Right People, Right Seats: Rethinking Church Staffing for Growth with Amy Anderson

Welcome back to another episode of the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Amy Anderson, the managing director at The Unstuck Group. Unstuck helps pastors grow healthy churches by guiding them through experiences that align vision, strategy, team, and action.

Is your church feeling stuck or overwhelmed by its growth? Wondering if you have the right people in the right roles to move forward? Tune in as Amy shares valuable insights on how to assess and rethink your church staff and structure to enhance growth, productivity, and alignment with your vision.

• Assessing and restructuring for growth. // Unstuck provides resources like podcasts, webinars, and quarterly reports to help pastors identify growth areas. However, their core work is on-site assessments that pinpoint where churches are stuck and how they can move forward. By conducting staffing and structure reviews, they help churches organize and leverage their most valuable resource: their people.
• Create a staffing plan. // Many churches struggle not because of ministry but due to ineffective structure. They unknowingly hinder growth by keeping staff in the wrong roles or overloading certain areas. Evaluate your staffing strategy and proactively plan for future expansion. Create a staffing plan to strategically shift where people will be placed as your church grows.
• Key indicators to watch. // Two primary warning signs suggest a church may need structural changes. The first is your staffing budget. If more than 50-55% of a church’s budget is allocated to staffing, a strategic review is needed. Second, look at how many staff you have per average attendance. A best practice is one full-time staff member per 75 attendees. As this number drops, overstaffing becomes a concern.
• Common areas of overstaffing. // Churches often fall into the trap of hiring more staff to compensate for inefficiencies rather than developing existing team members. Overstaffing in next gen and adult ministries is a common problem area. These ministries frequently see unnecessary staff increases due to ineffective volunteer mobilization.
• Leadership and span of care // The number of direct reports a leader should have depends on leadership capacity and style. Leaders should maintain a manageable span of care to ensure effectiveness. Balance strategic oversight with personal engagement, ensuring you are working on the ministry rather than only in it.
• Building strong lead team relationships. // The relationship and trust built between the lead and executive pastor is crucial at any church. The executive pastor is responsible for executing the lead pastor’s vision and ensuring that strategic goals translate into action. If an executive pastor disagrees with their lead pastor, the executive pastor should echo what matters to the lead pastor before presenting alternative solutions. It’s also critical that the lead pastor engages with the senior leadership team regularly. These leaders need to hear the heart and perspective of their lead pastor because that’s how culture gets transferred.
• A free roadmap PDF. // Amy and her team have created a free PDF, How to Restructure Your Church Staff for Growth, offering a step-by-step roadmap. This guide covers assessment strategies, staffing evaluations, decision-making frameworks, and structural planning to help churches navigate staffing challenges effectively.

To learn more about how The Unstuck Group can help your church with a staffing and structure review, visit theunstuckgroup.com. Plus download How to Restructure Your Church Staff for Growth here.

EXTRA CREDIT // Looking to strengthen your church’s staff team? 

Don’t miss the Church Staffing Health Assessment—a practical tool designed to help you evaluate and improve how you place the right people in the right roles. Inspired by “Right People, Right Seats: Rethinking Church Staffing for Growth with Amy Anderson,” this resource will guide you through key questions to assess role clarity, team culture, leadership development, and more.

This resource is exclusively available through unSeminary Extra Credit, our affordable membership that fuels the podcast and provides you with valuable tools like this and many others!

Click here to join unSeminary Extra Credit and get instant access to this resource and more!

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Thank You to This Episode’s Sponsor: Risepointe

Do you feel like your church’s facility could be preventing growth, and are you frustrated or maybe even overwhelmed at the thought of a complicated or costly building project? Are the limitations of your church building becoming obstacles in the path of expanding your ministry? Have you ever felt that your church could reach more people if only the facility was better suited to the community’s needs?

Well, the team over at Risepointe has been there. As former ministry staff and church leaders, they understand how to prioritize and help lead your church to a place where the building is a ministry multiplier. Licensed all over North America, their team of architects, interior designers and project managers have the professional experience to help move YOUR mission forward.

Check them out at Risepointe.com/unseminary and while you’re there get their FREE resource “10 Things to Get Right Before You Build”.

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Episode Transcript

Rich Birch — Hey friends, welcome to the unSeminary podcast. Super excited for today’s conversation. You have tuned in for something really special. This is going to be super helpful conversation. This is one of those conversations where I’m pretty sure that I know that you’re listening in and you are asking some of the questions that we’re going to answer today. You’re wrestling with these things. You’ve been thinking about it in the back of your head and we’re going to provide you with real helpful solutions, walk-away-stuff that you can apply today.

Rich Birch — It’s our honor to have Amy Anderson with us. She is the managing director at The Unstuck Group, which they help churches get unstuck. They help pastors grow healthy churches by guiding them through experiences that align vision, strategy, team, and action. They offer consulting in several different areas, including multisite staffing, digital strategy. And these folks are amazing. Listen, friends, I just love the work of Unstuck. I love what they do. I feel like I’m constantly interacting with churches, either the churches I work with, ah either they’re they’re going to work with Unstuck or they’ve just come off working with them. They have ah they love the local church. Amy loves your church and she doesn’t even know you yet. But we’re so glad to have you, Amy. Welcome. So glad you’re here.

Amy Anderson — So good to be here, Rich. Thanks for having me on your podcast.

Rich Birch — No, honored that you would would do this. What an honor for us. Give us a bit of your background. Fill in the Amy story.

Rich Birch — Tell us a little bit about Unstuck. Kind of fill in the picture for folks that don’t know you.

Amy Anderson — Sure. Well, I’ve been um on the team at Unstuck for 10 years. And ah most of that time I’ve been the consulting director, a new role this year as the managing director. But prior to that is really my ministry story. I uh the local church changed my life. It changed the trajectory of my life, my husband’s life, our three kids.

Rich Birch — Amen.

Amy Anderson — It was back in the late 90s, excuse me. We walked into the front door of a church that finally was what I thought church was going to be like. Meaning, they weren’t perfect, but they were I heard great Bible teaching every week. It applied to my life. I felt like I called the pastor every week and said, can you talk about this this week? Our kids went right into their rooms. And anyways, God, we were My husband and I were both believers, but we were not followers, if I could put it that way.

Rich Birch — Oh, OK.

Amy Anderson — We had I was raised in a very mainline church. I knew the rules, but I didn’t really have a relationship with Jesus and all that came together at this church when I learned to follow Jesus. So anyways having the church changed my life. Well, Jesus changed it. Four years later, we were on staff. Both of us.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Amy Anderson — Husband went back to school, Masters of Theological Studies. Anyways, Eagle Brook is the church. It’s in Minnesota.

Rich Birch — Fantastic church.

We’re kind of neighbors, Rich, here in Canada.

Rich Birch — It’s true.

Amy Anderson — So we might sound alike.

Rich Birch — It’s true. We got the same weather.

Amy Anderson — But I was… yeah I was then hired to oversee the front door of our church, the weekend services. So I left my corporate job.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Amy Anderson — My husband was in Groups, became a teaching pastor, a campus pastor. Today, he’s a lead pastor. But I spent 12 years at this church on this little corner in White Bear Lake. And it was about 1,800 people when I started. And when I left in 2014, we were six locations across the Twin Cities with over 20,000.

Rich Birch — Yeah, it’s amazing.

Amy Anderson — So you know, this multi-site was kind of a mystery back then.

Rich Birch — It’s true.

Amy Anderson — So it was trial by fire, fail forward. But it was an absolute amazing experience to be a part of that team. And so I thought I was born to do that. And then when I connected ah with Tony Morgan and he invited me on to The Unstuck team, I honestly, I think I was born for this. I just love the local church. And when it’s operating on all cylinders, it is absolutely amazing the lives that are transformed.

Rich Birch — Love it. Well, I, friends, if a little editorial note, there are folks that are in this market in serving churches who, you know, sometimes they make me feel a little bit queasy and a little bit like, Oh, I think they’re just see this as a market. They just are trying to extract value out of us. That’s not Unstuck. That’s not Amy. That’s not your group. Uh, this, this is a group of people that love the local church. And, um, frankly, I’m having Amy on because I love what they do and I’m hope that some of us will get more connected with them.

Rich Birch — Tell us kind of give us a sense of for folks that don’t know Unstuck, give us a sense of the scope, the scale of your ministry. You guys interact with a lot of churches on a regular basis. What does that look like? Help give us a sense of that.

Amy Anderson — Yeah, a lot of what we do is we actually just provide a lot of content for pastors.

Rich Birch — Yep.

Amy Anderson — That’s through our podcasts, our webinars, our Unstuck quarterly church reports, to help pastors just hear what’s going on currently in the church, what we’re learning, what we’re sharing. So that’s a lot of what we do. But obviously our business is being on the ground with churches. So I believe we served, I think we were on the ground with over a hundred churches last year across the United States, some in Canada.

Rich Birch — Amazing.

Amy Anderson — And what we do is we help them assess like, where are we at today? How are we doing? You know, very rarely in church world do we pause and just say, how are we? Because we’re on this treadmill of Sunday, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday.

Rich Birch — That’s so true.

Amy Anderson — We have 52 events every year. But we pause and we just spend a day talking about perspective. Where are we healthy? What’s stuck? And so we we identify a starting point. Then we come in and we help them plan. So now that we know who you are, where’s God calling you?

Rich Birch — So good.

Amy Anderson — And so how can we bring clarity to what the next three to five years might look like, and then actually break that down into key priority initiatives for ’em.

Rich Birch — Love it.

Amy Anderson — And then they work those plans. And then the third part is what I want to talk about a little bit today is then we do a staffing and structure review. So once you have clarity where you are and where you believe you’re going now, how do we organize and leverage our most important asset, which is the people side of things.

Amy Anderson — So that’s where we spend our time when we’re on the ground with the church. Usually multiple consultants are involved with the church. So we get multiple eyes on there. And a lot of it’s, uh, you know, we want to draw out the wisdom in the room, but staffing and structure is actually a little bit more, if I could call it prescriptive. I’ve been doing this for 10 years now. I mainly work with large churches because that’s where my experience is. But I’ve been able to watch these churches over the last decade, see what’s working, what’s not working. And so I’ve got a lot of confidence. Of course, every church has decision rights on the recommendations, but I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t.

Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good.

Amy Anderson — And it just, it, yeah, helps them get some, some churches are not stuck because of ministry. They’re stuck because of their structure.

Rich Birch — Right. Well, I’d love to dive into that. I know as we were kind of preparing for this, I know from my seat and kind of that executive pastor second seat, you know, managing managing the organization side, there are times where—and and, friends, if there’s if you’ve worked on the churches that I’ve worked for, it was not about you it was other people—where I wondered, do we have the right people and do we have them in the right seat on the bus? Like those are really common fears, concerns, and it’s like we’re kind of staring off into the distance wondering, you know, but this this ah like you said, it really struck me there. It’s our most important asset.

Rich Birch — This is obviously true at kind of the cosmic level. We want to care for people. We want to love them. You know we want our people to thrive. But it’s also true, frankly, frankly from a ah dollars and cents, close to 50%, lots of churches, 50 cents out of our dollars being spent on staff. Man, we got to make sure we’re leveraging that well. Unpack this, help us understand why is this such an important issue for us? Why is kind of our staffing, the who and if they’re sitting on the right bus, why a part of the right bus, why is that so important to us?

Amy Anderson — Yeah, there’s there’s some things that come to mind. One, I want to go back to the pace of ministry life. You cannot compare church to corporate. It’s very different because of the deliverables that that a church has um on them every week. And so, when we’ve got this fast pace and now you add in growth, right?

Rich Birch — Yep.

Amy Anderson — We have a lot of churches in in high growth right now. More and more people are coming. There is no pause button.

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — And so we’re just doing the best we can to keep everything moving. And typically, we really like the people that are on our team. But you start to notice some symptoms, right? That that gut check that a lot of lead and executive pastors have like, do we have the right people? Do we have the right people in the right seat? Or there’s a transition – someone leaves and all of a sudden we’re just scattering and trying to cover the hole. And, you know, one of the headline questions this whole year was like, where do we find people, Amy? Where do we find future staff?

Rich Birch — Right. Right.

Amy Anderson — And I’m like, oh, you’re really behind the eight ball. Because you need to have a system.

Rich Birch — Right. You started two years ago, developed them.

Amy Anderson — That’s right.

Rich Birch — Right. Yes.

Amy Anderson — Cause it’s, can I say it’s a crap shoot, you know, to hire externally.

Rich Birch — Sure, you can say that. Yes.

Amy Anderson — And there are great organizations that help you do that, but that’s just my experience. The the best hires tend to come from within through an intentional development plan. But anyways, just those types of things add um to the chaos. And when we do sometimes pause and take a step back, we recognize we have a structure that we’ve just been adding on to for a decade. We’ve never…

Rich Birch — Yeah, bolting stuff on.

Amy Anderson — …bolting stuff on.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Amy Anderson — And it’s very it’s fracturing and people have worn multiple hats and they’ve gotten attached to some of those things, but now everyone’s got, it’s just convoluted. There are not clear ministry lanes. There are not clear owners over certain… You know, we track a lot of things like vital signs and we’ve, you know, we, no one owns it. I remember when I was over the weekend, it was so clear to me at Eagle Brook when our attendance started to flatline, we all cared about that, but it was my job to lose sleep at night. It was my job to look under the hood and figure out what’s, what’s, what’s drifting right now. What do we need to change? If I didn’t feel that ownership, we would just kind of, you know, my joke on our podcast is what’s the best way to kill a dog? Give eight people the responsibility to feed it. Okay.

Rich Birch — Yes, yes.

Amy Anderson — So if eight people have it, that dog’s not going to get fed.

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — And so that’s, that’s another symptom like, well, who’s actually watching that? Who owns that?

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — And so in all that chaos, that’s why I just bring it up. So many churches are feeling the people pressure coming through. I don’t know if this was your view of the world, but in our view of the world, there were three headlines last year. One is we need help with staff and structure. Two is we’re ready to go multi-site. And three, we are dealing with crazy growth. The large churches that I worked with last year, I really, I think they were all growing between like 20 and 35% year over year.

Rich Birch — Right. Yes, I would agree. Yeah.

Amy Anderson — So you just have to stop the insanity…

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — …and pause and get it figured out. Because once you have a staffing plan, once you, you know, one of the things I do when I work with these large churches, let’s say they’re a church of 3000 right now. I’ll say, let’s actually, when will we be a church of 6000? Let’s just play some math forward. And we actually create a plan for that…

Rich Birch — Yes. And then work backwards.

Amy Anderson — …so that we can step backward to a phased approach. So now they’re not manically adding and changing things. They’re strategically shifting where people are going and how they’re being placed.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Amy Anderson — But that’s just kind of a high level perspective on all of this.

Rich Birch — Yeah, I love that. We’re going to double click on some of that there because there’s just a bunch there i want I want to follow up on. But I agree that it’s interesting. I in fact, I was talking to our mutual friend, Warren Bird…

Amy Anderson — Yeah.

Rich Birch — …he’s in getting another story a study going and we were talking about this issue. I said, it feels like that kind of K recovery that we talked about coming out of covid, that that has just accelerated that there are kind of prevailing churches, life-giving churches, that are accelerating.

Amy Anderson — Yes.

Rich Birch — And then there are churches that are struggling. And the churches that are struggling are really struggling. Like they’re you know behind the rate behind significantly behind the eight ball. That, I I’ve heard that time and again, kind of both of those realities which is interesting.

Rich Birch — Your idea that hey there’s no pause button, it’s true. There’s that like 12 noon on Sunday, it’s like, okay, we’ve got now how many days until we do this again? But what would be some of those symptoms when I’m looking around in my organization that I maybe have got the wrong people in the wrong seat? What would be some of those either things that come out this idea of like not ownership? I think that’s a good one.

Rich Birch — Are there other things kind of telltale signs that you see that you’ve seen churches like, Ooh, that’s evidence that we we just don’t have the right people in the right seats. What would be some of those things you see in churches?

Amy Anderson — Yeah, let me point back to our vital signs again. You know we we really believe that there’s no one metric that will tell you the health of the church…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Amy Anderson — …but a couple of vital signs that also may indicate something’s askew. One is that percent ah money ah percent of your budget spent on staff. When that when that sneaks past 55%, there should be a light going off, a yellow light at at the least.

Amy Anderson — When we look at how many staff we have, per average attendance when we call, you know, full-time equivalents. Our best practice is that you hire one full-time person for every 75 people that attend your church. When that number’s dropping to 60, 55, 50. I mean, I’ve seen it go. This is embarrassing, right? I won’t tell you the church. It wasn’t this year, a couple of years ago. They hired one full-time person for every 15 people that attended their church.

Rich Birch — Wow. Wow.

Amy Anderson — I was just like, that’s crazy. Anyways.

Rich Birch — Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Amy Anderson — That’s right.

Rich Birch — I talked to a church recently that was at 33…

Amy Anderson — Yes!

Rich Birch — …and which is crazy, right? You start, I’m like, that is nuts. It’s like you got one staff for every couple of families. It’s amazing.

Amy Anderson — You’re basically paying volunteers at that point.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yes. Yeah. Right.

Amy Anderson — But those two numbers, when they are off, it means that we probably have too many doers on our team. And they’re probably great people. But if those doers, and what I mean by doer, they just have a lower level of leadership capacity. It’s not a bad thing.

Rich Birch — Rich Birch — …and which is crazy, right? You start, I’m like, that is nuts. It’s like you got one staff for every couple of families. It’s amazing.

Amy Anderson — You’re basically paying volunteers at that point.

Rich Birch — Yes. Yes. Yeah. Right.

Amy Anderson — But those two numbers, when they are off, it means that we probably have too many doers on our team. And they’re probably great people. But if those doers, and what I mean by doer, they just have a lower level of leadership capacity.

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — It’s not a bad thing. But I think back in the days of the Global Leadership Summit, we were all convinced we all had the leadership gift. and And we may, you know, we all lead ourself…

Rich Birch — It’s so true.

Amy Anderson — …but you go back to Exodus 18, you know, there’s different levels of leadership.

Rich Birch — Right.

And so when we have people in positions with a lower leadership capacity than the position demands, that’s when we start hiring all the time. And we see our volunteer numbers drop, which admittedly, volunteer numbers, that has been the hardest number to recover from since COVID, to get people engaged again. But churches that do not have multiplying, equipping leaders, particularly in the discipleship areas and in the next gen areas, that that’s going to be those those numbers will indicate we may need to make some shifts here. And maybe they have the leadership capacity, but it’s undeveloped, or maybe we reward the wrong things.

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — Maybe we don’t tell that, you know, that the discipleship leader, um, you know, what the expectations for the role is. Or maybe next gen’s even a better one. You know, if we haven’t really cast the vision, I know you’re a kid’s pastor, but you are primarily a team builder. You are a people magnet.

Rich Birch — Right. Yes.

Amy Anderson — So sometimes those just need to be re-envisioned, but those are some of the symptoms, um, that would also indicate we’ve got some challenges in this area.

Rich Birch — That’s good. That’s super good. I remember years ago I had a a mentor who was ah just a monster leader in kids ministry, like an incredible leader.

Amy Anderson — Yeah.

Rich Birch — And they said, you know, one of the problems with most children’s pastors is they like kids too much. You know, they you know they it’s really more about leading adults than it is um you know leading kids.

Rich Birch — I was going to ask you that if there are common areas where we see overstaffing kind of creeping in and maybe unpack that a little bit more. Because it feels right at the time, right? We’re like, oh, with the discipleship, they can only have so many coffees per week. So let’s just hire somebody else who they can go have more coffees with. Are there how do we see that kind of overstaffing start to creep in? What would what would be some of those ways we see that?

Amy Anderson — Yeah, and by the way, you know overstaffing, it’s such an interesting dilemma because we’ll have churches that feel like, I think we’re overstaffed and we’re understaffed.

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — But I don’t know where that is. And they’re usually right.

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — And we’ve had a bit of ah of a data deficit in this area for churches to be able to do some comparable, you know, comparisons with other churches. Like how many do you staff in next gen, how many do you staff in adult ministries versus operations versus the weekend. And so we actually started this last year, our Unstuck church report Q2 last year gave the first data thatI’ve seen where you can compare by church size how are we spending our staffing allocations.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Amy Anderson — And actually Q2 of this year, we are we are providing that again.

Rich Birch — Updating it. That’s great.

Amy Anderson — We’re we’re in the midst of creating that survey and updating it so your listeners can watch for that. I find that that’s helpful just to to ask that question.

Rich Birch — 100%.

Amy Anderson — Because um we have this overall staffing ratio 75 to 1, but you could spend that, if I could put it that way…

Rich Birch — Yes.

Amy Anderson — …you know, in a lot of different ways. I see it all over the place where they have under and overstaffing. You know there are some churches that are just saddled with a huge building, a huge complex building.

Amy Anderson — I was working with the church in Philadelphia and I always forget how hilly Philadelphia is. Well, their church is, you know, over like three or four levels and additions and all this. They’re going to spend more…

Rich Birch — Right. Right.

Amy Anderson — …on their operational side because they have to care for that facility.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Amy Anderson — But where I see fat in the organization is actually in those adult ministry areas…

Rich Birch — Oh, interesting.

Amy Anderson — …and in next gen. Those are the primary overstaffed areas I see. Because in adult ministries, I hope I’m not going to offend anyone too much.

Rich Birch — No, no, this is good. This is good.

Amy Anderson — But we we talk about, ah you know, not having leadership capacity, but they have a great guy or gal they love. And so they make a change and they make them the care pastor. And the challenge is, now that care pastor isn’t developing the body to go care for the body.

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — They’re doing a lot of care.

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Amy Anderson — They’re doing a lot of counseling and then they need more staff because I can only care for so many people. So then we have another care pastor or another counseling…

Rich Birch — Yeah. And their their their view on the world is the way we do this is I have 40 coffees a week.

Amy Anderson — Yes.

Rich Birch — And so I can meet with 40 people and then, okay, if we’re going to grow, then we need, we need to keep scaling up…

Amy Anderson — Yes.

Rich Birch — …the number of people that can have 40 coffees a week, right?

Amy Anderson — That’s right.

Rich Birch — That’s their kind of, they would never say it like that, but that’s kind of their, you know, their, their orientation. Wow. That’s good.

Amy Anderson — And then in the next gen area, and I I feel the tension for this. But if, again, if we don’t have those, that mindset of I’m primarily a team builder on the staff teams, then you think about all the diversity in just birth through, fifth grade. I mean, a first grade boy is very different than a fifth grade girl.

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — And you have all these rooms and large groups, small group, pre-K elementary. It’s very easy to just hear that drum, we need more staff, we need more staff, we need more staff, instead of building out that tiered volunteer structure where we can give um ministry away. So your big number will tell you a little bit about your overstaffing…

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — …your understaffing. Getting into some of this comparative data hopefully will help as well to kind of evaluate your, you know, the leaders listening, you know, your team.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. And I would echo your reports are, you know, kudos to you. Literally the day they come out, when I get an email to your report, I pause whatever I’m doing and I read your reports. I think they’re they’re there and I share them, you know, in the cohorts I lead, I’m always like, Hey, here are the five things that I saw out of this that I think you should pay attention to. Here’s some stuff that’s… they’re always good. And so make sure you’re looking for that Q2 report.

Rich Birch — So that’s kind of on the, we’ll call that the staff size. Like, do we have enough people? What about on the structure side? What are a few kind of, you gave us a few handles there around the total number of staff. But what are some things, again, let’s let’s envision a church of 1,500 people. We’ve got we’ve we’ve maybe hit the 1 to 75, so we’re not overstaffed. But I’m not sure that really we’re structured right. What would be some of the questions that we should be thinking about? You know, beyond call Unstuck…

Amy Anderson — Oh absolutely.

Rich Birch — …what would be some of those questions that we should be and we’d be we’d be thinking about?

Amy Anderson — Here’s some low-hanging fruit in this area. One is um just assessing your span of care.

Rich Birch — OK, good.

Amy Anderson — We find, again, when we’re bolting on, ah we start to feel like, oh, that person has to report to me. Or that person has to stay reporting to me because they’ve reported to me forever, and that would feel like a demotion if I changed it. So now you just added another direct report. And usually in churches of 1,500, we’ve gotten to the point where there’s an executive pastor in place. But that’s not always true at 1500. So you can have a lead pastor who suddenly has like seven direct reports…

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — …and it’s like, hello…

Rich Birch — Yeah.

Amy Anderson — …that’s not, you are not going to have the time to do the four things that you cannot delegate, which is being the spiritual leader and overseeing the teaching, driving culture, right? Being the primary vision caster and leader of leaders.

Amy Anderson — And so, but the big mistake i we often see churches make is they, all right, well, well then we need an an executive pastor. We bolt that one in. And then you know what? Now the executive asterisk has seven direct reports.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Amy Anderson — So that’s an example of how we don’t really fix the problem. But span of care, when that gets out of here out of hand, ah it’s time we’ve got to look at our structure.

Amy Anderson — Another one is when we take these kind of core ministry areas and we don’t have them grouped together in alignment.

Rich Birch — Okay.

Amy Anderson — So it’s really in ah often from you when I first get an org chart from someone before I do a staffing structure, um I’ll see on the direct line, maybe to the executive pastor, we’ve got like outreach and missions to his right. We’ve got the weekend leader. Then we’ve got groups ministry. And then we have, you know, the next gen area. And it’s like, why don’t we take all those adult ministry things, like groups and serving and outreach, let’s get them all tucked under that same ministry lan.

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — Because at the end of the day, ah those are all next steps we want people to take. But I often get pushback at first, like, well, that’s way too big of a job. And I’m like, it’s not. It’s it’s having a conductor for all those next steps, because when you don’t do that, you end up they end up competing, right? They end up competing for announcements. They end up competing for volunteers. They compete for any kind of promotional stage time…

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — …where really you need a leader to kind of know here’s where we need to put the spotlight right now.

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — And to make sure all of those steps are integrated versus separate programs at the church.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that…

Amy Anderson — So those are a couple that come to mind.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s so good. Do you have a my experience with span of care is there are some leaders that just seem to have a bigger capacity. They can they can have more people report to them and those people seem to flourish and thrive. And then other folks, it’s smaller. Is there are there, you know, so seven is too many, but is three too little? it Talk us through what, what, what are their kind of rules of thumb that when you see that even just on an org chart level, you’re like, Ooh, we should be thinking about this here.

Amy Anderson — Yeah, some of it depends on your leadership capacity and your style, right? So with a lead pastor, there are some that are wired for that executive pastor role. Others kind of push back a little bit. By the way, I think they often push back more so because of fear of being separated from the staff. We’ve all seen, you know, not so good turnouts with that.

Rich Birch — Yeah, they hold too close.

Amy Anderson — I find it works very well to have a key executive pastor who’s really conducting and making sure we’re executing on the vision. But you know, for like my preference, I can have four or five direct reports and I can I can lead them well. And, you know, it’s I know Tony used to say to me, Amy, if I don’t know the name of your husband and your kids and what’s going, you know, what I can be praying for, then I’m not really leading you. I’m just checking a management box.

Rich Birch — Right. Right.

Amy Anderson — And so I think we all have that tipping point when we get from being good leaders to good checking box managers of what we’re doing.

Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good. That’s good.

Amy Anderson — So it’s different. And then of course, um you know, at a high level, you need to have some thinking capacity to keep your eyes above the waterline.

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — So we we always have to remember we need time to work on the ministry, not just in it all the time.

Rich Birch — In it. Yep.

Amy Anderson — Yeah. So yeah, I think four to five is good for me. I think every leader has to wrestle with that. And that needs to be part of the input when you’re designing the new structure.

Rich Birch — Yeah, that’s good. So yeah, not so much just a standard. Here’s the ideal. Just apply this, you know.

Amy Anderson — Right.

Rich Birch — It’s like understand your people. And similarly, I would say in my own world, like I like to have at least, you know, um one significant monthly one-on-one…

Amy Anderson — Yes.

Rich Birch — …that’s outside of the like, Hey, what are we doing? It’s like, I want to actually get into your life and help you.

Amy Anderson — Yes.

Rich Birch — And it’s a one-on-one where we’re not, ah the goal is not that I’m dumping stuff on you. It’s I’m coaching you. We’re working through stuff. And I find frankly, if I do more than four or five of those a month. It’s like, that’s a lot. Like it’s a lot to try to keep on top of. And so, yeah, that’s good. That’s really good.

Amy Anderson — Can I jump in on something you said there?

Rich Birch — One hundred percent.

Amy Anderson — So one-on-ones, just an off-the-cuff comment.

Rich Birch — Yes.

Amy Anderson — One of the things that also might be an indication we don’t have the right ah staffing structure plan is if you have one-on-ones every week with your team members. Like you have the wrong people…

Rich Birch — Good call. Good call. Yes.

Amy Anderson — …if you have to meet with them every week in a church context, yeah I want one solid one-on-one…

Rich Birch — Ooh, I love it. We are dropping the mic here, friends.

Amy Anderson — We are dropping it!

Rich Birch — Cause there’s lots of people that do that that, that are like, I got to stay on top of my people. And so we’re, so yeah, that’s interesting. If you don’t have those, particularly at that level, I’m assuming. Hey, if we, if we got to check in with you every single week, things are not going right.

Amy Anderson — Yeah. I mean, if it’s a brand new employee, great.

Rich Birch — Sure.

Amy Anderson — But in general, no one should need that much meeting and oversight. So you can quote me…

Rich Birch — That’s good. Love it.

Amy Anderson — …you know, Amy said, if that’s you right now and you need a break from all those one-on-ones.

Rich Birch — No, I was I was going through a period where we we were managing a team member, I was managing a team member on my team that was struggling. And I generally would do monthly one-on-ones outside of team meetings.

Rich Birch — But then we went, you know, and when they would start, we would do more and then, you know, kind of phase back to monthly. But this person was going in the other direction. We went from monthly to every other week to weekly and actually eventually got to daily.

Amy Anderson — No!

Rich Birch — And I I said to them as we went to weekly, I was like, you know, this isn’t good, right? Like this is not the fact that I’m having to sit with you and talk about, okay, what are you doing this week? Let’s talk about your is not, you know, it’s not a good thing. And they were a little surprised, which was that led me to like, then we definitely have the wrong person, the wrong, wrong person sitting in this seat. This is not about, this is about a different conversation that we need to have.

Rich Birch — Um, adjacent to what you said there, you talked a little, you kind of hinted towards executive pastor, lead pastor relationships. We didn’t say that we were going to talk about this, but I’d love to get your thought a little bit on that. I notice oftentimes when I’m in a church, not all the time, but oftentimes I’ll have like a lead pastor pull me aside and say, man, I love my executive pastor. They’re amazing or pastors. They’re amazing. They’re great people. Great at checklist, great at getting stuff done. They’re fantastic. Great operational leader. Hey, can you help me though help me understand—there’s no but in the sentence—but it’s like, help me understand how to work better with them.

Rich Birch — Or I’ll have an executive pastor pull me aside and say, I love my lead pastor. So good at casting vision. Man, I’ll run through a wall for that person. That person’s incredible. Can you help me understand how to work better with them? I’m trying to kind of, you know, work on that relationship. I want that to be… What what are some of the things that you’ve seen from your seat that are kind of critical to that relationship really functioning, thriving well, an important kind of flourishing relationship in the life of a church?

Amy Anderson — Yeah, the first thing that comes to mind is how important it is that they spend time together.

Rich Birch — Oh, good.

Amy Anderson — They’re both busy, but the lead pastor, again, having that final exam every Sunday that’s going public, uh, you know, that message becomes really important. But I, I think one of the sins that I see in this area is where these two people don’t spend enough time together.

Rich Birch — Right. Good.

Amy Anderson — The truth is the the executive pastor to do his or her job well needs to have regular connection…

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — …because they are the ones who are making the vision actionable.

Rich Birch — Right.

Amy Anderson — So there just needs to be a high level of trust. Trust comes through time, comes through relationship.

Amy Anderson — When I talk with executive pastors about working with the senior pastor, lead pastor, number one, you have to pay attention to their rhythms and in advance decide what’s what’s a good time for us to have that weekly connection.

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Amy Anderson — It could be a brown bag lunch on Monday for a pastor who has those rhythms. It could be Wednesday because they have to get you know some of their message written. But a lead pastor’s rhythms should set the tone for how we do these meetings and intersections…

Rich Birch — That’s good.

Amy Anderson — …so that you get the right energy into that meeting. I also think whenever there’s pushback, like if the executive pastor has a different opinion than the lead pastor, I think it’s always important—I think this is from John Maxwell’s book, the 360-degree leader—you always need to start that pushback by echoing what matters to the lead pastor first.

Rich Birch — Oh, that’s good. Yeah, yeah, that’s great.

Amy Anderson — Like, I know that you want us to be a church that does this. You need to, anytime you’re going to disagree, because they need to know that you’re for them and you’re for the vision that they’re setting. And then bring the appropriate challenge um to an idea or something that just goes so much better.

Amy Anderson — To the lead pastors, I would say, again, you need to spend time with your executive pastor. It’s probably the most important relationship you have on your work team. Here’s the sin I see from that direction is the the lead pastor who starts to go, I don’t really need to be in the senior leadership team meeting this week. Yeah, you’re going to talk about Acts and that’s, I really need to get back to this. Or the executive pastor who says, I don’t think we need the lead pastor in this meeting. Here’s the deal. That is the beginning of a crack that’s going to turn into a larger gap and a fracture between the lead pastor and the team.

Rich Birch — Oh that’s good.

Amy Anderson — It’s critical that that lead pastor is regularly around the senior leadership team table because each of those leaders needs to hear the hea