How to Fire an Underperforming Staff Member

Context Staffing exists to help churches and other nonprofits (and occasionally Christian for-profits!) identify, find, and hire effective staff members. Most of our work is helping churches find their next Lead, Executive, or Worship Pastor. We have a huge database of leaders that reflects decades of ministry experience and connections we’ve made over the years. If your church is in the Reformed, Missional, or Complementarian tribe, we are the right firm for you.

Hiring is the fun part, but often the reason you are hiring a new team member is because the last one didn’t work out. It’s not always a bad thing to lose a staff member. Sometimes they have hit their leadership lid, sometimes they were presented with a new or better opportunity, but sometimes they were underperforming and needed to be fired.

Firing is rarely fun and often goes very poorly, especially in a church context. Getting fired from your church job can feel like you are losing your job, your livelihood, your community and your identity all at once. This makes it even more important for churches to have a really clear and effective process they can use to discern whether someone needs to be let go and then executed in a way that protects the church and the former employee.

I’m going to split this up into three blogs. Part 1 will be about employee management. Part 2 is about Performance Improvement Plans and Part 3 is about how to pull the trigger on firing a staff member.

As sexy as employment management sounds, the reality is even sexier. Imagine rarely having to fire someone because all of your employees have a clear sense of what they are supposed to be doing and how they will be assessed. Imagine having an employee not meet expectations and willingly submit to an improvement plan. Imagine that same employee continues to struggle to the point they need to be fired and instead of throwing a fit on Twitter, they gladly transition to a role they can thrive in. 

Does that sound like an unrealistic fantasy? In our day and age, it probably is but that doesn’t mean we can’t do our best to create the kind of staff environment where it’s possible. So, how do we do that?

This may sound obvious, and it is, but nobody can succeed without having a clear definition of success. Every sport has a scoreboard, every company has a bottom line, and every employee deserves clear and measurable expectations. Before you ever hire a staff member, you should have written down what success looks like for the employee and how that success will be measured. This should be a part of their job description and updated regularly to reflect changes as they happen. Each time these changes are implemented, the employee should re-sign the document to acknowledge that they know how they are being measured.

This can be wonky in church situations but it doesn’t have to be. I would argue that the reason it gets wonky is because many of the people attracted to ministry are also the kinds of people who are allergic to measuring and accountability. These measurements ought to be a part of the hiring process so that if a candidate reacts poorly to the idea of being judged by metrics, you can know not to hire them.

Clear expectations are a gift to a staff member and their manager. It takes as much guesswork and subjectivity out of the situation as possible, which protects everyone when things go bad and gives everyone a chance to celebrate when things go well.

Not only does each employee need clear and measurable expectations, they should receive feedback about their performance on a regular basis. I think that this should be no less than twice a year, ideally four times. These don’t have to be comprehensive formal reviews but they should at least be check-ins to make sure they are tracking with their goals. 

Six months is long enough that if an employee is on the wrong track, things can be nearly unsalvageable by the time they are addressed. That’s why quarterly check-ins are ideal in my mind. It’s enough time to get decent data but not so long that adjustments can’t be made to keep things on track.

I sincerely believe that having an employee management system that (1) sets clear expectations (2) measures performance in objective ways and (3) provides regular feedback and accountability, will prevent 90% of employee issues. Is that 90% number scientific? Not even a little bit, totally from my gut, but it’s not far off.

Most of the employee blow-ups I’ve seen and the ones I have experienced were the result of poor or no management in the six to twelve months leading up to the crisis. You can’t protect yourself from crazy people or the cultural environment we are in, but you can mitigate some of the risk by taking the time to make a plan and execute it.

I promise you’ll save yourself a lot of heartache.

Next week we’ll talk about what to do when an employee is just not keeping up. See you then.