What is your plan to lead and support your staff?

If you’re like me (and every other leader I know), great intentions don’t always become reality.

When I was the lead pastor at Woodstock City Church, I knew my staff needed and deserved support. I wanted to support them and lead well.

But how?

Leading by example helps, and delegating is good. But I found most of my “leadership” was drive-by lessons. While helpful, sporadic leadership engagement is insufficient.

Systems Turn Intention Into Reality

The only way to ensure that what you hope happens actually happens is by creating and implementing a system. Systems are the secret to consistency.

To effectively and consistently do what you want, need, and should do, systems are a must.

6 Staff Engagement Systems Every Leader Should Create

Hope isn’t a strategy or a system. If you hope to lead your team well, systems are the answer. Here are the six staff engagement systems I used when leading Woodstock City Church:

1. Staff Meeting System

I can admit this now: I hated staff meetings. At least before I developed a system.

Staff meetings felt like an obligation full of expectations. They always seemed to sneak up on me. In my early leadership days, we usually did the same thing at every meeting: pray, share stories, thank people for their hard work, and cover some relevant information. Not that those things are bad or wrong, but they were afterthoughts. The meetings weren’t intentional.

I adjusted my approach by creating a quarterly meeting plan. We met twice a month, so for the six meetings each quarter, I planned to focus two of the meetings on leadership, two on spiritual growth, one on worshipping together, and the last one was all about fun and connecting.

I laid out the plan a quarter in advance. Knowing what staff meeting focus was next allowed me to plan systematically, keep the meetings fresh, and create a meeting more worth attending.

2. Annual Job Reviews

Always a crowd favorite!

Annual reviews don’t have to be terrible experiences. It’s only when the process is terrible that the reviews are unwelcome.

You can systematize your annual review process by selecting the review process to use and selecting when you’ll review each staff member (first of the year, month of start date, etc.).

There are several annual review systems out there. My recommendation is to find one that is simple enough not to be a burden while also robust enough to provide actionable input for you and your direct reports.

NOTE: I created an annual review based on Patrick Lencioni’s The Ideal Team Player. This resource is available to all Church Accelerator Partners. If you’re not a partner, join and download these resources or create your own.

3. One-on-One Meetings

I’m always surprised at the lack of individual meetings with supervisors. One-on-one meetings are perhaps the best mechanism to increase our relational influence with direct reports.

To create a one-on-one meeting system, simply designate who you need to meet with (I suggest each person directly reporting to you), how often you should meet (twice a month is ideal for most roles), and how to structure the conversation.

My structure was to divide the hour into segments:

• • 10 Minutes to catch up relationally
  • 30 Minutes to discuss current realities and pending work
  • 10 Minutes to focus on action items
  • 10 Minutes to discuss how I could help

NOTE: My SUBSTACK offers the full list of questions. Additionally, Church Accelerator Partners have access to the email I sent before these meetings and the six questions I asked them to consider.

4. Skip-Level Meetings

In an organizational chart, the people who report to the people reporting to you can offer great insight into the organization.

At Woodstock City, I decided to implement Skip-Level Meetings to help me:

1. 1. Foster better relationships with those who did not report directly to me
   2. Listen deeper into the organization to help me lead better

For Skip-Level Meetings to succeed, you need to systematize the process by scheduling them in advance on a rotation and providing the person you’ll meet with a simple list of questions for the meeting. As you can imagine, people meeting with you in this format will be initially intimidated. Providing questions in advance helps lower their blood pressure and gives them time to process their answers.

NOTE: My SUBSTACK offers the full list of questions. Additionally, Church Accelerator Partners have access to the email I sent before these meetings and the six questions I asked them to consider.

5. Anonymous Satisfaction Survey

I found it helpful to annually survey the team to gauge their overall satisfaction, feeling valued and appreciated, satisfaction with peers and supervisors, opportunities for growth, organizational culture, and pride in the organization.

This anonymous survey always unearthed comments and issues people didn’t feel comfortable voicing aloud. And, while this should be a given, these surveys are not an opportunity for a witch hunt. Use the feedback to understand what’s happening and grow your leadership.

NOTE: My SUBSTACK offers the full list of questions. Additionally, Church Accelerator Partners have access to the email I sent before these meetings and the six questions I asked them to consider.

6. Staff Engagement Survey

The Staff Engagement Survey consists of six questions that create an open, healthy conversation between leadership and their direct reports. While one-on-one meetings can achieve this, the engagement survey questions are better at opening a deeper dialogue.

The questions consist of things like:

1. 1. Have I recently done or said anything that robbed you of your passion or energy?
   2. Do you feel you have the latitude you need to make decisions that are important to your role?
   3. If you were me, what would you do differently?

NOTE: My SUBSTACK offers the full list of questions. Additionally, Church Accelerator Partners have access to the email I sent before these meetings and the six questions I asked them to consider.

Wrapping Up…

These six systems help ensure that what you want to do and hope to do actually gets done. And while this list may seem like going to meetings will become your only job, trust me, systematically creating a schedule like what I did at Woodstock City Church will save you time in the end. Moreover, it will develop more and better leaders around you.

Don’t wait to add more intention to your leadership. Your staff needs your wisdom and support.

One More Thing…

You’re probably aware of our Church Accelerator Community. All our Partners have unlimited access to our resource section, full of courses, frameworks, supporting documents, and our new Custom AI tools (Sermon Outline Creator, Sermon Evaluator, Small Group Question Writer, and more).

Partnership begins at $149 per month, which gets you about $5,000 in resources. Don’t wait. Become a partner today.

If you’d like personalized coaching for you, a staff member, or your church, check out the Strategic Partner and Community Partner options. I limit the number of these options to maximize my investment in each church and pastor. Let me know if you are interested.

Leading With You,
Dr. Gavin Adams