Many leaders unknowingly sabotage their churches by wrongly assuming their staff members are actively engaged in their role in fulfilling the church’s mission. By engagement, I mean enthusiasm, effort, and enjoyment in their work. This lack of understanding about engagement is, in my experience, the leader’s number one blind spot. It affects the entire organization and makes a leader look ineffective.
Here are the facts: The average leader engages only three out of every 10 staff members. The best leaders engage six or more out of every 10 employees.
The people your church serves clearly see whether your staff are engaged or not. Engagement affects the quality of their work, their productivity and responsiveness. They feel staff’s enthusiasm and energy (or lack thereof) and recognize the bad results of an organization with overall morale problems.
Simply put, staff engagement matters.
Research shows how important staff engagement is. Engaged employees are 20 percent more productive than the average employee. Organizations with high-engagement scores have customer loyalty numbers that are twice the level of organizations with average employee-engagement scores.
This begs the question: What do the best leaders do differently from average leaders?
Here are three things that will improve engagement among the people you lead and help you become one of the best, not one of the rest.
1. Connect Staff with Congregant Stories
First, the best leaders help people see that their work is important and provides value to others. The key is to consistently connect staff with congregant stories that express gratitude for your staff, your church community and your church’s work in the community and world at large.
This simple action should not be taken for granted. In one study, when a photo of a patient was attached to CT scans, the accuracy of radiologists’ work increased 46 percent. (Yes, 46 percent is correct and not a typo!) Stunning, isn’t it! Research has shown that this helps protect employees from burnout, too.
2. Help Staff Achieve Their Career Aspirations
The best leaders take time to get to know their staff members and find out what they hope to achieve in their careers. Armed with this knowledge, the best leaders find jobs, ongoing responsibilities or temporary projects that help their staff members progress toward their career goals. People appreciate this. They respond with enthusiasm and energy when their supervisor shows he or she cares.
3. Give Staff Challenging Work that Fits Their Strengths
After you give your staff members work that helps them advance their careers, make sure it is sufficiently challenging. If it isn’t, they will grow bored. If it is too challenging they will be stressed out or fail. The right degree of challenge will help them become immersed in their work and their time working will fly by, a state that psychologists have labeled as flow or optimal experience.
When you 1. Connect staff with congregant stories, 2. Help staff achieve their career aspirations and 3. Give staff challenging work that fits their strengths, it engages, enthuses and energizes them so your church will flourish.
About The Author
Michael Lee Stallard speaks and teaches seminars on leadership and employee engagement. He is the author of Fired Up or Burned Out: How to Reignite Your Team’s Passion, Creativity and Productivity (Thomas Nelson). Follow Michael: Blog: http://www.michaelleestallard.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/michaelstallard Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/michaelleestallard
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