Replace or Develop Your Staff?

What separates a great organization from everyone else?

It’s not sales, profits, or even weekend attendance. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, says the number one metric is the percentage of key seats filled with the right people. His goal is 90 percent. It’s not enough to just have a person in the seat. It needs to be the right person with the right skills and abilities.

What makes a key seat a key seat?

In BE 2.0, Collins and Bill Lazier give three filters. A role is a key seat if it meets any one of them:

1. The person in that seat has the power to make significant people decisions.
2. Failure in that seat could expose the organization to significant risk or catastrophe.
3. Success in that seat would have an outsized impact on the church or organization.

Key seats look different depending on your church’s size. In a large church, it may be the executive team. In a typical-sized church, it may be your key staff roles (and maybe a volunteer leader or two). Size doesn’t matter. If a role meets any of these filters, it’s a key seat.

Replace or develop?

So what happens when someone in a key seat isn’t performing up to expectations? You have two options: replace them or develop them.

Collins found that the best leaders he studied are split about 50/50. Half lean toward developing the person, and half lean toward replacing them. There’s no single right answer, but there are good questions. Here are seven to help you work through it:

1. Are you beginning to lose other people by keeping this person in the seat?
2. Do you have a values problem, a will problem, or a skills problem? (Skills can be trained. Values usually can’t.)
3. Does the person take credit for themselves or give credit to others?
4. Does the person see the work as a job or a responsibility?
5. Has your confidence in the person gone up or down in the past year?
6. Is it the right person in the wrong seat, or have the job requirements outpaced their ability?
7. How would you feel if that person came and quit on you?

The last one is the gut check. If your honest first reaction is relief, you probably have your answer.

What can the church learn from this?

Most churches don’t have the luxury of paying the highest salary to attract the best talent. So often we hire people who are new to ministry or starting out for the first time. They may not have much experience.

I’ve made those hires, and it took time to develop them. We met weekly to go over their goals and help them understand their role. We talked about time management, leadership, delegation, and communication, and kept meeting until I felt they knew what to focus on and how to spend their time. You couldn’t see the results in weeks. But after a few months, you could see the progress. They started delegating instead of doing all the work themselves. They learned to adjust how they communicate for each setting: one-on-one, small groups, and large gatherings.

That’s what development costs: time, consistency, and patience. It’s worth it when you have the right person, and question five is how you know. If your confidence in them is going up month over month, keep investing.

Churches usually lean toward development. We emphasize grace and second chances, so we want to give people more chances to prove themselves. That’s not a bad thing. But keeping the wrong person in a key seat isn’t grace for the rest of your team. Collins points out that the right people end up making up for the wrong ones, and eventually your best people leave. (That’s why question one comes first.)

The New Testament has a replace-or-develop story. John Mark left Paul and Barnabas partway through their first missionary journey. When it was time for the next trip, Paul didn’t want to take him, and Barnabas did. They disagreed so sharply that they went separate ways (Acts 15:36-40). Paul chose to replace John Mark. Barnabas chose to develop him.

Years later, Paul wrote from prison: “Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is helpful to me in my ministry” (2 Timothy 4:11).

Both paths moved the mission forward.

Leadership is an art, not a science. These questions won’t make the decision for you. They help you frame it honestly, so you can tell whether a person needs development or whether it’s time to replace them.

Be honest about whether you’re the right person to develop them, too. If you’re not, it doesn’t mean you failed them or that they’re a failure. It may just mean they need a different context or environment. Sometimes the most loving thing to do is to acknowledge that it’s time to move on and help that person find the right seat somewhere else.

This week, list your key seats. Next to each name, write one word: right, develop, or unsure. Then run each “unsure” name through these seven questions.