How Resilient is Your team?

One thing that smaller to medium sized churches often lack is depth in their volunteer base. You end up with the few people who do so much, and are even willing to take on more. What we’re going to chat about is when one of those people suddenly isn’t there anymore, and now there’s a huge gap that needs to be filled.

Succession and delegation can sometimes be hard to do in a church for two reasons. One, there simply aren’t enough people to fill the role, or two, the role has become so large or the previous person did such a good job, that no one feels like they can step into it and so the same job. 

You may have heard of the “hit by a bus” strategy where you should prepare to be completely replaceable at any given time. That’s a good philosophy to strive towards, and it has never been more used than recently with COVID. While getting hit by a bus or suddenly passing away is a rare occurrence, having to quarantine for two weeks because of an exposure to COVID is a reality that hits close to home. If you only have one person who knows how to run the livestream, what happens if that person is out? Who else knows how to do it? Do you have multiple people trained as Sunday school teachers? What happens if you are suddenly looking for a sub?

There isn’t one right answer that can solve the issue but there are some things that can help. 

Delegate tasks in volunteer sized chunks
Break tasks into smaller ones and assign them out to people. Instead of having one person run both slides for lyrics and the livestream, train one person for the lyrics and one to run the stream. 

Cross train your volunteers
Don’t dedicate one person to a specific task. Make sure that one volunteer is trained in multiple areas (such as both graphics and cameras). Sure they can have a concentration and specialty, but being able to pull in someone at the last minute who knows what they doing lends to greater flexibility and less stress.

Make sure there isn’t knowledge that just one person knows
If only one person knows the password to the YouTube account to watch the stream, and that person isn’t available one Sunday, you’re in a pickle. Make sure that at least 3 people know the critical information needed to run a Sunday, or better yet, have that information documented on paper so that anyone can step in and help.

What are some ways that you’ve made your team resilient?

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