those tough conversations. You need to be direct and kind. Those aren't opposite. You can speak truth and still maintain your dignity. And make sure that you don't let, you know, they're really gifted, excuse toxic behavior. Um, there's an old proverb that says, faithful are the wounds of a friend, and sometimes love looks like a hard conversation. So here's the bottom line for today. Because this is a big deal. This is a big deal. 54% of nationally, our church staff, 54% believe that leadership handles conflict, 54% believes they handle it well. 46%, almost half, disagree with that. They say, no, we don't know how to handle conflict. Conflict avoided is trust destroyed. The bottom line is when your staff don't believe your leadership will handle conflict well, they'll stop bringing concerns forward. And when they stop bringing those concerns forward, a lot of times they start planning their exit. And then you sit back and say, I didn't see that coming. You should have. You should have. It all starts with identifying one conflict on your team that everybody knows about but no one has addressed. Honestly, you probably know what that is. If there's something there, you probably know what that is. Have the conversation this week. Be direct, be kind, but don't wait for it to get worse. And if you can't think of anything, just ask somebody on your team, hey, is there any tension here I'm missing? Is there any tension on this team that you don't think I see, or anything that you think that I'm avoiding? And then prove them wrong by actually addressing it. That's my advice for today. This is just one of 10 discoveries that we're sharing that came out of our healthy church staff health assessment. We've compiled everything into a free 200-page report, PDF report, absolutely free. You can download it now at churchstaffhealth.com. We've also added some, if you're interested, we've also added some additional reports this year that you can order. One is a church report. So if you like what you're in the 200-page report, if it fascinates you, and you're like, this is the national average. I wonder what it's like for my team and my staff. We can we can run those numbers for you, and you can actually see here are the national results, here are the results of our team, what they have self-reported could be really insightful. And maybe you're just a staff member that wants to know how you individually compare in all those seven areas. We've got an individual report that you can order as well. You can get all the information on all of that at churchstaffealth.com. All right, it's a big issue, leadership and conflict. Tomorrow we're gonna come back with discovery number nine, and we're gonna call this the three-year decline. Three-year decline. And it's a big discovery we made in the report this year, and we're gonna talk about it tomorrow. You'll join us right here on the Healthy Church Climb.