Last time we looked at the leader, their role, and the importance of balancing authority and accountability. This week we discuss the other two groups within the leadership system: staff and governance.
Staff and Team: Clarity, Affirmation, and Security
Staff and volunteers carry out the work; they are the ones who “get things done.” There may be times, however, when those in leadership wish staff would “just do their job”—take responsibility, have no problems or extended sick leave, and just get on with it. As understandable as these frustrations may be, it is important to remember that staff are people, not machines.
Staff carry less formal power within the system and tend to experience more anxiety in relation to their working environment. Therefore, understanding what they need to function well is not a peripheral concern; it is about creating an environment in which they can flourish. This, in turn, helps determine whether the organisation can do what it exists to do.
I summarise the essential conditions staff need as CAS: Clarity, Affirmation, and Security. CAS is a practical framework that brings together three well-established areas of organisational research: role clarity, experiences of being valued and supported, and psychological safety. Each represents a significant area of need and is richer than the single word might suggest.
Clarity
Staff need to understand the organisation’s direction, their specific role within it, and what is required of them. Clarity is not only about information. It encompasses communication—the ongoing sense of being kept informed and connected to what is happening. It also involves understanding how their particular role fits within the larger purpose and knowing that their part genuinely matters. When any of these elements is absent, people can feel sidelined, and their engagement decreases accordingly.
Affirmation
People work for more than pay or task completion; they also need to know that they are valued. Being valued has two distinct dimensions, both of which answer the central question: “Do I matter?”
The first is significance—being seen. Does my contribution matter? Am I genuinely included? Does my presence count?
The second is agency—being heard. Does my voice matter? Can I raise ideas or concerns? Will my voice be taken seriously? Is there a way for me to communicate difficulties without this being used against me?
Organisations that attend to one dimension while neglecting the other will often find that frustration, resentment, or despondency increases, while commitment and productivity decrease.
Security
Staff need confidence that their environment is sufficiently stable, positive, and predictable to feel safe. This requires role clarity and consistent communication. It also requires a trustworthy process for raising concerns—not merely one that exists on paper, but one that people believe will enable them to be genuinely heard and appropriately responded to.
Security also means receiving appropriate correction when something needs to change, alongside encouragement and affirmation. People need to know where they stand, what is expected of them, and that feedback will be provided constructively and consistently.
When these conditions are present, staff can flourish and be supported to do their best work. When any of them are absent—whether in a growing church whose pace overwhelms people’s capacity to remain connected, or in a struggling church whose anxiety makes honest communication feel too risky—even highly committed people will eventually disengage.
Although there may be an organisational chart and a collective goal, people do not work as emotionless or need-less automatons. Every organisation is an emotional-relational system. Beneath the appearance of capable, well-adjusted adults are the same fundamental relational needs we have carried throughout life. This is why CAS is so important to understand, because by addressing Clarity, Affirmation, and Security helps meet some of those deeper needs. When those needs are met, people are freed to direct their energy and attention towards the work at hand. When those needs are not adequately met, an inordinate amount of energy can be consumed trying to respond to the resulting issues.
Governance has legal and compliance responsibilities that are real, important, and seemingly increasing. These responsibilities, however, are carried out within the relational system of the organisation. Two of governance’s most significant functions in this regard are, firstly, to monitor the health of the whole church and, secondly, to provide appropriate support and accountability for the leader. Effective governance therefore includes fiduciary oversight, attention to mission and culture, and active stewardship of the board’s own competence and independence.
Monitoring health involves asking substantive questions that go beyond operational performance and being attentive to the wellbeing of the people who make up the church. This includes asking: What is staff morale like? What are people actually experiencing? Is the culture consistent with our church’s stated values? Is the leader genuinely well—holistically well? Are the right people in the right roles, or have capable people been placed in positions simply because those positions need to be filled?
One of the most critical functions of governance is the encouragement and, where necessary, the correction of the leader. This involves the healthy use of governance’s authority to protect the health, safety, and effectiveness of the person who holds the positional power of leadership. Leaders need people who will invest in them, check in on them, support them, and attend to their overall care and wellbeing. Staff may be interested and caring, but they typically do not have the formal authority to manage the leader or direct them towards healthier practices. Nor should staff be expected to carry the primary responsibility for the leader’s wellbeing.
Equally, leaders need people who can hold up a mirror, enabling them to see more accurately their performance, conduct, and the culture they are creating. From this position of greater clarity, governance can, where necessary, direct or correct the leader’s behaviour, helping them to lead more effectively and in ways that contribute to the overall health of the organisation and its people. Staff and others may raise concerns—and they need to have safe and meaningful ways to do so—but the responsibility to respond appropriately and hold the leader accountable ultimately rests with those entrusted with governance authority.
These functions are pivotal to the church’s ultimate health, success, and longevity. Yet maintaining an appropriate level of both support and accountability is not always easy. It is here that many governance boards struggle, in different ways, for different reasons, and within different contexts.
Supporting the Leader
Governance may monitor the leader’s performance and fulfil its compliance responsibilities while failing to recognise that the leader’s wellbeing also falls within its organisational and pastoral responsibilities. There may be an expectation that leaders will look after themselves—and, for the most part, they will. However, when a leader shows signs of strain, distress, or an inability to cope, governance needs to ensure that appropriate support is provided. In these times of pressure, leaders also need pastoral care, access to counselling, work-based support, and encouragement to take leave when appropriate.
This failure can be a consequence of group governance, where the leader’s wellbeing is not the particular responsibility of any one governance member. When everyone is responsible, it can easily result in no one taking responsibility. Healthy governance therefore requires clear ownership: someone needs to be responsible for checking in with the leader, noticing emerging concerns, and ensuring that appropriate care and support are available.
If the leader is not healthy or well supported, the whole church or organisation will eventually suffer. When leaders are carrying too much, burning themselves out, or have become stuck, they need governance actively in their corner, helping them get to a healthier place. Metaphorically speaking, governance at times needs to act as Aaron and Hur did for Moses during Israel’s battle against the Amalekites at Rephidim, supporting him by holding him up when he became fatigued.
Correcting the Leader
Boards in growing churches may be reluctant to correct the behaviour or conduct of a leader who is seen to be the cause of that growth. Some may view the church’s growth as evidence of successful leadership or God’s favour and, consequently, minimise or dismiss concerns about the leader’s behaviour or leadership style. They may feel a strong need to honour the leader and remain loyal, while the thought of being dishonouring or disloyal may provoke a visceral reaction.
Others may simply believe that the church’s success is too important to risk by upsetting the leader. A seemingly successful church or organisation also reflects well on its governance board, and governing is certainly easier when there is apparent peace. Who wants to disrupt that? Yet this is not genuine peace; it is merely the absence of overt conflict.
In struggling churches, boards may be reluctant to challenge a leader who is already under significant strain, out of misplaced care. In both growing and struggling churches, a “don’t rock the boat” attitude can take hold, creating the same result: significant difficulties remain unaddressed, while the system continues to produce outcomes that no one intended.
Metaphorically speaking, when we do not face down the giants preventing us from entering the land God intends for us, those giants multiply, and we leave them for future generations to face. The willingness to bring honest, appropriately structured challenge to a leader when it is needed is not a failure of loyalty. It is the fulfilment of one of governance’s most important responsibilities. When we fail to speak the truth in love—especially to our leaders—we are not acting loyally and, in fact, are dishonouring them because we are failing to support them to lead well.
A further difficulty sits beneath both insufficient support and insufficient accountability: people do not always bring their full expertise into church governance. Over my thirty years of involvement in different forms of church ministry, I have repeatedly been amazed by how often highly competent and capable people appear to leave that competence at the door when they take up a role as a church elder or as a board or council member. The careful processes, quality of thinking, and level of scrutiny they would ordinarily apply in their workplaces are not always carried into their church governance responsibilities.
I am not entirely sure why this happens, but it is not as though people consciously decide to do this. Perhaps there is a sense that church governance operates according to different requirements. Professional judgement may be seen as not appropriately spiritual, challenge may be confused with dishonour, or robust questioning may be mistaken for negativity or a lack of faith. Whatever the cause, the result is that people who would readily recognise and address concerning patterns in another setting may overlook, excuse, or spiritualise them within the church.
Church governance needs its members to bring their full competence and expertise to the role. In other words, we need people to bring their best selves. The irony is that it is usually because of their professional experience and expertise that they were asked to serve in governance in the first place. Good intentions need structural support: clear induction, reliable information, role and conflict-of-interest clarity, regular board self-assessment, and an agreed process for evaluating both the leader and governance itself.
When the leadership system is working well, what holds governance, the leader, and staff together in healthy relationship are healthy feedback loops. It is through these loops that accurate information flows between each part of the system, expectations are clarified, concerns are raised and addressed, and the organisation can self-correct before small problems become large ones.
The purpose of these feedback loops is to help maintain the health and stability of the organisation. In systems thinking, the forces that preserve a system’s equilibrium are known as homeostatic forces. Homeostasis is an important and useful concept here. It refers to a stable, functioning equilibrium, and it is what I describe as the power of the status quo.
Depending on what is occurring within an organisation, that status quo may be healthy and productive, or it may be highly dysfunctional and even toxic. Homeostasis is neutral about whether something is healthy or suitable; it simply works to maintain what already exists. It is important for us to remember that stability does not necessarily mean health.
Healthy systems do more than preserve a workable equilibrium. At times, health requires the system to change its set point—to question the assumptions, policies, or relational rules that keep recreating the problem. This is the difference between correcting an error within existing rules and learning deeply enough to revise the rules themselves. In systems language, health requires both stability and the capacity for adaptive change.
There are two aspects of homeostasis that we need to consider carefully in a church context.
First, a system can achieve stability at an unhealthy set point. A church in which harmful leadership behaviour is consistently excused because the leader is otherwise effective may have achieved homeostasis, but not health. A church in which stagnation has become normalised and no one expects anything to change has also achieved homeostasis, but not health.
Second, the absence of visible disruption or conflict is not evidence of health. A church in which people have learned not to raise concerns or speak up about poor behaviour is not functioning well. Its healthy feedback mechanisms have stopped working. The church, organisation, or team may appear stable on the surface, but pressure is building beneath it. If that pressure is left unaddressed, it will continue to build until the system ruptures, resulting in a significant crisis. Conversely, visible disagreement can sometimes be evidence that people care enough and feel safe enough to engage. The issue is not whether conflict exists, but whether it can be handled honestly, fairly, and constructively.
When we hear heartbreaking stories of churches “exploding” or “imploding,” or of scandals emerging, we are often witnessing the visible consequences of a rupture caused by unhealthy feedback loops that were allowed to continue without being questioned. Success, growth, tradition, or familiarity may have been confused with health, favour, or faithfulness. The crisis may appear sudden, but the pressure that produced it has often been building for a long time.
When a church or its leadership is unhealthy, homeostatic forces are at work to maintain that unhealthy status quo. Feedback loops are operating, but they are unhealthy ones. If a staff member raises a concern and is met with disapproval, relational exclusion, questions about their commitment, or accusations of disloyalty, each of these responses communicates what the system expects. They exert pressure on the person to stop challenging the established order. The status quo may then be restored by the staff member withdrawing the concern, apologising for raising it, becoming convinced that they themselves are the problem, or leaving the church. The immediate disruption disappears, but the underlying problem remains.
An organisation that has a feedback process on paper but which people do not trust in practice does not have a healthy, functioning feedback loop. It has the appearance of one. That difference matters enormously, whether the church is growing, stalling, or somewhere in between.
When the system is working well, the leader provides the clarity and direction that staff need, and staff understand and fulfil their roles. If the leader needs different behaviour or outcomes from a staff member, they raise the matter respectfully and in an appropriate forum. The staff member listens, takes the feedback on board and, where appropriate, makes the necessary changes.
Equally, if a staff member has a question, needs clarification, wishes to raise a concern, or wants to make a complaint, they raise it with the leader. The leader listens and works with them to resolve the difficulty. This may involve the leader changing their own behaviour, providing greater clarity or additional resources, or finding a resolution that enables both parties to move forward constructively.
These are examples of feedback loops working well to maintain a healthy status quo. It would be nice if this were all that was needed, but this is a human system, and imperfect people do not always resolve issues well. One or both parties may fail to understand or appreciate the other’s concerns. A leader may be unaware of the degree of power they hold in the eyes of a staff member, so a response intended to be helpful may inadvertently silence or dismiss that person’s concerns. Immaturity, insecurity, or trauma-related issues in either or both parties may also produce unhelpful reactions that stall the conversation and prevent resolution.
It is important to remember that silencing an issue is not the same as resolving it. When concerns are raised or complaints are made, although we may not enjoy receiving them, something important and potentially healthy is occurring: the system is communicating that something requires attention.
When a person places a hand on a hotplate or against a sharp object, the resulting pain is unpleasant but important. Pain creates an immediate and urgent signal, causing the person to withdraw their hand quickly and, hopefully, prevent more serious injury.
As much as we may dislike pain, it serves an essential purpose. Without this feedback mechanism, serious and even life-threatening damage can occur. In Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants, Paul Brand and Philip Yancey draw on Brand’s work with people affected by leprosy, also known as Hansen disease. The condition can damage peripheral nerves and cause a loss of protective sensation. Without pain as a warning signal, injuries may go unnoticed and worsen, sometimes contributing to permanent damage or the loss of a body part.
Pain is important. However, organisationally, this does not mean that every complaint is necessarily accurate in every detail. Pain is not the complete diagnosis; it simply signals that something needs attention. In the same way, questions, concerns, confusion, and complaints need to be heard and explored as part of a healthy feedback system. A church that can no longer feel pain is a church in danger of losing part of itself.
This is why additional healthy feedback loops involving governance are crucial. When a significant matter cannot be resolved within the ordinary relationship between the leader and staff, there needs to be an appropriate way to access the support of governance.
Staff need a clear and trusted means of escalating an unresolved concern—particularly when it relates to the leader’s conduct—so that governance can bring its authority and perspective to the matter. This may involve assessing or adjudicating the situation, helping the parties reach a resolution, or bringing appropriate correction where conduct needs to change. The process itself needs to be fair: people need an opportunity to be heard, consistent criteria, appropriate confidentiality, clear reasons for decisions, and protection from retaliation.
Where the concern involves serious misconduct, abuse, possible illegality, or a conflict of interest within governance, the ordinary internal pathway may not be sufficient. The church needs a clearly communicated route to an external or genuinely independent person or body with the competence and authority to receive the concern, protect those involved, and determine the appropriate response.
The leader also needs a way to access governance support when managing a difficult or unresolved situation. Governance’s role is not necessarily to take over the day-to-day management of the organisation, but to listen to the signals and work to restore the system to a healthy equilibrium when some part of it has ceased to function effectively.
Governance’s actions are therefore crucial when difficulties have emerged between the leader and staff. A stable and healthy state is sustained through feedback loops that support the flow of accurate information, respectful challenge, appropriate accountability, and the capacity to address problems constructively. Healthy homeostasis is not maintained by eliminating every expression of pain. It is maintained by responding to pain constructively.
When this does not happen, people within the system find other, less constructive ways to respond to the difficulties and pressures they experience. These responses are symptoms of an unhealthy leadership system. They are many and varied, and there may be different reasons why each one emerges. Collectively, however, they indicate that something within the system is unhealthy and needs attention before a rupture occurs.
Within our leadership systems, we need to recognise these symptoms as warning lights on a car’s dashboard. Rather than ignoring them or disabling the warning signals, we need to explore what is causing them, address the underlying problem, and work towards resolution.
We will examine these warning signs in the next article.
