The Performance Review Revolution: Why Corporate Models Don't Work in Ministry

In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff podcast, Todd Rhoades discusses the ineffectiveness of traditional corporate performance reviews in church settings and offers a new approach to ministry evaluation that aligns better with the mission and calling of church staff. • Traditional performance reviews fail to capture the essence of church work. • Corporate metrics do not apply well to ministry contexts. • The podcast suggests evaluating staff based on their calling and character development. • Evaluation should acknowledge invisible wins and provide support for the staff's ministry calling. • A new, church-tailored evaluation process can help staff grow in grace and effectiveness.

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Transcript

Why Church Reviews Feel Wrong

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Most churches either skip performance reviews entirely or maybe they copy a corporate template that they found on the internet that completely misses the heart of ministry. Today on the podcast, we're going to talk about why traditional performance reviews fail church staff and what makes ministry evaluation actually work. And at the end of this podcast, I will give you a link to where you can reach out to me and I will give you three, two, one. Hi there, my name's Todd Rhodes. I'm one of the co-founders over at ChemistryStaffing.com, and you're listening to the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. You hand your worship pastor the same performance review form that your friend uses at his accounting firm. Matter of fact, that's where you got it. And you're asking him to rate himself on achieving quarterly targets and uh how he's expeding expectations. And he stares at you like you just handed him a math test in Mandarin. Because how do you quantify leading people into God's presence? How do you measure exceeded expectations when you're dealing with souls, not sales members? Most churches either skip reviews altogether or they just grab some kind of a corporate y template off the internet. And that's what we're talking about today here on the podcast. Here's what's happening in churches mostly everywhere. Not every church, but a lot of churches use performance review systems that are designed for profit, margins, and productivity metrics. We're asking ministry staff to fit into boxes that were never meant for ministry or kingdom work. Your children's pastor can't measure ROI on crayon investment. Okay, that might be a little crazy of an example, but your student pastor can't quantify, can't quantify souls per pizza party ratio. But we keep trying to make ministry fit into these corporate molds, into this church businessy mold. And when we do this, something just breaks. And here's where it goes wrong. Because when you do that, your staff is gonna start feeling like the calling got reduced to some kind of a checklist. They're gonna begin measuring themselves by metrics that have nothing to do with faithfulness. The pastor who walked with a family through a tragedy all year gets dinged for low event attendance. And the worship leader who discipled three volunteers gets criticized for insufficient innovation or something like that. And people start gaming the system instead of serving people's hearts because they want the metrics, whatever those metrics are, to show up in their favor. Ministry becomes about looking good on paper instead of being faithful in the calling. Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't evaluate ministry staff. Matter of fact, I think we should. That would be irresponsible if I was to say that. Irresponsible leadership. But we do, I think, in many of our churches, need to change what ministry evaluation looks like and what ministry evaluation should actually do. Okay, let me tell you and give you some examples about what I'm talking about. First of all, I think scrap some of the metrics, at least the businessy metrics. Start with calling, not metrics. Ask things like, how are you growing in faithfulness to what God's called you to do here at the church? Measure heart health before task completion. Maybe focus on character development alongside alongside that skill development. Because you need to look at how people are growing other people, not just growing numbers. Celebrate the wins, especially those invisible wins that you wouldn't pick up on that corporate review form, the late night crisis calls, the behind-the-scenes discipleship, the faithful preparation that nobody sees. And you can do this by just asking some better questions. And these questions do not show up on a non-ministry evaluation form. Questions like, where do you see God moving in your ministry? What's draining you right now? How can we better support your calling? Because your staff need to know that you see their ministry, not just their metrics. They need evaluation that acknowledges the weight of what they carry. And they need reviews that help them grow in grace, not just grow in efficiency. Ministry? Ministry is a totally different animal. It's fundamentally about transformation. It's fundamentally about transfer transformation of the staff, the individual staff member, and it's fundamentally about transformation of the people that they serve. And your review process for that staff person should reflect that sacred reality. All right, here's your bottom line for today. Ministry staff need evaluation that honors their calling, not just their calendar. So this week I want to challenge you to throw out that old, if you're using some kind of template that you used that you found on the internet, some kind of a corporate performance review thing that, you know, your favorite business guru or your accountant friend used last week. Uh throw that out and instead sit down with each staff member and ask them one question. How can I better support you in the calling that God's given you right here? And then listen to their answer. And you can build your evaluation process from there. Matter of fact, I have spent a lot of time preparing a church staff evaluation process. If your church does not have a really good annual evaluation process, this is a really long document. It's not free. There's a little bit of a charge to it, but you can reach out to me, podcast at chemistry staffing.com if you're interested. I'll send you all the information on it and you can check and see if this might be something for your church. But this will help you start from scratch or start over wherever you are into a really healthy annual staff evaluation process. It'll give you all the forms, all the details, but also give you all the rationale and all of the groundwork and the building blocks to actually build right from where you are right now. Maybe you've got a really developed system, but you think it needs to be tweaked. Maybe you don't have a system, maybe you've got a system that just needs to be totally thrown out and start over. This will help you. If that would be of interest to you, you can reach out to me. Podcast at chemistry staffing and just say, Todd, send me information on the church staff performance review system. Okay? Your people are doing kingdom work. So make sure that whatever you use, whatever process you use, that you remember that this is kingdom stuff. This is kingdom work. And you can't metrics are important, but metrics are not the only thing. The soul work is incredibly vitally important. All right, that's it for today. Thanks for listening. We're here every day, Monday through Friday, on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. And if you'd like more information, more things that we don't have time to talk about here, check out churchleadershipradar.com. It's a free email newsletter. You can check that out, churchleadership radar dot com. All right. Hope you have a great day, and we will be right back here tomorrow.