Chris Bright 0:06
Welcome to the thinking church podcast with me, Chris Bright. Every week, I'll be speaking with a church leader about ministry strategy, and getting to grips with not just what they do, but the thinking behind why they do it. So without further ado, let's get on with the show. My interview guests today is Tony Morgan. Tony is the founder and lead strategist of the Unstuck Group started in 2009. The unstuck group has served over 500 churches throughout the United States and several countries around the world. Previously, Tony served on the senior leadership teams of three rapidly rapidly growing churches, including NewSpring Church in South Carolina, he has five published books, including the Unstuck Church, and he hosts the Unstuck Podcast, which has 1000s of listeners each month. Tony is a great friend of thinking church, and I was really blessed to be trained by Tony in the unstuck process. So we are so grateful to you, Tony, and the unstuck groups impact on thinking church, Tony, it's great to see you.
Tony Morgan 1:26
Well, it's good to be with you, Chris. And thank you for inviting me to today's conversation as well.
Chris Bright 1:31
Brilliant. Well, I'm excited to dive into this because you've been doing a whole lot of work around team health, Church Health, staff health. And just we would love to really dive into that and get some get your thoughts on it. So your latest unstuck health reports. You've surveyed many church leaders and staff around the areas of personal team and organisational health and performance. And the scores are actually quite encouraging. We've got somewhere between the kind of 6.9 and 7.6, out of 10. What do you think has contributed to these quite healthy looking schools?
Tony Morgan 2:12
So Chris, yeah, it was actually encouraging for me to see the results of the survey. And by the way that included, I think we had in total, over 1100, church staff people take that assessment. And that included churches represented not only in the US, but also Canada and the UK, among other countries, I think there were a handful of other countries involved as well. And so to see this representation of response across all these churches in all parts of the world was very encouraging to me. And this may be a theme of our conversation today. Because when you ask what, why were the response is so high, I was honestly a bit surprised by that just, we all of course, have experienced so many disruptions over the last couple of years. And that's impacted us individually, in many different ways, but also certainly has impacted churches in many different ways. But I think the reflection of these actually encouraging results when it comes to Team health and performance may be linked to this the sense of we've we're experiencing unique challenges together, none of us have ever experienced this, the challenge is very clear. And I'm wondering, Chris, if because of what we've experienced, this just kind of reinforced that sense of mission and calling as far as church staff members are concerned pastors and ministry leaders and so on. And that's kind of a it's kind of brought unity of purpose to the team again. And so even with all of the challenges, the disruptions that we've experienced, that has actually helped unite the team, which is actually then as a result of that. Staff, leaders who have taken the assessment are acknowledging actually, we're doing pretty well. I'm doing pretty well individually. And our team is doing pretty well, too. And that could just be because together we're there's there's a real battle in front of us. And we were all kind of locking arms and trying to tackle that together. So I don't know, I don't know what's driving that necessarily. We'll get into some more specifics of different sections of the assessment that looked at different different aspects of the questions that we asked. But overall, I think it might actually link back to this sense of we're we're on a significant mission together. And the challenge is very evident. And because of that the team is actually in a pretty good place right now, given all that we've experienced?
Chris Bright 5:02
Yeah, I really think you're right. Because when you think about, you know what happened during COVID, you know, there might have been lots of churches that were sort of drifting in their mission and even just, you know, having a common goal, and suddenly, you know, locked down hits and hang on a minute, this Sunday, we've all got to get a plan together. And nothing galvanises a team like that sense of like, that common goal of Hang on a minute, you know, all of our services are having to stop. And now you know, you're going to a very short focus short week by week. And I think that's something that's really interesting about that, that being able to galvanise around something that's, that's very immediate is actually a really interesting thing. And it's just how we can now extrapolate that to longer term goals, because I think that's been the problem beforehand is those longer term things feel a bit more a bit a bit more kind of drifting in a church context. And you know, the immediate things, you know, we've always had Sunday's always coming, but Sunday's is always coming. And but with COVID, it kind of created this new, everything is new, we've all got to, you know, work together, teamworks can be really high in this moment. And yeah, I think it's I think it's fascinating to see what happens, especially in the UK, with the restrictions are being lifted now whether that that drift starts to happen, again, whether it happens again, or whether we get back into whether we can keep that sense of team, and it's probably a good chance to look at the team health part of of your reports, and, interestingly, that the numbers were quite healthy on there. What do you think leads to better team health? And, and, you know, to get that number to go up, you know, you know, for, for people where they feel like they've got a really strong team health, what are the things that you think that make that number go up higher.
Tony Morgan 6:53
So the overall unstuck teams assessment is actually in six different key categories, one of them being team health, as you've just indicated, and in each of those six categories, we asked 12 questions around 12 different different indicators. And what was fascinating about the team health section is that the highest scores were actually connected to both how teammates are caring for each other. And then also a sense of my leader is caring for me personally, as well. And so I just thought, this is fascinating. It's, I think, actually tied to some biblical principles that we see as well, where, you know, we're commanded to love God and love others. And when that actually happens in practice, then, especially within the context of our teams, where we're thinking of each other, caring for each other, and that becomes the priority over my own self interest, it actually elevates the overall health of the team. And when that happens, my suspicion is it actually helps our personal health as well. So it was fascinating to see how again, I would have just suspected Chris, in the middle of everything that we've experienced in the last couple of years, that team health would have taken a hit. But in reality, we actually saw people view their current health as a team to be very positive. And a lot of it is linked to how people are caring for each other, including specifically, how leaders are caring for their teams, which says a lot to about leaders in the church on on our staff teams, again, think about pastors or different ministry directors, ministry leaders on our staff teams, it the senses, looking at the information we received from the assessment that leaders actually stepped up during the season, and are leading their teams well, by first really being sensitive to the needs and caring for those that are on their team. So very encouraging. Yeah,
Chris Bright 9:03
absolutely. Yeah, really, really encouraging. It's so interesting, looking at the results, the lowest score, which was the kind of 6.9 which is really still not not that low, really. But the lowest one was organisational systems and structure. That I mean, it's interesting to sort of dive into that and to think think about what are the systems and structures that that lead to to greater health? What are those ones that that churches should be thinking about? When thinking about, okay, how can we get better systems and structure to have a really healthy organisational system structures and things like that?
Tony Morgan 9:41
That's a good question. And so just diving in to that particular section of the assessment. If we were to look at the lowest scores in that area around organisational systems and structure as an example, the lowest scores, the lowest indicators Around perform performance evaluation. In other words, people on the team aren't clear about their roles, their responsibilities, what the winds are for their positions. And then secondly, there was a low score for the organisation having some way collectively to manage tasks and projects, which again, I think goes to clarity of wins of objectives within our teams. And when we don't have a way to monitor how we're progressing as a team around tasks and projects, there's just going to be more question on the team where the priorities should be. So these are the these are the lowest scores, again, around kind of performance expectations and evaluation and around how we're managing tasks and projects in the church contacts within our church teams. And again, I think there's some overlap in both of those indicators that would suggest as leaders what we need to be considering is how do we clarify objectivism agenda, ministry objectives and priorities better? And then how do we keep those objectives in front of our team so that Together, we can make sure that we're making progress on the priorities that we've identified for our ministry?
Chris Bright 11:21
Yeah, I find this really fascinating because I think this is where the tension can arise in church leaders between, you know, how much are the staff? How much is it good to put numbers as targets, you know, do to staff is that going to demotivate people? Is that going to motivate people? Should we be using numerical factors? What are your thoughts on the kind of the adding Numerix? To those kind of things? Does it help team team health or and organisational health? Or is that actually inhibit it?
Tony Morgan 11:52
And an actuality neither of those indicators are directly tied to numbers. Chris, it has more more to to do with identifying what are the what are the priority ministry initiatives that we need to be engaging. So looking at our ministry strategies, the vision for the future that we're sensing God's calling us to it these many times aren't tied directly to numbers of actually identifying this is, this is a shift in strategy that we need to make this is a priority that we need to engage. And it's just keeping people focused on those goals, not not necessarily numerical goals. In fact, in many cases, numbers aren't involved at all. So just as an example, let me personalise it to our context at the unstuck group. In this last season, we identified I mean, with so many church leaders not being able to travel, but yet so many questions around, how do we engage ministry in this season, we double down as a team on certain initiatives related to the content that we were creating for the team and how we were delivering that content to church leaders. And so we tried some new things in this last year. And all of that really required our team to rally around those initiatives, and to join together and contributing our experiences and our skill sets to see those objectives accomplished. And so for ministries, churches, I'm suspecting that in many cases, those priorities are, are similar in that it's just identifying This is a strategy and event, a ministry that's worked for us in the past. But in the current context, we're not saying it's it's actually providing fruit for the ministry that we're engaging, and we need to make some shift, some change. And it's identifying those priority changes or initiatives and just making sure the team is focused and then the individuals on the teams are focused as well.
Chris Bright 14:06
Oh, no, that's, that's brilliant, that there's a term that you use in your reports, which I find really interesting, which is organisational culture. Now I think most people have heard of that term, but it is actually quite difficult to describe and sometimes when you you know, if you ask people, how would you describe the culture? Some people find it quite difficult to give an explanation as to what they mean. What's your definition for a Church's organisational culture?
Tony Morgan 14:34
It's pretty nebulous. And the thing is, when cultures healthy everybody knows it. And when culture is unhealthy, everybody knows it. However, trying to define it is rather it's rather challenging. And in my thinking, What's been helpful for me is to consider the culture is a reflection of how we behave. And how we interact with each other. And actually, it's that focus on behaviours that we have found to be really helpful, especially for church teams. Because in the past, I think the conversation around culture has been more about our values as a team or our values as a church. And the challenge with that, for churches is there's always things that we value that are actually, there's just going to be a part of every church, like the authority of God's Word and prayer and loving Jesus, and engaging in a personal relationship with Jesus, and all of these things that all of us as believers would agree to. But those things aren't necessarily what make for distinctive culture within the teams within the churches that we engage in, what we found is by talking less about kind of our core theology and the things we value in our faith, and shifting more towards the behaviours that we hope to see, as we interact with each other on the team, as we began to kind of shift the conversation in that direction, I think teams found it easier to talk about than the culture that they really wanted to create. And so I hope that's helpful. Chris, it's, I'm sure, it's still a little bit nebulous. But really, I think the focus needs to be if we want a healthy culture, we need to, we really need to narrow down on how we interact with each other, and how we behave towards each other.
Chris Bright 16:36
Yeah, I think that's really interesting. Because you're absolutely right. There's so many churches where you say, you know, I, you know, you ask them, What are their values, and they'll say, No, worship, prayer, you know, the word, and those things don't really help you. They, obviously, they're great things. And, you know, they, they make sense in the fact that we value them, but they're not actually, they're not helpful in terms of how you live out your, the mission of the church. So, you know, worship, or prayer, these are activities that you do, but that it doesn't, it's not instructive of, of how you can operate, how you can live, how we live and act in the world. And, and so you're right, the kind of behaviours, side of things that are much more, much more helpful when you're trying to set a culture just to dig into that behaviours. Can you give me an example of what kind of behaviours you're thinking about? Is it? You know, I guess maybe there's some church leaders that might be thinking, Okay, you know, is it like, mandating haircuts, or those kinds of things? What kind of behaviours? What kind of behaviours are you looking for? when you're when you're kind of setting them with churches?
Tony Morgan 17:44
Yeah, well, one of them for the unstuck group, as an example within our team has to do, it's probably coming a lot out of my personality, but the opportunity to make it better to actually improve. And as a team, we've agreed together, we're always going to be looking for ways to improve what we're doing to serve the churches, so that we can help more and more churches get unstuck. And so when we're working with each other to then we're pushing each other to how can we make improvement not only our systems and the strategies that we're engaging, but how can we help to improve each other to encourage development in each other as well. So that's, that's one example within the context of our team, of how we've identified our behaviour, which we think is distinctive to who we are, because we want to make each other better. And as a result of that, that's shaping the culture within our team.
Chris Bright 18:43
Yeah, I'm thinking of, I did the same activity with my own church. And one of the ones we came up with, which was really pleasing was to make every Hello matter. And I really liked that, because it was it's instructive to people, you know, on the team, you know, every person that you interact with that Hello, really does matter. So make sure that it's making a difference. But it's great for outside the church as well. And because now, you know, we can tell our congregation, you know, make every Hello matter, because every Hello really does matter if you're at work or school, or wherever you are, you know, every Hello can matter. And it can make a big difference. And I think that's the essence of when we when we talk about behaviour. It's not about, you know, mandating haircuts or you know, mandatory and there's some of those things might become helpful at other points, but it's the kind of big narrative, the things that really shape who we are how we operate in the world. I think that that's, that that's really interesting. How do you How did you come up with something like that? How do you look at sort of finding, okay, we we've got an idea of some things we think we want to do. How did you start that process of thinking about those kind of behaviours that you want to get?
Tony Morgan 19:57
Yeah, so this is, I mean, it's a component But we do when we engage with churches. And so there's a there's, I mean, a relatively in depth process that we go through with the staff leadership team first just to help them think about the people on their team that they think are elevating not only the health of the team, but the ability of the team to accomplish its mission, we encourage them to think about those key people on their team that are really elevating who the team is. And we start by just encouraging them to think about those people, and identifying the behaviours that they see in those folks that are really contributing to the strength of the team. And we just start brains brainstorming a list and then through a series of conversations, help the leadership team kind of narrow that down, and I like to keep it five or less, I think if the list gets too long, even though they may be behaviours that we recognise are important for our culture. If that list gets too long, it just becomes difficult for us to remember, maybe I'm just talking about me personally, I don't know. But, so we try to encourage the team to narrow it down to five or less. And then once we identify the behaviours, we try to create some clarifying statements, too, that are associated with each of the behaviours that kind of Express, this is what this is when we know that this behaviour is really evident. And each person's life within our team. This is this is the evidence of us seeing that behaviour played out within our team dynamic. And you know, from that point, then there's a process of kind of praying through that list and confirming it in further wordsmithing. And then ultimately, there's some training and then I would always encourage churches to be looking for catching their teammates, actually engaging the culture, shaping behaviours, and sharing those stories and celebrating those stories with their teammates as well. And so this is one of those things, if you just kind of develop the list, and then stick it away in your staff Handbook, or just print the list and stick it on the office wall is probably not going to gain momentum and gain traction within your team. And you're not going to see that culture shift over time. But if it's something that you're continually talking about sharing stories, celebrating within your team, eventually, we have found this not only begins to shape the culture of the church, staff team or volunteer team, but ultimately, this will shape the culture of your congregation as a whole. So when your congregation sees their leaders modelling this and in acting out through the behaviours that have been identified, eventually that culture will be pervasive throughout our nation as well.
Chris Bright 23:19
Well, thank you so much for listening to this week's podcast. This is only halfway through the podcast, and you can listen to the full conversation by joining our members podcast, just go to our website, www.hp thinking dot church and you can sign up to our members podcast there, it only costs the price of one coffee per month so it's well worth doing. So why not get a coffee, listen to the podcast and listening you. We will see you again for this podcast next week. So bye for now.
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