3 Questions Every Church Leader Should Be Asking About Staff Culture
O.C. Tanner’s annual Global Culture Report dropped a few weeks ago. It’s written primarily for the corporate world, but as I read it, I kept seeing things that felt incredibly relevant to the church.
To me, the most impactful line in the report says: “Every culture amplifies something.”
We’ve said for years that every church has a culture, whether you’ve defined it or not. Culture is never static. It’s either getting healthier or less healthy, and the people at the top are often the last ones to realize when it’s beginning to erode.
I think that’s part of what makes staff culture hard to lead. It’s rarely one big moment where you suddenly realize something is wrong. It happens over time, through the way decisions get made, how people work together, what gets celebrated, what gets tolerated, and how leaders respond when something starts to drift.
After digesting the report, here are three questions we think church leaders should be asking about their staff culture.
Can we care deeply about people and still hold a high bar?
Churches tend to lean toward compassion, but we also have a mission to accomplish. Healthy teams need both: people who feel genuinely cared for and clarity about what’s expected of them.
I think churches can especially struggle here because we convince ourselves that being clear with someone, addressing a performance issue, or having a hard conversation somehow means we aren’t caring for them well.
But avoiding those conversations usually creates more problems.
I’m 41 years into this, and very few issues I’ve seen have simply resolved themselves. Usually they get bigger, they fester, or they eventually create a much harder conversation than the one we could have had months earlier.
You can care deeply about someone and still be really clear about what the team needs from them.
Are we developing people or simply giving them more information?
The report talks about moving from a “culture of learning” to a “culture of growth.” I love that distinction. I’d put it this way: learning makes me smarter, growth makes me better.
The temptation when money is short is to cut development opportunities because they can feel like a nice-to-have. But a healthy culture depends on having people who are continuing to grow, being challenged, and getting better at what they do.
I’ve watched churches pull back on conferences, coaching, development, and opportunities for their best people to learn from other leaders because those things can feel extra when budgets get tight.
I actually think they’re some of the last things we should cut.
And development doesn’t always mean sitting in a room listening to someone teach. Some of the best growth I’ve experienced has happened over a meal, in a hotel lobby, or through a conversation with another leader who helped me see something differently.
We want people who are learning, but ultimately we want that learning to change the way they lead.
What are we doing every day that builds or erodes trust?
Trust erodes gradually: commitments without follow-up, decisions that never get explained, or performance issues everyone sees but leadership keeps avoiding.
Those small things add up.
We’re working with a church right now where some of the trust issues on the team haven’t come from one huge failure. It’s been a series of things over time. Someone was told a role would change and months passed without an answer. A compensation conversation happened and nothing followed. Commitments were made and then got lost.
Nobody woke up one morning and decided to create an unhealthy culture. But when those experiences happen enough times, people begin to wonder whether they can rely on what leadership says.
The same thing happens when everyone sees a performance issue and leadership won’t address it. The rest of the team knows. They’re working beside that person every day. Eventually, the lack of action starts affecting their trust in leadership too.
That’s why trust requires more than good intentions. It shows up in follow-through, clarity, accountability, and the way we handle everyday commitments.
Culture Is Always Being Shaped
These aren’t complicated questions, but I think they’re worth sitting with:
Can we care deeply and still hold a high bar?
Are our people actually growing?
What are we doing that is building trust with our team?
Culture is being shaped every day in our churches, through the conversations we have, the decisions we make, the things we follow through on, and the things we allow to linger.
It’s worth paying attention to.
If you want a simple resource to help you think more intentionally about your own culture, we created a free ebook called Culture Matters. You can download the ebook here.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Holly and I dig deeper into these three questions on this week’s episode of The LeadingSmart Podcast.
We actually went into the conversation with five questions from the report and only made it through three, so we’ll pick up the other two in part two.
How LeadingSmart Helps With Staff Culture
Sometimes you can tell something in the culture isn’t quite right, but it’s harder to identify what’s actually underneath it.
That’s where we spend a lot of our time with churches.
Through LeadingSmart culture consulting, we help leadership teams get an honest picture of their current staff culture, clarify the mission and values they want shaping the team, define what those values actually look like in everyday behavior, and put rhythms in place that keep culture from drifting over time.
The goal isn’t to create a culture that looks like somebody else’s church. It’s to help you build a healthy culture that actually supports your people and the mission God has given your church.
Schedule a call with our team if you’d like to discuss culture consulting.