Redesigning Your Role: When the Job Description Doesn't Fit Your Gifts Anymore

In this episode of the Healthy Church Staff Podcast, Todd Rhoades discusses the misalignment many church staff face between their roles and their God-given strengths. He addresses the slow drift in job responsibilities and offers guidance on how to realign roles to better utilize individual gifts. Todd encourages listeners to identify their core strengths, audit their current responsibilities, and initiate constructive conversations with supervisors to better serve their churches. • Many church staff feel their roles don't align with their true gifts. • Jobs often evolve unintentionally, leading to misalignment with personal strengths. • Most work becomes draining rather than fulfilling when talents are underutilized. • To address this, identify your core strengths and audit your current role. • Initiate a constructive conversation with your supervisor about aligning your role with your strengths. • Operating in your strengths benefits both you and the church, leading to high energy and better results. • Track your energy levels related to tasks for a week before discussing role adjustments.

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Transcript

When Competence Still Feels Off

SPEAKER_00 0:08

You're good at your job. You're competent, you're reliable, you're faithful, but deep down you know something is just a little bit off. The work that you're doing doesn't really fit who you are. And maybe you're using maybe 30% of your actual gifts that you feel God is giving you, but the other 70%, it's slowly just feeling suffocated. I was reading about how fewer pastors find their jobs really deeply fulfilling these days, and I think this might be why. And that's what we're going to talk about today as we continue our series here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast for this week. My name is Todd Rhodes, one of the co-founders. I hope you'll check out the work that I do every day with my team over at chemistry staffing.com.

How Ministry Roles Slowly Drift

SPEAKER_00 0:55

It's the drift that happens very slowly. Most ministry roles weren't designed. Maybe they were when you took the job, but over time, they've just evolved. Somebody left and you stepped in. Maybe you inherited their leftover tasks or some of them. Maybe a crisis hit and you filled in the gaps temporarily, and those gaps then became permanent. And years later, you're doing work that has nothing to do really with how God wired you. And the job description from five years ago is actually, if you pull it out and blow the dust off of it, it's fiction at this point. So you've become the keeper of other people's leftover responsibilities. And here's really the problem with that. You start every week feeling behind, not because you're failing, but because you're fighting your own design. You're spending 80% of your time on tests that drain you, and the 20% where you actually thrive just get squeezed out. And you begin to question if you're even good at ministry anymore. Bad at ministry, you're bad at this version of ministry or what ministry has become. Now, nobody did this to you on purpose. Churches grow, needs change, roles expand, but that doesn't mean that you have to live with a job that's slowly killing your soul. So I'm gonna give you hopefully some freedom here. And in most churches, this will work if you're honest. Some churches so much. But how to have a redesign conversation? And I think you have to think through this yourself before you go to your pastor or the person that you report to. You have to work through some of these things yourself. So here's what I would have you do.

Name Strengths That Energize You

SPEAKER_00 2:51

Start by naming your actual strengths. Not what you're competent at. That could be something totally different. But name your actual strengths. What energizes you? What work do you do where time just absolutely disappears? You could start doing this, and five hours later you discover that you forgot about lunch. What results come naturally when you're just in your sweet spot? Write that down. Get really specific. And then what I want you to do, now that you've got what really energizes you and what you feel like God's really wired you to do, I want you to audit your current

Audit Tasks That Drain You

SPEAKER_00 3:25

role. How much do you spend in that strength zone? What tasks could someone else do better? What responsibilities don't actually require your unique gifts? And then here's where it may get a little tricky in some churches. So you have to be careful here. But man, in healthy church cultures, this is the kind of kind of conversation that you should hopefully be free to have with your supervisor.

Plan A Redesign Conversation

SPEAKER_00 3:49

Start the conversation with your supervisor, not the I hate my job conversation. Nobody wants to hear that conversation with you. But the I want to serve more effectively conversation and come with solutions, not just complaints. Because here's what most churches don't realize. When you operate in your strengths, everybody wins. You produce better results with less effort, your energy stays high instead of constantly depleting. Your model, you model healthy leadership for the rest of your team, and the church gets your best energy instead of your best work instead of your leftover energy. And this is not selfish. It's not selfish at all. Matter of fact, it's strategic. God didn't give you specific gifts so you could just ignore them. He gave you specific gifts and wired you the way that he wired you so that the church and his kingdom ultimately could benefit from them. So here's

Track Energy And Take Action

SPEAKER_00 4:51

your bottom line for today. You don't have to survive a job that doesn't fit. You can redesign it to match how God actually wired you. So this week, track your energy for five days. The next five days. Note which tasks really energize you and which ones drain you. Don't change anything yet, just observe. And then schedule a conversation with your supervisor next week, your pastor next week. Go in with data, not just with feelings, because your gifts matter. Your church needs them unleashed, not buried under somebody else's leftover tasks. That's it for today. Hopefully, I've given you something to think about and maybe some homework to try and do over the next five days. I'd love to hear your story. Reach out to me anytime, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. I'd love to hear your story. And if there's any way that we can serve you at Chemistry Staffing, please reach out podcast at Chemistry Staffing. All right, that's it for today. We're here every weekday on the Holy Church Staff Podcast. So I hope you'll join me right here tomorrow.