PODCAST | How To Lead Well From The Middle (feat. Jenni Catron)

Resources:

For more resources, visit:
https://4sight-group.teachable.com/p/leadership-institute
https://jennicatron.com/

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Transcript:

William:
Well, hey, everybody. You're going to have a fun time today on the podcast. I've got my good friend Jenni Catron on. And Jenni has been traveling all around, seeing what's going on out in the church since the pandemic.

One of the things that we're going to talk about today, which I think will make you a winning workplace, is how you can retain good people. How do you convince good people to stay just a little longer than they would otherwise?

With the great resignation happening over the last couple years, with the trend of people staying in jobs and careers shorter amounts of time, with all of that in your clear field of vision, I think it's time to start focusing on retention. And Jenni's got some great insights for us today. So look forward to the show, and hope you'll get the show notes afterward.

Well, hey, everybody. Thanks for joining us today. My good friend Jenni Catron is on. It's Catron, not Catrone. Things you learn. It's Lucado, not Lucado. It's Catron, not Catrone.
So Jenni, thanks for joining us today. It's always good to see you.

Jenni Catron:
Thanks, William. Excited to connect, and always great to talk as well.

William:
Yeah, I'm sorry. I can see in you're in your home office there in Appleton, and it's still cold and nasty there.

Jenni Catron:
It's a little chilly still, yeah.
I was telling you, we had spent some time in Florida this winter, and it was the right decision. But we came back and there was still snow on the ground. And now, I told my husband, I went out for a run the next day after we got back from Florida. And I said, "It wasn't too bad." I had to put a coat on. I had to have my ear thing on, and my gloves on. But it was all right. And so he's like, "You're crazy. You're crazy."

William:
When I moved here to Houston 20, almost 22 years ago now, my neighbors said to me, "Oh yeah, we have two seasons." I said, "Ha ha, what do you mean?" "Oh, we have summer and we have August."

Jenni Catron:
Yes, yes.

William:
People don't realize we're the same parallel as Orlando, so it looks gray and nasty out there, but it's actually quite warm.

Jenni Catron:
Yeah. Houston, I don't know if I could do Houston weather. My impression is it's just always hot.

William:
You know what? It's always humid, so we have better skin than we would if we lived other places.

Jenni Catron:
This is true. This is true. Okay, that's fair. I love it.

William:
Anyway.
It's interesting to talk Florida, Appleton, Wisconsin, Houston, all these places. The number one question I get when I'm out on the road or in the air from other pastors is so what's going on out there? Because everybody gets so burrowed down in what they're doing. We're recording this the Thursday before Easter, which is probably, if I'm guessing a quiet time for you. It's a quiet time for us.

Jenni Catron:
Yes.

William:
Nobody wants to talk to consultants this week, but it's interesting to have both of us on this call at the same time. Might be really fun to talk. All right, it was three years ago this week when people were actually calling off Easter services for the first time probably in Christendom that there were no live services.

Jenni Catron:
Yeah, for sure. We never experienced that.

William:
And I mean people, well-known pastors who told me, "I don't care what happens, we're not cut." And then they called it off.
So fast-forward through three years, which probably feels like 20 to many of you listening today. How are things? You're out on the road, you're traveling, you're speaking. What are you sensing about where the church is right now in terms of are we around the corner from the pandemic? And if so, what are the differences you're seeing now versus four years ago?

Jenni Catron:
Yeah, great questions. I do think we're beyond the pandemic in most cases, in that it's, oh yeah, remember that thing that was such a disruption?
A lot of the churches that I'm talking to are really seeing rebounding momentum as far as connecting with their community, seeing their attendance bounce back.

There's some exceptions to that, but most of the churches that I'm talking to and working with, they are really seeing a rebound.
Now, it may be, there's still a little bit of comparison of pre-COVID numbers and current numbers, but the momentum's going in the right direction as far as seeing growth and feeling like they're achieving mission again.

So I'm seeing a lot of hopefulness from that standpoint. I think that now the reality is what's the longevity of our team at this point? Because we all rallied together, weathered these last couple of years that were crazy. We had some team members depart. Maybe they relocated to be near family or we downsized a little bit, or whatever the situation might be.

And I think there's now a lot of people pulling their head up and going, okay, wait, how are we? How's our team? How are we doing? What's good? What's not so good?

So I feel like the fatigue of some teams I think is showing. It's not sure true across the board. I'd be interested to hear what you're seeing too, William, but I'm hearing a little bit more of that.

William:
One of the articles I've written for Forbes that's gotten more traction than anything else was, there is no work-life balance.

Jenni Catron:
Right. Yes, yes.

William:
So if you've worked in a church, frankly, you're experiencing it right now if you're real-time in a church. Because it's that week before Easter, and it's a four letter word that starts with H. Holy week. Although it feels like a different H and three letters sometimes having done this many times.

And in that week before Easter, you don't have a life. You just don't. And don't come to me if you're on church staff and say that I got to get to the soccer game or the... Not this week. No.
So I think in a macro sense, so then the week after Easter, when I was fresh out of seminary, I preach on what was then known as Worldwide Associate Pastor Sunday.

Jenni Catron:
Yes, that's right.

William:
Strategy's changed now, smart pastors actually do preach the week after because they want to bring people back.

It's like after Easter, everybody went to the beach and just got out of town. So it wasn't a predictable work-life balance, but there's this surge in activity. And then you got to have a release or everybody loses their mind. I think 2020 saw an enormous surge in activity for a sustained period of time.

Jenni Catron:
Yeah, that's it. True.

William:
And everybody took on other duties as necessary. Well, we don't have an online campus pastor. Now we do. You're it.

We don't have somebody managing digital giving. Well, now we do. You're it. And you're running camera. And everybody took on extra stuff, which was frankly therapeutic for many pastors I talked to. Because they couldn't get out of the house and they couldn't go see people in the hospital.

But the compound interest of that surge of activity, I think really caught up to us I think in '22.

Jenni Catron:
Yes.

William:
'21, we were still dealing with megatron or whichever variant we were on, all that.

Jenni Catron:
Still very reactionary, yeah.

William:
Yeah. '22, it started to feel like, okay, but then you got all this resignation and churn. '23 is beginning to feel like some sense of normal again, but with a heavy, heavy cost on the mental health of pastors.

Jenni Catron:
Yeah, I think that's true. I think what I'm also hearing is the lack of clarity now or the need for clarity that teams are describing of, Oh yes, everybody's job responsibilities were shifted. Okay, now like you were saying, now you're taking on this role, now you're taking on this. Well, you covered this. Well, you do this.

And everybody leaned in and did that for a couple of years, because we care about the mission and we just want to figure it out.
We leaned in and rallied together around that. But now what I'm hearing from a lot of staff members is like, okay, is this now my forever? Who's doing what? And one of the things we talk about a lot with the organizations we serve is just how clarity is a chief indicator of the health of a culture.

If there's a lack of clarity around simple things like how we're structured? What our roles are? How we meet together? Do we have a flexible work schedule? All of these things that were up in the air. And we lived with the ambiguity of it for a couple of years, because again, we knew we were all just figuring it out.

Now team members are saying, Hey, I got to know, is this my new reality? What's my role or my place on the team now?
And the leaders that are being proactive to bring more clarity, I think are finding stronger teams and healthier cultures. Where there's still that ambiguity, that just wears people down. There's just an emotional toll to not being clear about what I'm responsible for, and I'm seeing that show up a lot.

William:
That's good. That's good.
So when you see people just saying, they're like, yeah, I've got all these other duties as necessary. What are some clear, actionable steps that people listening today might say, okay, today I learned three things I can do to clear the muddy water in our organization?

Jenni Catron:
Yeah. I think sometimes we, especially if you're in a more senior leadership seat, you think it's clearer to you than it often is for the team. So even going back to saying, okay, do we just need to provide a little clarification in job profiles for our staff?

If we have actually shifted some responsibilities, I just need to actually declare that by doing a little bit of a rewrite on their job profile, actually making adjustments on an org structure, assuming you have one. I'm a big advocate of making sure you have one. Because again, everybody sees their place in how they help achieve mission. That's the essence of an org structure.

So I think just going back and saying... Oh, and an actionable step would be to ask your team, Hey, what feels ambiguous here? Where are you lacking some clarity?

And just inviting some conversation with your team to get a sense for where is there just some uncertainty? Because when team members are uncertain, they hold back. Or your really ambitious ones will plow forward, and then you're wrangling that. But most of your team will be a bit passive if they're uncertain of what's required of them.

And so the greater clarity you can provide, the more confidence they have in showing up and contributing in the way you probably expect them to.

But they're like, is that my job now still? The more uncertain they are, the more tentative they are.

Christa Neidig:
When your team isn't whole, it disrupts your mission. We have staffed over 2,500 missions of faith. Build your best team through our customized executive search. Go to vanderbloemen.com/get/started to talk with our team today.

William:
I feel like one of the things we're seeing now that folks have fallen somewhat into a pattern of, are we at the office? Are we not? How often are we there, that sort of thing. Whatever the new normal is for however long that lasts.

We are seeing people say one clear actionable step is to find out if people are happy working where they're working.

And you and I both have very different assessments that help organizations know that. And they're very different things. They might even be named to the same thing, but it might be helpful to tell people. People know them for a long time. If you go to theculturetool.com, you'll get our... So we have nine key areas of cultural health or toxicity. How do you measure up against, I guess we're about 4,000 organizations have gone through this, all Christian.

And it gives you a score on how are you in these core areas? You just unveiled a similar name, but a very different tool. Tell us about that, that might be an actionable step for folks today.

Jenni Catron:
Yeah. We built a tool, again, much similar to what you've done, but we built it around, we call it the culture hierarchy of needs. And this recognition that for employees to be really engaged, they have some basic needs that we need to provide as organizations in order for them to fully contribute.

So our assessment is based on those five levels of the hierarchy, which the first one is just basic tools. Do they have compensation? Do they have the resources they need to do their work? Do they understand what's required of them, et cetera?

The second is more of the organizational clarity, the how we work. So again, do we have a clear org structure? Are our mission, vision, and values clear? Do people know their role and their responsibilities? So that's more that organizational clarity. And then the next level is connection. Are we creating an environment for team members to be connected?

Do they have a friend at work? Do we provide opportunities for feedback, both being given and received? So what are our mechanisms for that?

And then you move up the hierarchy into levels of fulfillment and engagement. And so our assessment gauges each of those levels for you to figure out where's the gap in our culture? Because if we are missing some of the more baseline things in the hierarchy, it's really hard for employees to fully engage and contribute in a meaningful way.

And so it just helps organizations assess where's the gap in that hierarchy of needs, and then equips them to better know how to address it. And then coupled with that, part two of the assessment for us is that taking the specific values of your organization and your team, and testing for how well is our staff living into and aligning with those values?

So we have part two of our assessment is very specific to the organization to say, Hey, what have you defined as the values that guide behavior in your organization? And how are we doing with that?

So what I love about the one you guys do is you do that comparison, that benchmarking against other organizations so you can see how just how you're doing against the broader culture. We are saying, assess yourself against what you've defined as what's core to your culture. So two important tools, just different lenses and ways to look at it. But I think both are really helpful.

William:
I tell people all the time, when we wrote the book culture wins, we studied winning cultures, 150 different organizations. We also studied some other organizations. And there was a giant company, top seven or eight company in the world in terms of size and revenue. And in the elevator lobby for their main office, building headquarters, they had four walls and they put their four cultural values up. And it was honesty, integrity, trust, and then something else that was similar.

So that was Enron. And if you're old enough to remember Enron, you're like, no, they weren't any of those things. So what I love about what your tool does is it says, okay, we say we're doing this, are we the same?

Or as I say, when we do searches, I tell our team, our job is to make sure that nobody, whether it's a church or a candidate, nobody goes down the aisle with Rachel and wakes up next to Leah. So it's similar.

Jenni Catron:
Exactly, exactly. Yes, I love that though. It's so good.
But yeah, that's the thing is that, and I think my encouragement always to leaders, especially more senior leaders, is we will define some of these things and then we move on. And we've got plenty of issues and challenges and decisions we're navigating. And so we say, okay, here's our values. I'm sure Enron, with great intention, set those four values at some point in their organizational life.

And so we have to be conscious of that as leaders, that sometimes we can set these things, but if we haven't built a rhythm to make them truly part of the culture, truly in the water, they stand the chance to be more of a negative than a positive. Because your employees are walking by those things on the wall and snickering, because they're like, that is not true. That is not who we are.
So we're always trying to go, we know what you aspire to. We know what you've projected and say you want to be, but what's actually true?

Because until we get honest about that, of what's the truth of our culture, good and bad, there's some wonderful things that are actually true about your culture. And then there are some things that are not in alignment with what you've said you want to be true. And getting honest about that is really important for just building the healthy culture that you truly want.

William:
Well, and let me just encourage, whether you're using the hierarchy tool or ours, convincing someone that we need to do a cultural assessment or whether it's a good place to work or not, is like convincing men over 50 to go get their annual physical. They just don't want that [inaudible 00:17:58]

Jenni Catron:
They just don't want to know.

William:
A situation.
But the pandemic is your golden ticket to say, well, with the pandemic, can you actually use that for just about anything? When you re-do your budget, the pandemic. But honestly, nothing has shaken the fabric and the rhythm of culture in the workplace more arguably ever than the last three years. So it is the perfect time to say, why don't we just see how we're doing?

Jenni Catron:
Exactly.

William:
And then, worst case, we come out really bad, and a year from now, we're going to be a lot better. That was true for us. We made the mistake of doing our own cultural assessment the week after I told everybody they had to be back in the office. Don't do that. That was not good.
I think there were voodoo dolls.

Jenni Catron:
I love it.

William:
But we've measured again since then, and it's like, oh, it's gotten better. So it's one of those things you're like, why do I want to study that? Why do I want to work on that? You know why? So you don't have to hire me to do searches.

Jenni Catron:
This is the truth.

William:
It's about retention, which is the ballgame for the future. And after the great resignation, I can't think of anything more tangible for smart leaders and employers to work on. Is how do I keep people, even if it's just one more year than they were planning on being here?

Jenni Catron:
Absolutely, absolutely.
William, I've been doing a keynote this year so far on six trends that we're seeing impact culture in organizations, and there's some usual suspects there. But the retention piece, that's the superpower right now.

And I think like we talked about earlier, those first couple of years after the pandemic, everybody just rallied. We did lose some people if they made choices to go, they participated in the great resignation. But if we're not consciously trying to retain some of our best team members, and you can speak to this better than anybody of just how challenging recruitment is right now.
It is attracting great people. People are more, in my opinion, I'd love to hear your expertise on this, but what I'm seeing is they're a little slower and reluctant to make massive moves or shifts. I think there's that headline out there about the great remorse.
All the people who did the great resignation now are a little remorseful of maybe moving too quickly. And so I feel a hesitation from some people of not wanting to make a move too quickly, or they recognize, maybe the grass isn't greener over there.
And so I think the recruiting is more challenging. The workforce, the talent pool is just more competitive. And so retaining great staff, they have institutional knowledge. They know your culture. And the longer you can retain them, the healthier your overall culture. And so just the attention to that is such a big deal right now.

William:
And it's not a pandemic thing. You asked me what I'm seeing out there when I'm on the road. I'm just seeing acceleration of preexisting trends. I think COVID will end up being remembered in part as the great accelerator.

Jenni Catron:
Yeah, I agree.

William:
You had churches that were doing digital giving. Now nearly everybody is nearly all digital. The offering plate is no longer a thing. That would've happened.

Jenni Catron:
It would've been a slower train to that.

William:
Online worship. Yeah, okay. A lot of people were doing it. The churches you've served all have online campuses. My mother's little church, first Presbyterian in Morganton, great church. It's like 300 years old or something. It's crazy. And red carpet and white columns and the whole thing. When were they going to start it? Well, they have it now.

Jenni Catron:
Totally.

William:
There's an acceleration of a preexisting trend. What does this have to do with retention? Before the pandemic, we were seeing millennials as the new gorilla in the workforce, the biggest chunk of the workforce. They don't just change jobs, they change careers.
So before the pandemic, I was beating this drum of, look, if you want to win, no matter what kind of business you're running or what kind of church you're leading, if you want to win, just keep your people one year longer than everybody else.
Because hiring me is expensive. Doing it alone is worse. And adding someone new changes the culture. So whatever you can do to retain, and I think that trend has just accelerated.

Jenni Catron:
Yeah, I agree.

William:
I think watching Gen Z now, I think it's going to be even more pronounced. So people used to get mad if a youth pastor only stayed four years. Welcome to two years.

Jenni Catron:
I was going to say four years would be glorious now. Because I think, you probably know this stat better than I do, William, but the last that I saw, it's like roughly three years was the average. And I think that might have been even a pre-pandemic number.

William:
Yeah.
Well, our goal, what we read for youth pastors particularly, which is now the newest hard search.

Jenni Catron:
Hardest one, yeah.

William:
It's just ridiculous how difficult that one particular search is, which is a whole different podcast. But before the pandemic, I would've told you two to two and a half years was industry standard. And our goal was say, if you bring us in, we're going to try and get somebody who'll stay five. And that would be a huge win.
And we've done that, so that's good. But those numbers are shifting even more quickly now. And when you think about what can I do to get people to stay a little longer, one thing you can do is work on your culture. Another is probably the number one people, I've had so many people call me when they're leaving a job. People join a cause, they leave a manager.

Jenni Catron:
Yes.

William:
And the number one reason people leave the manager is not, oh, he's so mean and awful. It's, I can't get him to tell me what my path is. I can't get him to tell me what my career development looks like. Why should I stay? So one thing I wanted to share with our listeners today that I'm excited about is you're offering some leadership development training now. It's your newest offering as a company.

Jenni Catron:
Yeah, that's right. We saw the same thing, William, in that every time we would go into a team to work on organizational culture and help them with team dynamics, we would continuously see this pressure on what I would say are mid-level leaders. They're not in the executive team, but they have responsibility for other staff or volunteers that they are responsible for leading.
And what we would see time and time again is it was the biggest contributor, poor management at that level was often the biggest contributor to employee dissatisfaction. And so we just kept looking at this and going, what's going on there? And so there's a bunch of new research coming out about all the pressure that's on that leader at that level. Most of them have taken on new responsibility in the past couple of years. So somebody left and we said, Hey, Sally, would you also take this on?
You're awesome. You do great work. Let's give you more. Or Joe, let's promote you to now being over all of first impressions. And congratulations. But we don't really do anything to equip them. And so then to your point, this data has played out for decades, of people don't leave jobs, they leave managers.
And so just recognizing what's happening is those managers, those leaders at that level are just not being equipped with some of the practical tools. Things like, I'm talking to one leader right now, and she was like, "Jenni, I don't know how to do a performance review. I've never done one. My manager previously never did one. And I'm terrified, and I have this staff team that I'm responsible for. And I know I need to do performance reviews, but I don't have a clue how to do it. Will you help me?"
And it's stuff like that, that I think those of us that maybe have been in leadership for a few years, we've figured it out or we've gotten the training. But there's this wave of leaders that are stepping into these responsibilities with no training whatsoever. And as a result, their staff are getting frustrated.
And like you said, they're getting no coaching on a development pathway or how they can grow. And it's tricky in ministry, because it's not like we can have 10 student pastors or five small group leaders. There's typically one role.
So what happens is we just avoid the conversations because we don't know how to answer the question. Because in the corporate world, it's like you go from assistant to coordinator to manager. And you can see those growth and development pathways. And in the ministry space, there's not always that many opportunities or titles to be distributed, but we can be developing people and investing in their growth. So they're growing as leaders, they're growing as people, and we can be providing resources that do that.
So we launched the Foresight Leadership Institute with that in mind, of saying, Hey, most churches especially, you don't have the luxury of having a leadership development department that's building out your leadership development curriculum.
And I led staff teams of 75 to 125, and we didn't have a dedicated leadership person. So I know that that's not our reality. So we said, what can we create that basically becomes that four year team?
And so that's what we've done. It's just a monthly leadership training program that we focus on one topic, it's one eight to 12 minute video. It's one group coaching call. And then the magic to me in this is then our team is checking in with you weekly to encourage you to implement what you're learning.
Because again, we've got content for days, you can YouTube anything and get training, but we're not doing it. Because we need that coaching for accountability. And so that's what we're trying to do with the Leadership Institute, is just really equip that leader who's feeling the pressure of additional responsibility, but is lacking the training on some just critical skills. And be that coach and accountability partner in that. So we're super excited.

William:
Yeah, the human accountability factor's huge. I know there's space for online and just content, that works. But at the end of the day, people who buy a treadmill rarely get in shape. People who hire a trainer do.

Jenni Catron:
That's right. Yeah, that's the difference. And we've said that always with all of our coaching and consulting work, is that the accountability piece, that's the it factor for us. And so we're hoping that that's how this resource really supports the leadership 

William:
Oh, that's great. And it's not a sexy, fun subject to talk about. Retention, didn't even sound good. It's an odd word.
But I'm telling you, I think it's the ballgame. And I think it was the ballgame before the pandemic, and the pandemic has accelerated a preexisting trend. And I think working on your culture, getting some coaching about how to let people see a path for leadership development. And you can just say, "Why are we doing all this?"
And you just say, "The pandemic." That's all you have to say.

Jenni Catron:
That's all you have to say. You just use that as your excuse of like, hey, well, the pandemic, we got to respond to this.

William:
And if you're listening right now and you're thinking of leaving where you are, I would encourage you to maybe hang in there a little bit.

Jenni Catron:
I agree.

William:
The number of people, pastors, who call us on Mondays to tell us they're thinking about quitting. It's actually more than all the other six days combined.

Jenni Catron:
That's amazing.

William:
Yeah, I used to have, when it was just me, when I started the company 15 years ago, I used to have an auto voicemail for Mondays that says, hang up, call me on Tuesday.

Jenni Catron:
That's brilliant.

William:
Don't do anything on Monday.
And if you're like, what do I do? I did mess up. There's lots of resources. I had a surprise article in Forbes recently that I just thought maybe a few people like it. And it's really taken off is, are you regretting your resignation? Here's some concrete steps for what you need to do now.

Jenni Catron:
Love it.

William:
And so get a coach with Jenni. Get a sense of how you're doing with any one of the great tools that are out there for measuring how your workplace is. And hopefully, you can keep your people a little bit longer. I promise you, it will pay high dividends. So Jenni, thanks for joining us today. Really appreciate you. We're going to put foresight.com, we're going to put all that in the show notes to everybody who wants to get the show notes. Go to vandercast.com. We won't beat you up with offers for Ginsu knives and things. It'll just be the show notes. And thanks for joining us this week. We'll look forward to seeing you again, and getting to introduce you to another one of my friends that is seeing what's going on as we're all trying to help team Jesus go farther and faster.
Thanks.

Christa Neidig:
Thanks for listening to the Vanderbloemen in Leadership Podcast. At Vanderbloemen, we help Christian organizations build their best teams through hiring, succession, compensation, and diversity consulting services.

Visit our website, vanderbloem.com to learn more and subscribe to our Vanderbloemen leadership podcast wherever you listen to podcasts to keep up with our newest episodes.
Thanks for listening.