20 Leadership Lessons On Building A Healthy Staff Culture – Live Blog From 2014 NACBA Conference

20 Leadership Lessons On Building A Healthy Staff Culture – Live Blog From 2014 NACBA Conference

This week I am being dispatched by Injoy Stewardship Solutions (ISS) to attend the 2014 National Association Of Church Business Administrators (NACBA) Conference.  In an effort to grow in my skills to better add value to pastors and church leaders, I will be live blogging throughout.

If you are attending the event, please stop by our booth #514.  I would love to connect in person and give you a free copy of my book the 10 Indispensable Practice Of The 2-Minute Leader along with a study guide.  Also, if you have not signed up for our FREE July 22nd online event How To Grow A Church, click here to do so today.

The session I attended today was conducted by Dr. William Wilson, founder of The Center For Healthy Churches.  William’s session was entitled Building A Healthy Staff Culture.  The following are 20 leadership quotes I captured during the session:

1. Anywhere where people are working together there is the potential for healthy or unhealthy relationships.
2. Five Expressions Of Health In Churches – Spiritual, Structural, Emotional, Physical, Financial
3. The church is a world prone to dysfunction and discord.
4. Maintaining confidentiality is not a bad idea.  Maintaining secrets is a bad idea.
5. The less people know breeds rivalry and pits people against each other.
6. Any change is met with resistance.
7. Dysfunctional church staffs are always silos…There are a lot of activities that encourage isolation.
8. The lay people take cues from the staff.  The imitate everything they see the staff doing.  If you have triangulation in the staff, you will have in the congregation.
9. The #1 filter everyone uses is “What does this mean to me?”
10. One of the best things you can do is say, “You know, we need to talk.”
11. Senior leadership on a staff is critical to setting tone and direction.  It is hard for those leading in the 2^nd chair to influence tone and direction.  It is hard.  Not impossible.
12. Trust is behavior and you can behave yourself into a different type of culture.
13. You want people to be honest with you without being brutally honest.
14. Staff who work in the financial arena know how much people value transparency.
15. Show loyalty to the absent…Create a culture where people are honored even when they are not in the room.
16. Keeping your promises increases the level of trust.
17. Healthy congregational leadership teams are always asking how they can get better.  They are not afraid of feedback.
18. Staff and clergy need to be more like the lawyers who argue all day and then say, “So where are we going tonight?”
19. One of the key things to building trust in a culture is you know someone is going to ask you if you did what you were supposed to do.  Accountability is key to a healthy culture.
20. I bet everyone in the room could name three people on your who are trust accelerators…And you could name the trust decelerators…We are going to build our organization around people who are accelerating trust.  And we’re going to hold people accountable and measure that.