Equipping Managers to Thrive
The Need for Management
In order to scale a growing church that God has entrusted to your care, it will require Senior Leadership (Lead Pastor and Executive Team) to lead and manage staff and volunteers through an organizational structure of managers and supervisors. Often great “do-ers” are promoted to management roles because of their success. Sadly, they often struggle in the new role due to a lack of confidence and basic management skills.
An intentional, church-specific management training and development plan for new supervisors can ensure you avoid potential risks such as:
The supervisor lacking confidence in their knowledge or ability to
manage the project or processes so they revert to “doing” rather than
managing and leading others to complete them.
Staff and volunteers become confused and frustrated because they
aren’t given clear direction, goals, accountability, and resources from
their new leader.
Communication throughout the organization can suffer without
proper training and direction of managers
Senior leaders aren’t able to lead and manage what they are uniquely
gifted for as they must work through these issues and often “manage for” the new supervisor.
Many churches have developed great leadership development programs or pipelines that help team members grow in their knowledge of the church’s culture, their own character, and general leadership principles. This has been awesome, but in the effort to build “leadership” pathways, the word “manage” has often gotten a bad rap. The reality is that for any organization to thrive people, processes, and projects need to be actively managed. Therefore, creating specific training programs and resources to teach management skills will ensure your supervisors can both lead AND manage in healthy ways to help you sustain healthy growth.
Review this list to see what you may be able to enhance or add to your training resources to ensure your supervisors and managers are ready to thrive.
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1. Prepare a person for a supervisory role
Prior to promoting someone to a management role, consider the following:
Have a clear job description that outlines the people, projects, and processes that they will manage.
Interview them for the role and ensure they have the capacity and ability to succeed and the desire to manage and lead people.
Offer them the new role and inform them of the training they will do to be successful in the new role.
Promoting too soon
Promoting someone beyond where they can thrive isn’t great stewardship of them, church resources, or other team members.
Potential areas to interview internal and external supervisor candidates include:
Asking questions around some or all of the 6 Cs of hiring:
Calling
Culture
Character
Competency
Chemistry
Capacity
Asking layers of questions about how they have built, managed, and developed teams in the past.
You often learn much more about a candidate by digging in deep on one set of questions rather than skimming across high-level answers across many topics.Layering the questions allows you to continue asking the next question. For example:
Tell me about how you’ve built your Connections Team.
How many people have joined the team in the last XXX months? Tell me about some of them - their gifts, how long they’ve been on the team, maybe some challenges they have had, or you have had with them on the team.
Tell me more about “Tom’s” performance concerns. How did you manage “Tom’s” attendance and timeliness issues?
2. Develop a manager training to equip new supervisors
Form your training topics. Consider the following questions to brainstorm potential topics:
What new meetings will they attend or lead? What is the expected
participation and preparation for these meetings?
What new communication are they responsible for receiving,
contextualize for their ministry or department, and disseminate?
Outline expected timelines, communication methods, and what to do with the feedback they get
Teach or review how to coach and correct performance with their team members
Teach or review how to have uncomfortable/hard conversations
Can they goal set for their ministry and team members based on the church’s goals, which include accountability, tracking, and communicating individual and team progress?
What resources and training are required for the systems/processes you use?
Managing and approving staff PTO
Budget development and management
Ongoing and annual performance reviews
Hiring or interviewing responsibilities
Orienting, onboarding, and training new staff
When to get your Senior leader or Human Resources leader involved in people management
Prioritize which things on your manager training list are the most important to train in first.
Which are managers struggling most with?
Which will provide the greatest results?
Which will impact the most people on the team?
Ask current or relatively new managers, “What did you wish you knew
when you started your management role?”
Concepts for consideration
Determine method and timing for training:
Consider taking all supervisors at every level through the initial round of training so all are on the same page and know what new supervisors will be receiving (You’ll be surprised how much existing managers learn).
Consider spreading training across multiple weeks to encourage better retention and practical use of the principles and systems.
Consider first-time or refresher training a key time:
Budget training prior to budget season.
Interview and hiring training prior to recruiting someone on their team, etc.
Consider capturing audio and or video of the training for evaluation or to provide future on-demand training modules (make sure to have live Q&A sessions for on-demand sessions).
Delegate across appropriate senior leaders or strong managers who will develop and can teach the content.
Get feedback from participants and their supervisors to improve training effectiveness and materials.
Create a space to digitally house the resources and training for reference and future use.
3. Don’t wait, start developing now
Wondering how to get started? Even without a fully developed management training system, you can start to equip supervisors and managers intentionally.
Start to document what you are already doing. Senior leadership or others are teaching supervisors key practices or systems as part of ongoing conversations and as the need arises. If you begin to document the conversations, systems utilized and processes required, you’ll start your library of training.
Discuss this across ministries or departments to see where you are duplicating efforts, who is doing pieces exceptionally well, or where there are gaps.
Prioritize the gap areas or those identified in talking with current and newer managers for things they wish they had known or may still be confused about.
Hint: Have the new supervisor or manager assist in putting the resources together to ensure their understanding of the material and share the workload.
Leverage One on One Meetings to help Supervisors improve in areas that will most help them lead their teams.
Document the discussion and share it with other senior leaders to see who else could benefit from this information.
