The Permission Problem: Why Church Staff Wait for Green Lights That Never Come

In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, Todd Rhoades discusses the prevalent issue of 'permission addiction' in churches where staff are restricted from making even minor decisions without top-level approval. This culture stifles innovation and transforms leaders into order-takers. Rhoades advocates for shifting from a permission culture to a boundary culture where staff are empowered to lead within set guidelines. A practical 'permission audit' is suggested for leaders to assess and remedy excessive approval dependencies.• Churches often hinder staff initiative by requiring excessive approvals.• This creates 'permission addicts' where leaders are reduced to order-takers.• The restrictive culture stems from fear of failure or past negative experiences.• Rhoades suggests transitioning to a boundary culture with clear parameters.• Empowering staff fosters innovation and reduces leader bottlenecks.• Conducting a 'permission audit' can help leaders identify unnecessary dependencies.

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Transcript

The Small Group That Stalled

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Your youth pastor wants to try a new small group for you. So they write you an email, then they schedule a meeting, and then they wait for three weeks to get your calendar to open up. And by the time you say, yeah, that sounds good, they've lost all their momentum. Now, this is a problem that's happening in a lot of churches where we've created permission addicts. So your staff used to be leaders and now they're just kind of order takers. Somewhere along the way, we taught them that every decision needs approval. Now, this doesn't happen in every church, but I've seen it happen in a good number of churches. And if your church is one of them, you're listening to a great podcast today. This is the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. And my name is Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders, over at chemistrystaffing.com. Every idea needs a committee, every change needs a green light from the top. And a lot of times that's exactly what happens that your staff are uncut off at the knees, and that they can't make even small tweaks or small decisions without getting approval. And you become, if you're the senior pastor or the board in some church cases, you become the bottleneck for things actually getting done. So here's what happens behind the scenes. And this is really a slow death of initiative that I see in some churches. Your staff will stop bringing you ideas because, can I be frank with you, your process is exhausting. Your staff stop innovating because it's just not worth the hassle. It's just easier to keep your head down and maintain. They start asking for permission for things that they should just be able to handle, like ordering supplies or scheduling volunteer meetings or changing the room setup. We've trained leaders to act like interns in some of our churches. They're not children, they're capable leaders. At least that's what we hired them to do. Now, listen, this didn't happen overnight, and it didn't happen on purpose. A lot of times this kind of trajectory happens in churches when leaders get burned, when staff take too much freedom and do too much of making decisions on their own. And then you give them a lot of rope and somebody makes a bad decision and you get caught off guard and you get blamed for it. So all of a sudden you tighten that rope up. And the more you tighten the rope, the more you get to the point where people can't make decisions without you approving them. You probably just got in this situation because you were just trying to avoid chaos. You were trying to avoid the phone calls from people that were ticked about the decision that was made that you had no idea about. Maybe you got burned by a rogue decision. Maybe you inherited a mess from some loose oversight, and you just you yanked on the rope, you tightened the reins. Now, permission culture kills initiative, but boundary culture creates confidence. Here's what I'm talking about, and here's the difference. Here's what permission culture says. Permission culture says ask first. Ask first. Boundary culture says, okay, here's your sandbox, here are the parameters, here are the guardrails. Go build. Go do it. Whatever, whatever you can do that fits into this sandbox, as long as you're not going out of the sandbox, go for it. Your staff needs to know what they can do, not just what they can't do. So give them some decision rights. Tell your children's pastor, for example, you own programming for ages two through twelve. That's your job, okay? This is your budget. Your budget limit is this amount. Now, keep me posted. As long as you stay in that budget, and as long as you're doing a good job with those programming for ages two through twelve, you keep me posted. You don't have to ask permission unless you're going out of that sandbox. Okay? You tell your worship leader, hey, Sunday mornings are yours, okay? Just don't surprise me with a 45-minute guitar solo. Okay? Tell your admin, handle everything anything under 200 bucks, handle it. If it helps people, do it. If it's more than that, bounce it off of me. That permission not only empowers the employee, but it allows them to think outside the box. Not outside the sandbox, but outside the box, right? It allows them to know that when they can and when they when they can make decisions and when they need to ask. Maybe it's time if you think this is an issue in your church, and as you pulled that rope in, you thought maybe you needed to do that, but now it's extremely tiring because everybody's coming to you for every decision, and the weight is heavy. So maybe it's time just to, if you feel like you're in this situation, to do a permission audit. Okay. Look at the last 10 decisions, and or just get out a sheet of paper this week and or next week, since it's Friday, if you're listening to this on the day that it's released, get out a piece of paper next week and write one to ten on there. And then every time somebody comes in your office, every time you get an email or a text, or somebody calling you on the phone, asking you for a decision, write that down. Write that down, and then look at the last ten decisions that your staff asked you about. And then ask yourself, it's a simple question, it's a simple audit. Okay. This isn't brain science or brain surgery here. How many of those ten decisions should they have just handled? How many times did you say yes, but just next time just do it? That's your permission problem in real time. So here's your bottom line. And this audit might really help you to kind of get a grasp on how you can fix this for the future. Here's your bottom line, though. Leaders who have to ask for permission for everything stop leading and they start waiting. Your team, you hired them to lead, and you want them to lead, and they need to be able to lead. And sometimes we just need to get out of their way. Share this podcast if your church needs to hear it. I think this is some churches deal with this very well, other churches just over time. And it's not because you're a bad leader, it's just because of the trajectory of things, if you're not careful, will put you, if you're a senior pastor, in the role of approving everything. And that's not healthy for your staff, it's not healthy for your volunteers, and it's not healthy for you or your church. All right, that's it for this week on the podcast. I hope you'll join me again tomorrow. Not tomorrow, next week. Let's what are we looking at next week? We're looking at ministry identity crisis next week. We're looking at perseverance, we're looking at what happens when your staff stops believing in the vision. We're talking a little bit more about succession, all different kinds of topics next week here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. I hope you'll join me. And if there's any way that I can talk with you about anything that you're going through at your church, any way that I can help you or I can hook you up with somebody on our chemistry staffing.com team that can help you with any kind of healthy church staff initiatives, compensation, hiring, firing, just overall church staff health issues. We would love to be able to have that conversation with you. You can reach out to me on my website, todd.church. There's a contact form on there. You can reach out to me anytime, and I'd love to start that conversation. All right, have a great weekend. Have some great services this weekend, and join me here again on Monday. I don't have to be a little bit more.