18 Search Results for hiring

4 Simple Rules for Working with and Hiring Creatives

I’m privileged to have Darrel Girardier guest blog for me today. Darrel serves Brentwood Baptist Church as the Digital Strategy Director. If you’re like me, you’re not crazy creative, but you work with those who are. And Darrel gets how to bridge the gap. I think today’s post will help you as you consider finding, hiring, and working well with your creatives.

I’ve had the privilege for the last 15 years to work with creative teams in both the corporate and church setting. While each setting is slightly different, there are some rules that I think can be applied to each situation.

If you work with, or are in the process of hiring creative people for church, I’ve outlined four simple rules that help you along in the process. Here they are…

1. Hire creatives who can take the abstract and make it concrete.

I’ve worked with some very talented people. However, what separated the good ones from the great ones was the ability to take what was either technical or abstract, and explain it in a way that anyone could understand what they’re saying.

Now why is this important? If you’re going to manage, evaluate, or coach someone for whose skill-sets you don’t have, you need to have some sense of the scope of their work and what it entails. Often this leads to conversations where you want to be informed, but you don’t need to know all the details.

If you hire the right creative person for your team, they can make the process easier for you. By making the abstract become concrete, they can provide the information you need to make better decisions.

2. Hire creatives who understand the difference between design and art.

It’s easy to become enamored with people who create visually stunning work. Whether it’s videos, logos, or stage design, visual creative work is something that everyone wants to show off. However, the best creatives understand the difference between stunning visuals and stunning visuals that solve a problem.

In other words, you should hire creative people who understand that their challenge when creating a video or design is not to wow you, but instead, solve your problem. These types of creative people will help you move beyond questions like, “What colors or fonts do you like?” to more important questions like, “Who is your primary audience?” and “How do we measure success?”

If you can hire a creative person who instinctively knows to answer those questions first, then you’ve found someone who will be more results driven, which will have a greater impact for your church.

3. When you talk to a creative staff member, talk about your design problem and not the solution.

One of the things you can easily do to frustrate a creative person is to bring them a problem, and then bring them what you think the solution should be. It’s the equivalent of describing a canyon to an engineer and then telling them how to build the bridge.

The more effectively you can describe what you’re trying to accomplish along with the challenges your facing, the higher chance you have of engaging your creative staff. The problem is that most of us come to the creative person with a problem and what we have our idea of what the solution should be (but we can’t do ourselves). This solution-based approach eventually frustrates the creative person and creates a feeling that they’re simply a widget maker.
4. Be wary of confusing roles.

A lot of church leadership staff try to find some mental model so they can categorize how creative people will work with the rest of the (non-creative) staff. Often this leads to using the “client/service” model.

In this model, the ministry is the “client” and the creative person (designer, video producer, etc…) is the service department. You can find this model in most large corporations that have in-house creative departments.

While this model has its advantages, it can lead to de-emphasizing the partnership ministries and creative teams should have, and instead, focuses on simply making the client happy. And yes, creative people do want make ministries happy, but they don’t want to do at the cost of violating basic creative and design principles (Comic sans font anyone?).

To remedy this situation, you need to clarify roles. Not in the sense of who’s in charge, but rather what each party is responsible for. In other words, find a way to let the creative people do what they do best (design, produce, etc.) and still meet the needs of the ministry. This can be a bit of balancing act, however, if you clarify these roles on the front end, the creation process will go much smoother.

As I stated in the beginning, every situation is a bit different. However, most creative people I know want to be respected, trusted and encouraged. If you follow the four rules above, you’ll be one step closer to getting attracting, keeping, and allowing them to feel respected, trusted, and encouraged.

Darrel is effectively collaborating and coaching other church leaders, particularly in the church communications space. Check out his blog and his “Ask Darrel” podcast on iTunes.

The Pitfalls of Hiring Church Members on Staff

It can be a mistake for your church.

Or it could be a win.

Sometimes it’s the path of least resistance.

And sometimes it’s exactly the right decision.

Hiring church members onto your church staff can cause problems. Not unlike hiring family members (previous post on nepotism on church staffs), there are benefits for doing this as well as drawbacks. In both cases, the drawbacks often have more wide-ranging impact.

An unwise hire can not only affect the work done at the church, but also potentially the individual’s relationships with the church or with God. Most problems can be minimized by good communication during the hiring process (previous post on our hiring process). As church leaders, we need to communicate with our staff early, often, and thoughtfully regarding what they can expect in their role, what our expectations of them are, and what the implications are if these don’t match.

But, before you begin communicating what it means for a church member to take a position on your church staff, you first need to deal with it philosophically. While not comprehensive, here are a few questions to help you do that.

What’s your church’s track record? If you’ve hired church members onto your staff before, have they succeeded? If not, was the work the only thing impacted, or did it leak into their church membership (i.e. the way they felt about the church)?
How important is it that the individual in that specific role knows the DNA of your church? (This answer will vary based on type of position: custodial, administrative, minister, director, etc.)
Do you believe the person is capable of keeping the confidentialities of the work?
Are they mature enough in their Christian walk to appropriately separate their role on staff from their role as a church member?

If you decide that you’re open to hiring existing church members onto your staff, then you need to practice problem avoidance (a previous post’s topic).

Make sure your church and prospective staff members have clarity on the following issues:

Being on staff is not like volunteering. Many prospective employees might think being on church staff is like being a volunteer, but with pay. There are a lot of differences, and you need to let them know what they are.

Being employed by a church doesn’t mean everything is “ministry” in nature. Many church members don’t realize how much business and “corporate” work happens behind the scenes. They have high hopes of their work directly being tied to benevolence or baptisms, and may become disenfranchised quickly when they don’t see their output tied to actual ministry.

Working in a faith- and grace-based environment doesn’t mean you get a pass on performing well. Many think because it’s a church, there won’t be standards, reviews or improvement plans. But the church is God’s choice of institutions to bring people to Him — we should set the bar for excellence.

Their experience in their work environment can (and likely will) affect their spiritual experience. Many church members who want to be on staff think there will be no conflict when their work and their church membership intersect. And certainly, there can be a positive benefit of working where you worship. However, there can also be a negative result from mixing these two worlds.

For example, an employee’s work as an assistant to their pastor may make them appreciate all that’s involved in the role of the pastor. They may see the dedication involved in preparing a sermon or they’ll get a glimpse of the kind of care a pastor provides to people in need. Then again, the pastor may have a bad day on Thursday, be unkind or impatient with the assistant, and suddenly, it’s three days later, and their pastor is leading communion and the only thing the employee can think is, “He treated me a like a jerk last week!” Now their work environment has suddenly negatively impacted their spiritual environment.

When church members consider joining your staff, it presupposes that your specific church was first their place of worship, discipleship, and community. Likely, this is paramount to them – and as a church leader, I hope it’s also paramount to you.

So when I’m meeting with a church member who’s applied for a staff position, I try to communicate that by taking this job, they’re jeopardizing their current relationship with the church.

It seems negative to put it that way – and of course I hope it doesn’t come to that. But the truth is, they’re putting that possibility on the table by being employed by their church. I hope their employment furthers their love and commitment to the church – but if it doesn’t, they need to be aware of the wide-ranging impact on other areas of their life.

It’s important that you as a church leader and employer have clarity about these potential risks. My experience is that we’ve been able to successfully employ many church members who’ve thrived in both worlds. These church members and staff are productive in their work, and also growing in Christ-likeness. That being said, it’s still a risk. And because we as leaders should care most about the church being a place of discipleship for them, we need to assess the inherent risks, lead conversations about them, and choose wisely.

A Critical Step in Hiring A Minister

The pause.

The pause is relevant no matter how many ministers you hire.

The pause is critical no matter your church’s governance model.

The pause is a ‘must have’ no matter how long you’ve been hiring ministers.

The pause is, in fact, a pause.

After each step in your selection process with a minister candidate, you as a church leader need to ensure the decision maker or makers (hiring manager, elders, personnel team, whomever) pause.

Once we as church leaders get excited about a candidate and can see how they fit into our church’s future, we sometimes move things forward quickly and don’t stop.

We perpetuate urgency.

When you’re working urgently, you miss things.

A pause in the hiring process accomplishes several things:

It makes sure we’re in an Acts 15 moment “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…”
It slows it down for things below the surface to literally rise to the top (some things are only uncovered in time)
It allows people to catch up. This is really important for search processes that include multiple people. Most “multiple people” have lives that aren’t solely focused on hiring ministers. So pauses give literal time for people to catch up on the process
A pause at each step tells the candidate that this is a process, it includes due diligence, and they too, should be pausing
And related to an Acts 15 mindset, pauses allow us to be still enough to hear from God. We want to always be a part of God’s “good, pleasing, and perfect will,” and that may not always match our desired candidate

There are some negatives to pauses. But the positives far outweigh the negatives.

One pause is not enough, I suggest a pause at every significant step (see link at bottom for examples of steps). I’m not suggesting how long a “pause” should be, that’s circumstantial and usually clear to the leader who’s involving others, wants the best, and seeking divine wisdom.

Completing a step doesn’t have to beget another step. In hiring a minster, the paradigm should be: complete a step, pause, and then make decision about whether to take next step.

Pausing could mean you delay having a minister on site by a week or a month. Pausing could also mean you never hire the minister. And in that case, the pause did its job…allowing time for the process to disqualify candidates, or changed the desires of a candidate or the search team, or for the Spirit to provide clarity that only comes from God.

As a practical takeaway, here is an Abridged Version of BBC Selection With Pauses that shows pauses throughout.

p.s. Lifeway President Thom Rainer has written some excellent blog posts recently about what ministers want search teams to know and what search teams want minister candidates to know.

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