When Your Staff Stops Believing in the Vision (But Won't Say It)

In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, Todd Rhoades and Matt Steen discuss the concept of vision drift within a church staff. They emphasize that vision casting is not a one-time event but a continuous process that requires constant reinforcement. The episode highlights how vision can fade over time due to lack of consistent communication and suggests strategies for integrating the vision into daily conversations and interactions with staff to prevent this drift.• Vision casting needs consistent reinforcement to prevent drift.• Staff may default to maintenance mode without ongoing vision communication.• Vision fade is not due to bad staff but normal without regular updates.• Reinforce vision by weaving it into every conversation and sharing stories.• Avoid recasting new visions; reconnect with the existing one.• Discuss vision drift openly in one-on-ones to gauge staff pulse.• Leadership is responsible for preventing vision drift by continuous engagement.

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Transcript

When The Energy Suddenly Fades

SPEAKER_00 0:07

You thought you cast the vision really clearly in January with passion and with clarity and it seems like your staff took it in Hook Line and Saker, at least they nodded enthusiastically. They took notes, they asked really good questions. But now it's March. It's the end of March. And it feels like something's off. I don't know. They're just showing up, still doing their job, still smiling in meetings. But you can just start to feel it. They just stopped believing in maybe the church and the mission and the vision that you just gave them in January. Does this sound familiar? We're going to talk about it today here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. Hi, my name is Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders, along with Matt Steen, over at chemistrystaffing.com. And today we're talking about this vision drift and what it actually looks like and why and when it's happening. It starts small, they stop bringing up the vision and casual conversation. I was excited. Hey, what if we did this? Conversations start to disappear. They default to maintenance mode. Instead of mission mode, they're polite, but they're maybe not overly passionate. Maybe they're compliant, but they're not overly committed. And here's where it gets tricky. They're not openly rebellious. They're not undermining anything directly. They just kind of stop innovating toward the vision. They stop connecting their daily work to the bigger picture and they talk about programs, not purpose. They focus on logistics, but not legacy. And honestly, they might not even realize that they've drifted. But this is not bad staff or weak commitment. It's just vision fade. It's normal. And vision just normally doesn't like continually go on this forever. From January to the end of March, that vision fade is it's actually pretty normal. Particularly if you've not been constantly communicating the vision. If you gave the vision talk in January, you've not said a thing about the vision, you just thought it would stick, and it's the end of March and it didn't. A part of that's on you because that vision fade is normal when you don't constantly talk about vision. So it might be time to re-resetter that whole way that you think about communicating vision. Stop of you assuming that just one vision cast meeting or one staff retreat is gonna last all year long because it won't. It will fade. And as the leader, if you're the one that's the primary vision caster, you need to start thinking about how can I weave this vision into every conversation? And you might think I've already said it once. I don't need to say it two or three times. Have you ever sat down to watch TV and you see the same commercials over and over? If they worked on the first try, guess what? They would only they wouldn't spend the thousands and thousands of dollars to keep bombarding you with the same ad. Have you ever clicked on something? Like you maybe you're shopping for a trash can online, and then you go to your Facebook feed, and you've got 25 different versions of trash cans that show up on your feed. But you keep getting the same ad for the same trash can again and again. Or you visit a site, you get the same ad for the same site over and over again. That's because vision and action, just like in marketing, it takes multiple times to say it. And you might feel like you're repeating yourself, but for the person that's hearing it, a lot of times they need, I forget what the stat says, it's seven, you need seven touches, seven, I think it's seven, seven times that somebody hears that vision before they even start to pay attention. So how can you start to weave that vision into every conversation that you're having? And how do you ask specific questions like how does this connect to where we're going? You gotta share stories. There, you don't need to say it the same way every time, but if you share stories of how what the vision is and how you've made a quick victory, even a small victory, that helps ingrain the vision. Name the vision drift directly in your next one-on-one. You can say something like, hey, I'm sensing that we've kind of lost some. Remember what we talked about back in January? I feel like maybe we've lost some of our shared excitement about whatever that vision is. And help me understand what's happening. Now, don't recast the vision. That's another issue that happens in a lot of churches, is that you might have one vision in January and nothing happens, and then you come back in June with another vision that doesn't have anything connected to the first vision. Don't recast the vision, reconnect to it. Your staff didn't stop believing because they're undercommitted, they stopped believing because they stopped seeing process, progress, or maybe because the vision got a little buried under just the day-to-day urgent ministry tests that everybody has to deal with. Or maybe that vision loss happened because you just stopped talking about it with conviction. And when leaders drift from vision, dreams or teams and dreams will drift much faster. So here's your bottom line for today. Vision isn't something that you just it's not a one and done. It's not something that you cast just once, it's something that you tend constantly, or it will quietly die in the day-to-day chaos of ministry. Your staff wants to believe in something bigger than their to-do list. Your vision is just the ticket. Sometimes they just need to be reminded why it matters. Now keep leaving, my friend. Maybe today's the day that you need to refresh that vision or start rolling that out in different ways to your team. Maybe it's time that you reinforce or that you rediscover that vision. Maybe you don't even have a vision and you're like, well, we really need to get on this. There's any way that I can help you in this whole vision area, in this whole healthy staff area, hiring, firing, compensation, any of those kind of things. That's what we do in our daily work at chemistry staffing. And we'd be happy and actually proud to partner with you. You can reach out to me at my website at todd.church. That's the actual URL, believe it or not. Todd.church, there's a contact form on there. If you don't have that contact form, send it to me, and we could start a conversation about how we might be able to help and come alongside you. It would be my sincere honor. So that's it for today. Hope you'll join us again tomorrow as we round out this week. Let me see, what are we talking about tomorrow? Tomorrow we're talking about uh a little bit about succession and how to rebuild or how to build your own replacement and some questions that every staff member, even if you're not a senior manager, every staff member should be asking. So that's tomorrow on the podcast with