PODCAST | Transitioning Jobs Well (feat. Ben Stapley)

Resources:

https://www.benstapley.com/blog

Christa Neidig:
Welcome to the Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Christa Neidig, Manager of Marketing and Business Development here at Vanderbloemen. Today I get to talk with Ben Stapley, Executive Pastor at the Life Christian Church. This is part one of our two-week series with Ben, so make sure to tune back next week for the second part of this conversation. Today, Ben shares the importance of staff retention through his experiences of transition and some fundamental principles that he has learned throughout the process. We hope you enjoy this conversation. Well, hey everyone, welcome to the podcast. We're so glad you're here. I get to sit down or Zoom with Ben Stapley today. This is actually week one of our two-part series. Today we get to talk specifically to candidates, we're going to talk about transitioning jobs well. Next week all of our churches, non-profits, education staff, we're going to talk to you about transitioning staff well, how to transition staff well. So make sure to tune in next week for that. But this week we're going to talk about all the transitions. Ben, how are you today?

Ben Stapley:
I am doing great. Thank you for having me. Big fan of Vanderbloemen. Can't wait to share with your audience today.

Christa Neidig:
Oh, well we're big fans of you and we're glad to have you back. I know we've done conversations with you in the past and I think these just hit really close to home with a lot of our audience, so we're glad to have you on.

Ben Stapley:
Thank you so much.

Christa Neidig:
Let's go ahead. So you wrote a couple of articles, which is where the conversation started between you and I about this with transitioning staff. I think we exchanged a few emails and you sent over this one that I just think is fascinating, based on some of the trends you've seen in staff retention being really hard over the last couple of years. I think it's no secret to anyone. So why don't you just tell me a little bit about the background of what led you to write this?

Ben Stapley:
Yeah, I'll start for myself from a personal standpoint, I've transitioned churches jobs about a year ago, so this was a lot of stuff was on my mind. And at the same time, I had a lot of friends in ministry who were doing a lot of transitions as well. Transitioning from one church to another, transitioning from a church out of a church. And we were all learning a lot of stuff on the fly. And there were repeat conversations I was having or repeat hurdles I saw friends trying to make and I was like, you know what? I think I want to share some of this because I've learned a little bit during the season.
And if I had to pay the dumb tax because I made a mistake in this process, which we all do, I wanted to share it with other people so they minimize their mistakes by learning from mine. So ultimately, that was my heart to help other people because I don't think this high season of transition is completely done yet. And for those people still in it or it's ahead of them or even ahead of them down the road because you probably won't be with the same organization in your whole life, how can they learn these principles and, ultimately, transition well for their selves and for the sake of the organization as well.

Christa Neidig:
I think that's great. Go ahead and tell just our listeners a little bit of your overview of the article and then we can dive into some of the points that I thought are really useful.

Ben Stapley:
So just for my background, I was in television production before I jumped into ministry and so I have a little bit of a secular and sacred background and then I have some friends jumping from sacred into secular professions, real estate, personal coaching, you name it. And I thought there were a number of principles that I found were universal. It doesn't matter what job you're jumping into or from, these are just some good principles to help anyone transition. And then there were some unique ones that I saw from ministry that I've learned. I've been in four different churches now over 17 years and I've learned a bunch of these that I don't think most people, they didn't teach me this in seminary, I got my MDiv but I wasn't taught this, and my mentors didn't teach me this. I had to learn through experience. And I think some of the principles that apply uniquely to ministry are super helpful, but if not, you get blindsided and you can inadvertently get hurt and I don't want that to be on anyone. So I think those, that's the way I approached it, what applies to both settings.

Christa Neidig:
Yeah, no, that's really great. Speaking of blindsided, you talked about one of your first points in the general guidelines section is that there should be no surprises and I think communication, not surprising either end of the parties, let's talk about that a lot 'cause I think that's a really great point.

Ben Stapley:
Yeah, and it's interesting, I actually say it both ways. I say that if you're transitioning, your supervisor shouldn't be surprised, but then I also say in a sense they should be surprised. I'm arguing from both sides here, so stay with me. But they shouldn't be surprised in the fact that if you are experiencing attention or frustration instead of just packing up your bags and leaving, taking your ball and going home, you need to voice them to your supervisor because they will probably want to help you solve them. They probably can.
And so whatever those tensions are in the workplace, there's always pull and push factors, whatever those push factors are pushing you out of the organization, have you talked to them about your supervisor? You need to, to give them the opportunity to solve it. So in a sense, if you kept on coming to your supervisor just saying, I feel I've hit my lid here in the organization, or I want a new challenge to satisfy my desire of growth and you've said that year after year in your annual reviews and you're still stuck with the same responsibilities and no additional oversight, then when you do leave the supervisor wouldn't be surprised because you've been discussing this for a while.
So that's the one way in which they shouldn't be surprised, now they should be surprised in the fact that your level of effort and your impact in the organization don't diminish before you give them your letter of resignation. So sometimes, I can see you smiling, nodding, sometimes it's really clear when someone's going to leave an organization because you just see their effort plummet and I haven't been given the two weeks notice, but it's going to come in about a month from now, I can tell. And from that degree your supervisor should be surprised because your level of commitment to the job, the organization is on par to the very end.

Christa Neidig:
I think that's such a good point. No one wants to be the person, I mean, we've all seen it where there's that person that starts disconnecting from everyone, starts walking away. You know it's coming, but it's not there yet and everybody's kind of bracing for impact for when it does. And that's just a tension that you don't want to be the person creating in a workplace and especially in a ministry workplace. I think that just has even further detrimental effects. Something you talked about in, I think, it was point number three of the general part, you talked about when you start to know when it's time to leave. What are some of the signs of when you kind of have these negative thoughts and these are, you mentioned when it's generally negative when you think of your workplace is when it's time to leave.

Ben Stapley:
Yeah. So somebody told me years ago, I've picked up this principle to someone else, but they told me, they said, "If a percentage, zero to a hundred, a hundred being the most favorable and zero being terrible, where are you in relationship to the organization?" "I'm still 60% favorable." And they said, "Okay." They said, "Tell me when you get close to 51." And I was like, "Why?" They said, "Because there's a world of difference when you go from 51 to 49, once your overall perspective of the organization turns to negative, your pace to departure speeds up exponentially." So he said, "You could live in the 60, the 55, even the 51% for a while, but once you turn to 49," he's like, "You got weeks left."
Because at that point when you see things overall from a negative vantage point, I don't like the work I'm doing here, I don't like my manager, I don't like the direction where things are going, then everything gets tainted with that negative perspective, and at that point you're just counting down your days. So I think that's really helpful for people who are sliding down that negative ramp. Just realize once you turn that corner it's really hard to turn back. And so I always tell people, counseling them, that bring up those conversations with your manager beforehand before things get negative because once it is, you might as well pack up your bags. It transitions pretty quickly after that.

Christa Neidig:
Yeah, you hit on a topic, I know we're kind of talking about the general guidelines that you have and in a little bit we'll get into more of the church ones, but I kind of want to swing that direction for a second and let's talk about something that I think is no secret to a lot of people in ministry and it's church hurt. It's people that work for a church and they leave the church, things go bad and they get really hurt and it's really sad. It really is. And I feel like you kind of hit on a way to start avoiding that early on before you get to that hurt. Do you have anything to talk about in regards to that?

Ben Stapley:
Yeah, I would, if you don't have a mentor, someone who's mentoring you personally and professionally, I would definitely encourage people in ministry to do that. I also, I've sought out counseling, actually people who are gifted to give counseling to people in ministry because there's some unique challenges that we face. Every job has its unique challenges. Ministry has its own, and if you're not talking that to somebody who understands those challenges or is empathetic to those challenges, can help you overcome those challenges, you're really going at it alone. And so my encouragement is get personal mentoring, professional mentoring, get professional counseling as well to help you process that.
Either process it to a degree that you can stay or process it and help you leave in a healthy way. I like to use... I don't want people leaving the organization bringing emotional baggage with them in to the next place, oh, my last place, you can't believe what happened there. So unpack as much of that emotional baggage as you can before you transition somewhere else with people who know what the game is, know what the ins and outs are. So do that beforehand instead of bringing that emotional baggage with you to the next organization. It's not fair to them, it's not fair to yourself, it's not fair to the place that you left as well.

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.
I think that's great and I think that kind of leads up to leaving, and leaving well, I think that's a really important point. You talk about how people, they remember how you leave long after they remember the work that you did while you were there. They remember if you went out and it was bad, they don't forget that. Let's talk about leaving well.

Ben Stapley:
Yeah, someone said once they said never light the match to the bridge because you may need to come across it. The longer, I've been in ministry for 17 years, for me that feels forever. I know some of our listeners here have doubled maybe triple that amount of time in ministry. But it's one of the things I've noticed during that duration is the ministry world is small. And even if it's just for self-preservation and nothing else, don't leave on a bad note because that's going to follow you wherever you go after this. Ministry world is pretty small and people hear about how you left, so do yourself a favor, leave well. And then the way I like to say it is, if you came back, and hopefully you do at some point, if you're in the area, you're near the church, you have a Sunday off, if you came back, how would you be received?
Would the staff say, hey, great to see you, or would you feel a sense of shame coming into the doors? And if it's a sense of shame, then you're probably not leaving on the right note. But if you say no, I would anticipate being warmly welcomed when I came back, you're probably doing things well and making sure that it's, again, it's a win for everybody in that season of transition. Don't foot it in, don't light a match and try to burn the place on the way out. Do all those emotionally healthy things that need to happen to preserve everyone in the situation.

Christa Neidig:
I think that's great. One of the biggest things we do at Vanderbloemen is succession planning. And so we see a lot of successions and some done amazingly and beautifully and they restore still those friendships, and then we see some that aren't done well or it's too late and they've already started that. And so I think one thing we always say is leaving a legacy when you do succeed. If you're a founding pastor that has been at a church for 40 years and then you go to leave, that's a legacy you have there and that's something important to protect and for people to honor that.
And so we always talk to churches about how they can honor that and how we can celebrate that on the way out. Someone mentioned this, and I don't remember where I heard it, and it was a joke about succession planning. I don't know if you've ever seen the play Hamilton. Well, there's this part in it where George Washington's leaving and Hamilton's freaking out that he's leaving. He's like, "No, I'm going to teach them how to say goodbye." And I just think that's such a good example of let's leave well and let's show this example well. And I just think it has a lot of long-term effects for the person going out and the congregation that has to say goodbye.

Ben Stapley:
Especially in terms of talking about some of the lead pastors who may be, maybe some of their children may be picking up the mantle and running with it. Man, if you leave in a bad note, you're really undercutting them and their ability to, regardless of who it is, but sometimes there's even family ties that you cast a rock into the pond and the ripples go beyond that. And so just realizing that for those legacy pastors to do that, to leave a legacy, you've been here, you've invested so much, make sure you end off on a high note.

Christa Neidig:
Yeah. So let's transition a little bit. We already kind of have, but into more of those church specific guidelines you talk about a lot in this blog you wrote. I think one of the second ones you talk about the scope of the transition and treating it accordingly. I think this is something we see. We talk to tons of candidates and we hear people that are transitioning all the time. We ask why they're leaving. So we hear day in, day out, why people are leaving, how people are leaving, if they've already left and they're looking for something, there's just a bunch of ways to do it. Let's talk about the importance of taking time to realize the transition. I think the process that you touched on earlier is so important.

Ben Stapley:
So in contrast to, again, I'm using a dichotomy here and painting with broad brush strokes, so I understand it's not as black and white as I set it up in terms of sacred and secular working for the church and not. But if we're going to use that dichotomy, what I encourage people in ministry is just realize it's completely different than transitioning a different job. When you transition a typical secular job, you're changing your employment and that's usually it. Your social circle is still the same. Your house of worship is still the same. When you leave a church job, all three of those things change at the same time, and it can be earth-shattering for people if they're not aware of what a big transition it is. You're not just transitioning a job when you leave churches, you're leaving your spiritual home and you're leaving also, oftentimes, a big part of your social network because there are a lot of friends that you'll probably identified and built up at that church.
Generally speaking, not everyone has friends at work, but if it's a church that you're working at, you probably do have a large degree of your friends. And when you leave, you don't take all of them with you. Oftentimes they're still invested in their church and you're going to become a memory over time to them. And that's news flash for some people. And for those who it is a news flash, is it can be heartache for them to go through it if they don't properly anticipate it and mourn it. So I've encouraged people, don't just end on Friday at one church and start at the other one on Monday. Take a week off in between and allow yourself to grieve what is ending before what is beginning. And if you don't do that, it's going to be really hard for you to emotionally invest in the new church because you're still going to be remembering the old one.

Christa Neidig:
No, that's really good. I think, my husband and I actually talked about this recently because we moved, or he moved to the Houston area only a few months ago and we were talking about switching churches when we went to one church for years, and we loved that church, we built relationships at that church, we had our community at the church. And then you move and you can't compare day one at this new church to years of relationships and friendship and teaching and discipleship at another church. And we've even found that hard, not even as ministry leaders at this church, just as members. So I can't even imagine even how much harder that would be. And so I think this is really important and I don't think I've ever heard someone say this so clearly, how important that is.

Ben Stapley:
Yeah, it took me, again, I pay the dumb tax on this. It probably took me transitioning into my third church where I finally realized, hey, this is a big deal, I need to spend a little bit more time on it. So I finally figured it out and hopefully helping, hoping to help others do as well.

Christa Neidig:
That's great. Another point you have, it's simply protect His bride, which I think is so beautiful. And just a great thing that I think we should talk about is how can church leaders protect His bride as they are as transitioning jobs?

Ben Stapley:
And I'll even, I'll combine two thoughts here at once where I would encourage people to protect their families and also protect the bride. When I say protect their families, in ministry sometimes compensation is a dirty word and we don't want to speak about it. And if you're asking for a raise that's somehow ungodly, but providing for your family, if you have a family, that's a biblical mandate, God wants you to do that well. It's an expectation on you. So having that compensation conversation upfront and being unashamed of it or trying to secure the highest potential you can in terms of earnings is not a bad thing. Now, it could be, but it's not inherently bad. I guess, I'll say that. It could be a godly thing if you're looking to provide for your family. If you're just looking to amass earthly possessions, then obviously your heart's out of line there.
But that's the first thing I would say is protect your family. And the reason why, is early in my career, I wouldn't do any negotiation. Whatever the paper was slid to me and whatever number was on there, I said yes, I guess that's it. And I didn't engage in any negotiation. And it took me a while to realize, hey, that's not really honoring my family as well as I can. So I'm going to write a number, I'm going to slide it back and we're going to play this little game, because that's a way for me to honor my family.

Christa Neidig:
Something-

Ben Stapley:
So that's a... Yeah?

Christa Neidig:
No, just on that part that we've seen is a lot of churches don't know how to do, this might be insider information, but a lot of churches don't know how to do compensation well because it does feel dirty. No one wants to talk about it. No one, how much do pastors make? How much should they make? We've started doing, a couple of years ago, gathering compensation reports for churches. And so the churches we have options for, if churches just want to do compensation reports with us to have an idea, we do that. We do them for our searches because it is, it's so important, especially when trying to find good candidates. I think right now in a time where there's a lot of candidates, it's really important and nobody knows, very few people know how to do it well.

Ben Stapley:
Yeah, I really appreciate you guys providing that resource. And there's always a pendulum swing in terms of who's more in the driver's seat? Is it the employer who has more of the power or leverage in that relationship, or is it the employee? And I think we've seen, and I think, I know we've seen that pendulum swing way over to the employee and there's a lot of, hey, you're hard-pressed to find employees, people have left the market, you have two candidates you're looking at and the other one I know is no good, and I'm the only... They have all the leverage, not all the leverage, they have more leverage or maybe a balanced leverage at this point. But it's helpful. So it's helpful for both sides. And I've appreciated those salary ranges to help us in terms of a hiring staff, what is an appropriate level.
And then if someone is asking for the moon, I can, hey, we just want to show you what is out there and so it may not be what you want, but what we're offering is actually higher than the competitive rate out there for this job in this field. And so I think that's really helpful to help both parties come to a position where they feel pleased with the relationship and they both feel, man, I'm really excited about this. Instead of, it becomes a win-win instead of a win-lose situation. But getting back to your original question about protecting His bride is something that is super helpful when you transition out of the church. Again, whatever emotional baggage that you have, any potential wounds that you may have endured at your previous church, just realize it's still Christ bride, it is still the church that He came to die for.
And that church, even though you may have hurt feelings by them, it's still beloved by Him. And so how do you protect His bride on the way out? Again, it's not gossip, it's not slander and it's not taking it out on them, for sure. And beyond that, it's helping you if you have hurt to forgive and to move on from that as well, so that you are empowered to do new ministry without this baggage along with you. So if there's anything in terms of people transitioning out of church jobs, I say remember to protect His bride, and that is a good, for me, that's a good guardrail where that'll keep you in the lane of doing things well, if you just remember that statement right there.

Christa Neidig:
That's great. As we wrap up, I want to talk on one more of your points that I think you made. I think we've talked a lot to people who are switching from one job to another within ministry, but let's talk about the idea of maybe you're switching out of ministry jobs, maybe you're no longer going to be in the church. Because I think your last point you talk about this is not everyone is called in ministry for their whole life and it looks different in different seasons, and the Lord uses different seasons in different ways. Let's touch on that.

Ben Stapley:
Yeah, this is helpful because I've... I'll say it from my vantage point, I haven't felt, I've never felt that call upon my life, that Ben, God's telling Ben, for the rest of your life, this is what you're going to do. It's always been seasonal. And so because of that I've been able to approach it, but I know some other people, some other people, gets clear God's calling on their life is this is what I want you to do for your whole life. I think the tension is, oftentimes we overplay that model and that template that if you're in ministry, you're a lifer. And if you leave, you've somehow been unfaithful to God, you've rejected His call on your life or you're a failure because you couldn't hack it or make it, or a host of other negative assumptions that may come with that.
And so my encouragement for people who are on the fence is to determine that, and if God's called you to ministry for your life, then figure out how you can stick in there and be faithful to that call on your life. But if He hasn't, then feel released from that and feel the freedom to explore other options or stay in it, but don't feel, don't put someone else's yoke on yourself, it doesn't fit. And so realize the yolk that God's given you and carry that well.

Christa Neidig:
That's great. Ben, thank you so much for joining us today. I think this is going to be such a helpful conversation for so many of our listeners. For anyone listening, where can they find more of your information at?

Ben Stapley:
Yeah, this article and others would be found at benstapley.com/blog. So if you wanted to go there and check it out, I'd love to share that content with you guys.

Christa Neidig:
Great. And for anyone that is looking to potentially switching a career, at least in ministry, feel free to talk to us at Vanderbloemen. We have a whole job board on our website of wonderful churches, schools, non-profits that we are just honored to work with and we would love to talk about that with you. And then don't forget to join us again next week as we talk about how to transition staff well. Thank you so much for joining us, Ben.

Ben Stapley:
Thank you.

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