Hot Take | Your Parish Needs Vision, Staff with Purpose, and Meetings with Tension

Jim Jansen 01:02

It is. Not just here in the States?

Shanon Stallard 01:03

No, no, in New Zealand and Australia. um, God has a vision for that parish. Discover what that vision is. Start talking about it.

Jim Jansen 01:13

How do I discover that vision?

Shanon Stallard 01:15

If you seek it, you'll find it. Go to prayer. Talk to people. Talk to the parish. Ask parishioners who should we be? Who is God calling us to be?" Align that with what God has placed upon your heart, and then form a vision using their words.

Jim Jansen 01:30

'Cause he's speaking to both. Whatever he's stirring in your heart in prayer, he's also stirring in your people.

Shanon Stallard 01:36

A challenge there, Jim, is like, this is a new priest to a new parish. Those people have been there a long time. You're new as the pastor, yeah? And so talking to people and hearing ... their worries and concerns and fears, yeah? Let them talk those because that might give you the inverse of what is needed.

Jim Jansen 01:54

Oh, so good. All right, scenario number two. I have several staff that I manage, and neither of them seems to be performing that well. They're mostly doing the minimum. There's no drive for excellence, there's no growth in skill, and sometimes they're not even doing the minimum. I'm afraid of the backlash if I let them go. I just wonder, maybe I'm just being too picky. What say you?

Shanon Stallard 02:18

Well, first seek to know your people and what is it that motivates them? What's led into this sort of mediocre sense of performance? We can often think it's got something to do with the individual when sometimes it can be something to do with the structure and the culture around that's led that individual to work in that particular way. Seek out is it purpose that they're lacking? Is it the need for mastery? They actually don't have the skill set and I need to equip them. Do they need a little bit more autonomy in what they do, and it feels like they've tried something before and they've got a slap and so they're not gonna try again.

Jim Jansen 02:56

Or less autonomy. Do they just need some direction to get started?

Shanon Stallard 03:00

Yeah, so connect back to the purpose. I don't really know what I'm doing, so I just do the bare minimum and I don't want to step outside of that because I could fail because I don't feel supported.

Jim Jansen 03:10

Shannon, what questions, if you're sitting down with this employee, what would you ask them to start to uncover the purpose and what's really going on?

Shanon Stallard 03:18

What's their why in terms of the role. What is it that they want to achieve, what is it that they kind of hope for. How do they see their job connecting into the bigger mission of the parish?

Jim Jansen 03:31

And just simple "Hey what do you like about your job? What's the least favorite part of your job? How do you see your job connecting to the bigger picture vision of the parish?" And just ask.

Shanon Stallard 03:42

Yeah. Yeah.

Jim Jansen 03:43

By the way, Shannon did not know like, I'm, like, surprising him with some of these things here. Okay, scenario number three.

Shanon Stallard 03:49

All of these things .

Jim Jansen 03:50

So, You're doing great. Okay. "My team is experiencing tension. Our meetings tend to wander, and they go long, but we don't seem to be accomplishing much. We're all over the place. I'm not sure if we're making progress. It's starting to bother us. We're feeling the tension and the frustration. What do I do as a leader?"

Shanon Stallard 04:09

Patrick Lencioni, look at his stuff around meetings. If there's tension, great. You want tension. You don't want artificial harmony, which is happens in a lot of teams. Tension is what you want in a team because tension brings about different ideas, and so a degree of conflict is w- is a desire to have in a team. You don't want too much of that, but you do want a little bit of that. Often we don't like meetings, and meetings aren't effective because we have what Patrick Lencioni calls meeting stew. We try to achieve everything under one meeting. So a good structure for a meeting I like to use is POP.

What is the purpose of this meeting? What is the outcome of this meeting? What are we gonna achieve and what's the process we're gonna use for this meeting to achieve that outcome? And so purpose and outcome. Gotta define those two. They are different things. And so for each meeting we need to have that and be clear about what is this particular meeting about. And sometimes we need to break up a meeting into different meetings, and that's when we get an agenda, and we're gonna have different items, and we pop each kind of agenda item. Do that, have that sort of structure to a meeting.

People are gonna love to come to meetings because you have the tension, because we know in that meeting we're gonna debate ideas, and people will enjoy that because it's meaningful.

Jim Jansen 05:24

Shannon, you have done leadership training and development for the military here in the church. There's dozens and dozens of different leadership frameworks and operating systems, if you will. It seems like there's something about what Lencioni has done that he didn't design it for the church, but it seems to work in the church. Is it just me, or do you feel like there's something about his leadership framework that just seems to work really well in the Catholic parish context?

Shanon Stallard 05:58

God created people. We are created to be His. We are created to be in communion. We are created to be in His church. And so therefore anything we do to research and put together some sort of framework around leadership is gonna mirror the Creator. And so therefore what works in a corporation is gonna work in a church. And so I think it's, the disorder that can happen in corporations because of the purpose is maybe different to the purpose of the church and therefore what can flow out of that is a bit of a disordered sense of leadership.

Jim Jansen 06:37

Yeah

Shanon Stallard 06:37

But Patrick Lencioni, yeah, he's got great stuff. I would be a little bit critical of some of his stuff because I think it does lack a little bit of research. I've got a master's in science and leadership and so I have a very scientific approach to tools and things I use. There's a lot of pop culture stuff out there, yeah? It's kinda like someone had a great idea, and it sounds good, but it actually doesn't help. It's, it doesn't help at a deeper level, yeah? And so I have a little bit critique of some of Patrick Lencioni's stuff because it is "I just had an idea, and here's this thing." And man, he's-- God gives him some stuff too, yeah? And He gives some stuff and you probably take that and do the research, and you'll discover that, man, that is true, yeah?

Jim Jansen 07:17

Yeah, a lot of people are finding life and hope, and they're actually starting to make traction because of it. All right, Shannon Stallard, thank you. Thank you for the hot takes. This, three hot takes, and I surprise you with all of them. That's great. We will link to your websites, leadwithvirtue.org and PetrosLeadership.com.