Walking into Staff Conflict Unawares – Transcript

Jim Latimer
Welcome to Coaching for Interims. We are about empowerment for interim ministers: best practices and quick help from interims for interims – wisdom from the field. I am your host, Reverend Jim Latimer, and today I have the joy of having with me, the Reverend Lynn Carman Bodden. Lynn is a long experienced interim minister in not only in the United Church of Christ, but in several different denominations as well. I encourage you to listen to that bit of wisdom which is separate from this one. But in this particular one, Lynn, what topic would you like to share with us?

Lynn Carman Bodden
I want to share when things don’t always go so well – a story about when things don’t always go so well and I hope some of the things that I learned from it. I was invited to serve a church in my area, which I had accepted, and it was a multi-staff church. I would say multi-staff is something that I have experienced several times and don’t always feel completely confident in. We do not take classes in how to lead staffs when we’re in Divinity School. And the first day that I walked into this job, I walked in and the person who greeted me in the admin’s office was not the person that I, in fact, had met, but the person whom I had heard had retired – left the job and retired from that job. And I had heard- because it’s in the area where I live – stories about that person. And I thought, “Whoa, Nelly! What is that that this person is back?” She was a nice enough person. She was there subbing for the person whom I had met, who was off doing training for another job, not to leave the job at the church, but to do two jobs at one time. And what I walked into was unhappiness on the part of another staff member with the fact that the admin was not there, and it was putting an extra burden on her. And she was unhappy about it. That was one of the presenting issues. As it turned out, the person who was unhappy had been unhappy in another job and might still have been working out some of those issues in the life of the church. And what turned out, then, was a conflict between the admin who was away and this other person who had to work with her. And I tried to sit down with them and negotiate that. It led to a lot of yelling and great unhappiness and my image as a person who was able to navigate conflict fairly well, was rapidly fading…

Jim Latimer
was taking a beating!

Lynn Carman Bodden
And you may have heard it said, but the way that you join a system is directly proportionate to how you’re going to be able to work, and this staff conflict then, colored my work in that church for the next four months until the person who was unhappy finally resigned. Other staff people got involved and tried to negotiate it. That didn’t work very well. Working with church leaders, who had not told me that this was gonna happen, didn’t work very well. And what I learned subsequent to this was that it was a pattern in the system, that when there was a transition, there would be a staff conflict, often with the person who worked in the office involved. And honestly, it happened after I left also. It happened again! So I was not successful in helping them to work through all of this. And I will add that on top of the layers – one person was dealing with mental health issues and there were racial dynamics involved – what it made me eventually do was get into therapy, which was helpful. But I spent a lot of time examining myself and my ability and feeling like the longer I do this work, the less I know, and the more I don’t know. And I was not my best self through this. So I am grateful for having had the resources to sort of catch me and help me get back on my feet. I was grateful that one of these parties that was involved in this conflict…who had…I mean, what I learned was that I got triangled royally into something and I didn’t deal with it very well. I was grateful that one of the people resigned. And I was grateful that it offered us the opportunity to examine the whole staff structure and redesign it. But what I learned was – and what I would share with people is – it is critical to ask questions that they might not anticipate that you need to ask about the working relationships within the staff, and what their expectations of you are in relation to the different people on the staff. In some churches, the leadership manages the staff and not the senior person or the interim. In the church I’m in now, and in another church I served, I deal with some staff people and another person on the staff deals with other people. So clarity about your role over against the staff is important. And if one is going to work on multiple staffs, I would encourage those people to get some training on how to work within staff teams, not just to take for granted that I’m nice to people and people like me and I can do this, etc. I also worked on a staff once where, sadly, somebody died. And I had to learn quickly and help the staff to learn quickly how to explore job descriptions, and how to do a search for another person, and how to write job descriptions that describe the accountability and to whom different staff people need to go. So hopefully, the disasters that we have teach us new things and offer us things to share with others. But I have been an interim a long time, and I have learned – I mean I knew this – but I don’t know everything. And there may be things that happened that we did not anticipate at all.

Jim Latimer
And I’m hearing also, Lynn, that you learned also to be gentle with yourself and not to beat yourself up too much about this. You walked into a situation that had things you didn’t anticipate, which of course, can happen to anyone. And you learned not to underestimate the complexities, particularly of a multi-staff situation. And you learned that if at all possible, as the incoming interim into a multi-staff church, learn something about the dynamics beforehand.

Lynn Carman Bodden
Right. Or least ask. Sometimes they don’t know. What I would say in that situation also was that the leaders didn’t really understand how to manage the multiple staff that they had. And so part of one’s job might end up being helping to put that kind of process in place to help them develop the process that they need to manage all these people.

Jim Latimer
And teaching them some awareness as appropriate around how systems work – triangles and all those things. Wow.

Lynn Carman Bodden
Yep. Thank you for your graciousness about reminding me to be gentle with myself, because that stuff sticks with you, and carries over into the next job.

Jim Latimer
It does! You get nine compliments and one person’s low critique, and what do you carry with you? It’s oftentimes the one negative. But there are so many good things that you do. Sweet! Perfect, Lynn.

I think that’s a good place to end, although I’m left wondering about a lot. But you’ve given me, and hopefully our listeners, hope that: Be gentle with yourself; it’s complex; ask questions; don’t assume that they know what they expect of each other, much less of you; and just ask questions and be curious. Wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing this with us.

Lynn Carman Bodden
You’re welcome.

More Bits Of Wisdom from Rev. Lynn Carman Bodden
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