FCLP 33 | The Difference Between Evaluating People and Evaluating Ministry

In this encouraging leadership episode of the Female Church Leaders Podcast, Kadi Cole explores one of the most overlooked skills in healthy ministry: evaluation. Drawing from two very different ministry cultures, she unpacks why many leaders either avoid honest evaluation or unintentionally create fear around it, and how both extremes limit long-term ministry health.

You'll gain practical insight into separating people from programs, creating a culture that celebrates and evaluates well, and using honest feedback to strengthen your ministry without discouraging the people who serve in it.

TIMESTAMPS

01:02 - Two unhealthy ministry cultures: fear of critique vs. denial through over-celebration

02:33 - The importance of healthy, honest evaluation (not personal feedback)

02:54 - Challenges of evaluation with volunteer teams

05:39 - Distinguishing between celebration (morale) and evaluation (effectiveness)

06:47 - Practical steps: Separate meetings for celebration and evaluation

06:59 - Key questions for celebration and evaluation meetings

Resources mentioned:

The Competency Gap Quiz: thecompetencygapquiz.scoreapp.com

Next Steps and Resources:

• Take the Quiz: Identify your growth gap with our Sticky Floor Quiz at femalechurchleaders.com.
• Join a Cohort: Be part of our next Closing the Leadership Gap cohort for guided coaching and monthly Q&A with Kadi. Visit closingtheleadershipgap.com to learn more.
• Stay Connected: Follow us on Instagram @femalechurchleaders for daily encouragement and leadership tools.
• Spread the Word: If you found this episode helpful, please follow, rate, and share the podcast to help us reach more female church leaders.

Tune in and get ready to lead with clarity, strength, and joy. Your calling matters, and we're here to support you every step of the way!

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Female Church Leaders Podcast, a weekly resource for women who love God, love the church, and are called to lead. I'm your host, Katie Cole, Church Leader, Autor, and Executive Coach. After more than 30 years in full-time ministry, Open as the only woman at the table, I understand how meaningful yet challenging your calling can be. That's why I created this podcast to remind you that you're not leading alone. Each week, I'll share practical tools, biblical insights, and honest encouragement for the real challenges female leaders face in ministry. So you can grow your skills, strengthen your faith, and lead with more confidence and joy without burning out or striving to prove yourself. We drop a new episode every Monday because Sunday is coming and you are gonna be ready for it. I've led in two very different ministry cultures, especially when it came to evaluating our ministry programs and events. In one culture, everything got picked apart. Every service, every event, every decision got run through a fine-tooth gome. What went wrong? What could have been better? What are we missing? Over time, I watched my team and even myself begin to grow quiet. People stopped volunteering for new things. Nobody wanted to raise their hand or give a new idea because if it didn't work perfectly, they knew it was coming around back to them in a debrief meeting. We had actually built a culture of fear, and it cost us our willingness to try anything new. Now, in the other culture, it was totally the opposite. Everything got celebrated. Every event was amazing, every program was a win, even the ones we all kind of knew hadn't gone very well. Maybe a series that fell flat or an outreach where no one actually showed up, a program that had clearly run its course, well, we praised it anyway, because we didn't want to discourage anyone. And to be honest, we probably didn't want to discourage ourselves. It felt kind in the moment, but looking back, it really wasn't. Because we could never admit when something needed to change, and especially when it needed to end. We couldn't say a ministry wasn't effective anymore, or a program wasn't working, or that we'd overcommitted our team. So we just kept adding and adding and adding until we were exhausted and overextended, running a dozen good things instead of a few great ones. Two extremes, two very different cultures, but they were both missing the same critical leadership ingredient, a culture of healthy and honest evaluation. Now, when I talk about evaluation, I'm not talking about personal feedback or a performance review. That is a totally different topic, also very important. But I'm talking about evaluating the ministry, the event, the program, the thing you built, not the person who built it. Most of us were never actually taught that those are two different things. And that is exactly why evaluation often feels so loaded and so personal. This can really be tricky in ministry, especially when you're working with volunteer teams. They are not clocking in for a paycheck. They're giving their Sunday mornings, their vacation days, their evenings after work out of love for Jesus and love for the people. So the moment evaluation feels even slightly personal or negative, it doesn't just sting. It could accidentally convince a faithful volunteer that they're not wanted or needed or that their ideas aren't working, which is exactly why so many of us skip it. So if you led anything this summer, a camp, a VBS, a teaching series, a big outreach event, you're sitting in the perfect moment right now to build this practice. Most of us treat evaluation like an afterthought if we think about it at all. We plan, we prepare, we execute, then we move straight into the next thing without asking what we learned. Evaluation isn't a bonus step, it's the actual final stage of planning. Skipping it means you're walking into next year's ministry with this year's blind spots still fully intact. But before we get to how this works with your team, first, I want us to take a minute and take a look at ourselves. Think back to your own history with feedback. Maybe in your family growing up, maybe your first leadership role. Have you had a boss that things didn't go too well around this topic? Did it tend toward criticism where never anything never quite felt right or good enough? Or did it lean the other way where you could do no wrong and everything was celebrated every single time? Or maybe you were blessed with a balance of both. Do you find yourself now repeating that same pattern? Or are you compensating for some reason? Are you overdoing the other side because you don't want people to feel the way you felt? So however you got here, if you internally flinch when someone offers you feedback or they talk about having an evaluation, it's hard to build a safe space for your team and honest evaluation if you personally don't feel safe doing it or leading it. So our own relationship to evaluation and feedback is often the first place to start looking at this topic. Now, when you take a look and you realize that you lean a little towards everything is awesome, it's easy to accidentally protect morale more than recognize what isn't working. So if your natural reaction is the opposite, boy, now that I see this, we really have a lot of work to do. It's easy to focus on the gap before you ever celebrate the win. Now, neither instinct is wrong on its own, but whichever one is yours, it is the side your team is probably getting plenty of from you. Now, the goal isn't to double down on what already comes naturally, although that is more fun. But our goal as leaders is to grow ourselves. It's to deliberately build the side that is underdeveloped. And we all have that part. Because healthy ministry culture actually needs both. We need celebration and evaluation. Celebration without evaluation becomes denial. But evaluation without celebration becomes fearful. Not one instead of the other, and not one is more important than the other. They are two different functions for two different parts of your evaluation and two different groups on your leadership team. Celebration is about the people who did the work. It's for everyone. It protects morale, reinforces calling, and reminds your team why the sacrifice they made was worth it. Evaluation, the second part, is the part about the program. It protects effectiveness. So you're not pouring next year's resources into something that's already stopped working. Different purposes, different postures. Combine them and you'll water down celebration to make room for critique, or you'll soften the evaluation so that you don't bum out the mood. And then neither one does its job. As the leader, you have to run both meetings. And you need some of your team's voice in both because your team sees things that you can't. Now, the first meeting, the celebration meeting, is whether you gather everybody together, not just key leaders, but everyone who served, everyone who's there to celebrate, everyone who had a part in what was going on. And then you take time to ask three critical questions. Number one, where did we see God at work? This is a great time to at a staff meeting or at a volunteer rally to actually talk about what are the stories, what are the things that we saw where God was clearly at work in people's lives? Number two, what are we celebrating? What were the wins? Did we reach our goal? Did we uh make things better than last year? Did we move things forward? And number three, who do we want to affirm? And this is one of the key ones. It's one that I often overlooked as a leader. Who were the people that really went the extra mile? Who were the key people behind the scenes that need to get celebrated? Who do we need to thank for pulling off this amazing event or really investing in these people through this program? That's it. Stories, wins, specific praise for specific people. Not a generic, great job, everyone, but name exactly what someone did and the difference that it made. Now, you can do this for a long time, but even just 15 minutes can hit all of these questions and celebrate both God's hand and your team's hard work. Then you pray and thank God for what he did. Now, like I said, you can do this at a volunteer meeting. I see it a lot in staff meetings. You just want to make sure that you celebrate with the people who are on the front line contributing. Celebrating is the focus when we are all together. Now, evaluation is totally different. It's the second meeting that you have next. And I just want to say you want to make sure that everybody who's going to be in the second meeting also was in the first meeting because the wins matter to inform the evaluation. And the second meeting is smaller. It's just you and the leaders who are actually responsible for pulling this off. And you ask three totally different questions. The first one, what worked well and why? Now, that second part is important because a lot of times we talk about what worked well, but we don't take time to understand why. Maybe a new leader was put in place, maybe a new process was tried. Maybe just miraculously God did something weird and we can't count on that all the time. What what worked well and why did it work so well this time? Number two, what could be improved? Nothing is ever perfect this side of heaven. So what are the things that could get better? And is it worth it? Because sometimes we can improve something and take it from a 96 to a 98, but the effort would just not be worth it. So what could be improved? And then the third one, what would we do differently next time? What are the things that we want to keep? What are the things that we want to change? What do we want to do when we think about doing this again? Keep the whole conversation about the event, not the individual people, not the person responsible. You want to talk about the actuals, not the personal. Keep it curious, not defensive, and give everyone a heads up when they come to the meeting so they can be prepared. We want everyone to walk in having already thought through the evaluation from their perspective, not reacting on the spot. This helps the conversation stay constructive instead of turning into everyone airing their frustrations or only bringing more positive things that don't help us get any better. So two different meetings, two different sets of questions, but both are necessary and neither one is actually optional for healthy evaluation culture. And you specifically don't skip anything. You are the leader. You need to take time to celebrate personally, and you need to take time to celebrate your people. And you also need time to be there for the evaluation and lead the conversation to keep the culture and the guardrails for your people on track. Now, here's how to make the biggest changes in your culture around feedback. I kind of mentioned it earlier, but do not wait until something goes wrong to introduce the practice of leadership evaluation. You have to build this now into your culture before even things get kicked off in the fall. When you're casting vision for things, when you're planning the new series, when your new small group semester kicks off, when you're getting your programming going, that's the time right now to tell your team up front that we'll be celebrating and evaluating this together when it's all over. Tell them out loud before anyone has served a single Sunday. When people know evaluation is coming and they know it's not personal but strategic, it stops being a surprise and it simply becomes just how you grow in ministry together, which is the real goal. So here's your action step for this week. Before the fall schedule fills up, put your evaluation meetings on your calendar now for every major event, series, or program you're planning. Not after it happens, but now, while your calendar is still open and you have the headspace to protect it. That time gives you and your team the heads up they need that this evaluation is coming and they can begin working on it even before they take any action on the actual project. Proverbs is filled with such great wisdom, and verse 2717 says, As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. I used to grow up thinking this was only reserved for men's like uh ministry retreat, but now I know that we all need to sharpen each other, particularly leaders. Sharpening isn't comfortable. It involves friction, contact, pressure, but it is not damaging. It is the process that makes something more useful, more effective, more ready for what it's built for. That's what healthy evaluation actually is intended to do. Not an attack on who your team is or on you as a leader. Evaluations are simply a little friction in the right spirit, which makes ministry sharper and better the next time around. If this is hitting close to home or you're realizing that maybe you've never actually been trained on the harder skills of leadership like running an honest evaluation meeting, I want to point you to a new resource we just released. It's called the Competency Gap Quiz. It takes about two minutes to complete, and it's built to help you as a female church leader find the one leadership competency that might be holding you back and gives you some real next steps to move it forward. You'll find the link in the show notes. You're not being unspiritual by evaluating what you're working on. It's actually the key component to stewarding it well. So celebrate loudly and evaluate honestly. You and your ministry will be better for it. We see the ministries you're building, even the unglamorous parts, like a debrief meeting or a courageous conversation you've been avoiding. But I promise taking these kinds of steps in the right direction matters more than you know. Keep growing and know that we are here to cheer you on. I'm so glad we got to spend this time together on the Female Church Leaders Podcast. I hope you're walking away encouraged, equipped, and reminded that your calling truly matters. To keep growing, join us for our next Closing the Leadership Gap cohort at ClosingTheLeadershipGap.com. It's a guided coaching experience, including live QA with me, designed to accelerate your leadership journey. If this podcast has been helpful to you, would you please take a moment to follow, rate, and share it? Your engagement helps the algorithms suggest our resources to female church leaders we haven't had a chance to meet yet. And don't forget to follow at female church leaders on Instagram for encouragement and leadership tools designed just for you. You can also follow my personal feed at Katie Cole spelled K A D I C O L E. Keep leading faithfully, keep growing your leadership gifts, and I'll see you next Monday because Sunday is coming and you are going to be ready for it.