Your church needs another hire. But which one? Get it wrong, and the cost is more than money. It is strategic. In this episode, Doug Parks sits down with Erin Johnston, Executive Pastor at Canyon Ridge Christian Church in Las Vegas, to walk through how to decide your next staff hire using strategy, capacity, and your org chart instead of the loudest voice in the room.
You will learn:
- Why you should build a three- to five-year org chart before you write a single job description
- How to avoid "whack-a-mole" hires that solve today's pain point and make tomorrow miserable
- How to tell if you have a missing role or just an overloaded one, using a simple two-week time matrix
- How to audit functions and ask whether a volunteer team could do the work
- How to sequence hires as you scale, and why developers of people beat specialists
- Why a staff-to-attendance ratio around 1 to 100 should drive hiring decisions with data, not emotion
- What "leadership weight" is and how to add capacity instead of one more doer
This week's action step: sketch your three- to five-year org chart, even as a rough draft, and let it guide your next hiring conversation.
TIMELINE
0:00 Cold open
0:16 Welcome and meet Erin Johnston
1:11 Why the next hire is so hard to get right
2:59 Start with the future org chart, not the job description
4:14 Avoiding whack-a-mole hires
5:44 Is it a missing role or an overloaded role?
7:12 The time matrix tool
7:51 Audit the functions and use volunteers
8:25 How to sequence hires as you scale
9:52 Staff-to-attendance ratios and data-driven triggers
11:12 Leadership weight and multiplying capacity
12:12 Recap and your action step this week
12:56 Next episode and wrap up
COMING NEXT: Episode 11, how to have the hard conversation with an underperformer.
More episodes and resources at https://executivepastor.io
The Executive Pastor Podcast is hosted by Doug Parks and Bart Rendel and brought to you by Intentional Churches. Subscribe so you do not miss a new episode every week.
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