FCLP 38 | How to Know When It's Time to Move a Volunteer to a Staff Role

In this insightful leadership episode of the Female Church Leaders Podcast, Kadi Cole tackles one of the hardest calls in ministry leadership: knowing when a volunteer role is ready to become a staff role. She walks through three specific symptoms that signal a shift is due, plus how to leverage unpaid staff roles when budgets are tight.

You'll gain a way to tell whether someone is ready to lead a team, not just do the tasks, what actually separates an unpaid staff role from being a committed volunteer, and a simple next step for evaluating a role you've been questioning.

This week I'm teaching The Competency Gap Live Training live - register here!

TIMESTAMPS

03:57 – Volunteer vs. staff: it's about expectations, not pay
04:02 – Symptom 1: role has outgrown volunteer capacity
05:11 – Symptom 2: high volunteer leadership turnover
06:18 – Symptom 3: role is holding back other ministries
11:21 – Acts 6: the biblical model for delegating ministry
13:22 – Resources: Stewardship Case guide & upcoming training

Resources mentioned:

Make Your Stewardship Case; www.kadicole.com/stewardship

Next Steps and Resources:

• Take the Quiz: Identify your growth gap with our Sticky Floor Quiz at www.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 www.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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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, author, and executive coach. After more than 30 years in full-time ministry, often 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 going to be ready for it. Knowing when to move a volunteer role to a paid staff position is one of the hardest calls in ministry leadership. Resources are always tight no matter how big your church is. And once you hire someone, you're committing to that salary long term. Unless you're in the rare position of a strong growth culture and extra income to work with, every dollar you might spend on staff is also a dollar every other ministry in your church needs too. So today I want to talk about two things. First, how do you know when it's time to shift a role from a volunteer position to a staff position? And second, how even if your church or ministry can't pay for a staff role right now, you can still use unpaid staff roles to move things forward. Okay. Picture Maria. She's led in your early child ministry for three years. This is a critical ministry for most churches and one of the greatest impacts on weekend growth. It also happens to have the highest volunteer ratio requirement of any ministry in your church, which means Maria likely runs your largest volunteer team and has direct impact on the largest number of families. Many of her volunteers are parents of young kids themselves, so her team also has the highest rate of last-minute cancellations to deal with. But Maria has proven to be very capable. She's faithful and she's committed. Yet the structure she's leading within hasn't kept up with what her growing role requires of her. The most common response to this situation is to think about how to start paying Maria so that she can step up and lead at a higher level. But there's a lot more going on here than whether she is paid or not. The difference between a volunteer and a paid staff role are not pay levels or even number of hours worked, it's levels of expectations. Volunteers, they get to lead from their availability. Are they available for what is needed? But paid or formalized staff lead by assignment. What is my responsibility no matter what the circumstances going on in my personal life? When a role crosses that line from being available to accepting an assignment, it's the relationship with that leader that changes. And that's also what needs to be evaluated most closely. As a volunteer, Maria can skip Sunday when her kids get sick. As a staff member, she covers early childhood ministry regardless, because she's agreed to specific expectations in advance, not just showing up when she can. Now, that expectation runs both ways. Maria also, when she's in this kind of more formalized staff role, gets a seat at staff meetings or at least a recording of it if she can't attend live. As a staff member, she's now part of decision making and strategy for her ministry, not simply executing what is decided without her. She gets a job description built around her actual strengths and most importantly, the authority to build and lead her own team the way she believes is best. And then she's held accountable for the fruit of those leadership decisions. That's a heavier responsibility, but for someone with Maria's capacity, it's often a much easier and more enjoyable one. So how do you know when it's time to shift a volunteer role to a staff role? Well, there are three key symptoms that begin to show up when you need to start considering this. Symptom number one, the ministry has outgrown a normal volunteer's capacity. A typical high capacity volunteer role commitment is anywhere from 8 to 15 hours a week, including attending weekend service times. So is your re role requiring more than that? Does it need more than 10 to 15 hours a week on a regular basis? Does it need weekday availability, day-to-day attention, or coordination across departments like facilities or classroom setups or communications for registrations? And are things falling through the cracks simply because there aren't enough hours in the day for someone who already has a full-time job, a family, and then you want them to fulfill these requirements of this role consistently? That's Maria's experience in early childhood ministry right now. She's covering last-minute gaps almost every Sunday. She hasn't been able to recruit a new volunteer in two months, even though she's normally excellent at this. And her team is now down three people. Last month, she forgot to follow up with a family who had visited twice, not because she suddenly doesn't care, but because there was no time left in her week to notice that she had missed it. Okay, symptom number two that your volunteer role may need to grow into a staff role. You're seeing high turnover in volunteer leadership. This is what is likely to happen with Maria. If nothing changes, Maria will keep absorbing the gaps personally, new families will have less follow-up, the team will begin to get tired, and this amazing high capacity volunteer will begin to think she's not a good enough leader to juggle all of this anymore. This is actually an unsustainable situation for any leader. And yet many times our volunteers burn out or take themselves out because they feel overwhelmed. When you start to see this pattern repeat, strong leader, some success, some overwhelm, and then stepping back, leaving you having to find yet another strong leader, that's an indication that this role and the structure supporting it are no longer realistic. So rather than finding yet another volunteer leader, the better leadership move for you is to evaluate the situation with fresh eyes. Ask yourself, what here used to work but isn't working anymore? What's changed since we had someone in this role successfully long term? What do I see coming in the future that I can position this role to embrace rather than merely to survive? And symptom number three, other ministries or leaders are getting frustrated or being held back. When a ministry is under-resourced or inconsistently led, it doesn't stay contained just to its one area. If your tech team has no lead, your worship pastor ends up troubleshooting soundboards. If no one owns following up with newcomers, your small group leaders keep needing help recruiting. If no one owns communication, every ministry leader ends up writing their own flyers and emails off-brand and inconsistent. I think we've all been there. That's the linchpin effect. As a leader, take a big picture view of the situation. Where are people consistently frustrated? Where are complaints always coming in about? What if you elevated it even just a little, would release other leaders and ministries to more move forward easier and faster? If you invest in just that one role, the linchpin, rather than giving a little to lots of areas, it is one of the most strategic and multiplying uses of your staff dollars that you have at your disposal. Now, if you're already doing the budget math and thinking, um, we can barely afford to pay our current staff, if that, this isn't only about full-time hires. Sometimes the answer is a targeted part-time investment. Instead of paying someone 10 hours a week to do the work of a volunteer, paying them to coordinate the leaders of several volunteer teams is much more impactful. It's about multiplying what you already have and using it strategically, not necessarily the size of your budget. I've worked with some very big churches, but at the end of the day, there is never enough money to serve all the needs of the people on the front line. We have to think creatively and strategically in whatever size church or ministry we are. For Maria, that might mean paying her 10 hours a week to lead and train her team instead of expecting her to personally run every Sunday morning herself. Same gifting, same family she already loves, but a different set of expectations and a shift in the structure around her. Now, I have one big caution before you make that move, however. If someone like Maria is excellent at getting the job done, but not good at equipping and empowering others to do it, think twice. In other words, if she holds the ministry to herself and doesn't know how to give it away, there's no reason to bring her on staff in a paid or even unpaid role. All you'll be doing is paying for what someone is already willing to do for free as a volunteer. Ephesians 4.12 reminds us that a leader's job is to equip the saints for works of service. That's what staff salaries are for. They're for equipping, not for doing the tasks themselves. Now, there is one way to get the best of both worlds, especially if budgets are tight. That is creating unpaid staff roles. An unpaid staff role is different from simply being a committed volunteer. It's a defined position with a formally written job description, clear responsibilities that belong to only this person, and the accompanying authority that gives them the ability to get the job done on their own. They get access to everything a paid staff role gets access to: the database, the building alarm codes, and the ability to spend budget. This is all agreed to in advance, just like with a paid job, and it often comes with a set timeline, three months, six months a year, rather than an open-ended commitment. The person in this role is accountable to a supervisor, not to just their own ideas of what they think is best. They're included in staff and team meetings, and they're part of planning and strategizing for their area, not simply carrying out decisions made without them by other leaders. I've seen this work very successfully at all sizes of churches. A ministry leader, a department director, an event coordinator, a person who oversees your building and grounds, they can all operate this way, given authority and a seat at the table, but without a formalized paycheck attached. A defined term also means that you get to reevaluate this role on a set schedule. If it isn't working, you have a direct conversation at the natural review point, the same way you would with any other role on your team. Instead of an indefinite arrangement, no one knows when it's going to end. And the same goes for them. If this isn't what they bargain for, you have a clear picture of how long they will fulfill their responsibilities, and you have plenty of time to make different plans should they choose to step down. For a lot of churches, this is actually the first step toward a fully staffed ministry. Prove the structure works with an unpaid leader in place, and then you can add budget once you have it. It's also a perfect way to test out someone's leadership capabilities versus simply their ability to get tasks done. It costs you nothing in salary, but it does cost you. You have to make a decision. Are you willing to lead that person with the same clarity and accountability you would bring to a paid role? If they are taking a step up in leadership, that means you have to also. But it can also be an incredible win-win that answers both your prayers for more workers for the harvest and their prayer that God would open up a bigger opportunity for them to lead and impact the kingdom with their life. In Acts chapter 6, the early church is growing fast, and the daily distribution of food to widows is getting overlooked. It's interesting what the apostles choose to do. They don't just work harder and ask everyone to push through it, they recognize this specific responsibility has outgrown what they can personally oversee, alongside everything else God has called them to. Listen to what they say in verse 3 and 4. Choose seven men from among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and full of wisdom. We will turn this responsibility over to them, and we will then give our attention to prayer and the ministry of the word. They selected seven leaders to do this job, and they were known for wisdom and character. And then they gave them the role of helping widows eat food. And as a result, Scripture says that the Word of God kept spreading, and the number of disciples grew rapidly. See, recognizing the gap and building the right structure multiplied the ministry. But it took the right assessment, the right people to get the right result. So here's your action step for this week. Pick one role you've been watching and questioning if it is sustainable. Run it against the three symptoms of whether it needs to be stepped up, possibly to a staff role. First, has it outgrown the normal volunteer's capacity? Two, are you seeing more turnover? And three, is it holding back other leaders or other ministries? If you're not sure what the answers are, take some time and ask the leaders around you where they're sensing the most strain or frustration. Then take some time to write down the actual options. A full staff role, a paid part-time role, or an unpaid staff role with defined responsibilities and authority. When you get clear on what you need, why you need it, and how it's going to move your ministry forward, you have a much better chance of getting approval and seeing the results you know are possible. If this episode resonated with some of the leadership challenges you've been experiencing, I want to point out a couple other resources that might help you as well. First, we have Make Your Stewardship Case, which walks you through step by step how to have a conversation with your church's leadership about investing in your development. The principles would work great if you are asking for more resources for a new staff role like we've discussed today, but it is also designed to help you pursue the kind of coaching and learning that will move you to the next level as well. You can download it from the link in our show notes. Second, we have a live training coming up just for female church leaders. It takes only 90 minutes and we'll be covering the number one research every leader needs to know about, as well as giving a sneak peek to our closing the leadership gap fall cohort if you want to check it out. I would love to see you there, and I'll be answering your questions live. So please click on the link in the show notes to sign up for a time that fits your schedule. Thanks for all the ways that you love people and serve the Lord. We see it and it matters. Leading teams, developing leaders, and moving volunteers to staff roles is not easy, but you are doing the work to learn how and when, and that will make all the difference. And remember, we are here to cheer you on every step of the way. 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.