How To Lead A Healthy Tech Team - Standards
Today, Audio Coach Tony Guyer brings us the first of a three-week series to strengthen your tech team!
How sustainable is your tech team? Are you barely surviving? Are you constantly looking for new help? Have you stopped looking? Is your tech team worn out? Are they aging out? Do you wake up at 3 AM every Sunday with anxiety over whether you will survive that morning?
What would it take to move beyond anxiety to a healthy team where people were waiting in line to be a part of it?
Before we dig into the meat of our discussion, let’s be honest about what we are about here. I am not presenting some new silver bullet solution that is a current trend that will revolutionize how you worship at your church. Nor do I desire that you see me as only a cheerleader to give you empty tasks to make everyone feel better about their struggle. I am here to remind us of who God is and how valuable it is to put our affections and attentions in the right place so we do not waste our energies and efforts on techniques and miss out on the beauty of the struggle to keep the main thing the main thing.
Let’s look at a paradigm shift that will bring clarity and focus to our struggle with a couple of directives. Over the next three weeks, we’ll look at three questions:
Are your standards too low?
What does your culture look like?
How will you know if you’ve arrived?
Are Your Standards Too Low?
Do you have clear standards for what you seek in a tech volunteer? Are these standards assumed? Written down? Are they grandfathered in by the former leader?
In a time where many struggle to get volunteers to cover each Sunday, it may seem a bit cheeky to talk about whether a volunteer meets the standards to serve. Some of us might live in a world where any warm body will do.
You may or may not be surprised at how often I have done audio training at churches with volunteers with significant hearing loss serving as a sound operator. Would you have a blind person doing projection?
Or maybe it’s a character issue. A church I worked with had a sound operator that occasionally cussed out the worship leader during Sunday morning rehearsals. We’re talking the big daddy cuss words! He would also arrive late to rehearsal and reek of alcohol. Not surprisingly, this church had a revolving door of worship leaders, yet this paid staffer had been serving for years.
(So we don’t fall too quickly into a self-righteous interpretation of their problem, we should understand their justification. The pastoral leadership felt this was the safest place to have this lost sheep. If the tech didn’t have a job or a place to be, maybe he would fade into the background and eventually stop attending.)
I believe in disciplining people at various levels of maturity, but the philosophy I encountered was losing its effectiveness due to the absence of leaders who cared enough to enforce the standards that God has set for us. Such behavior cannot be tolerated.
Consider how Jesus interacted with his disciples. These disciples were a diverse group of followers. Smelly, blue-collar fisherman, despised tax collectors, intellectual doctors, violent zealots. Did God’s love compel Jesus to put up with whoever was available in Israel at that moment for his disciples? Would He have had a more qualified, educated team if he had waited for another 100 years? It seems like it was His design to take these men with all their flaws and build His Church with their leadership. When Jesus encountered awkward times, did He roll His eyes and say, “Here we go again” No. He corrected, rebuked, admonished, and taught, but above all else, He loved His team and set an example for the calling. The New Testament is full of Jesus communicating His standards for His disciples.
Of course, our drunken sound person is an extreme case of things being “not quite right.” But maybe it’s more common that you are stuck with a Sound Janitor that comes in, powers everything up, and goes and gets a doughnut without any partnership or understanding of music or how to mix and balance sound.
Maybe the projectionist shows up five minutes before the service starts with the expectation that all the songs will have been entered and edited by the worship leader and is not concerned about the nuance and timing of the lyric changes.
We seem to go out of our way to allow the least commitment to serving on Sunday possible so we don’t overwhelm our volunteers.
There is a point where we need to be sensitive to managing resources, but have we over-corrected to the point where there is no value in the excellence and beauty of our worship offering? At this point, we need to remind our team that their contribution to the Sunday worship service matters. There is value in bringing excellence to our worship.
We recently celebrated Mother’s Day with a special dinner at our house, where my daughter and I prepared a special meal for my wife and both of our mothers. This meal involved a considerable amount of preparation and resources with the single goal of communicating how much we valued our mothers. It would have been a lot easier to stop at McDonald’s, grab a bunch of 99-cent cheeseburgers, and call it a day.
In light of who God is and what we believe about Him, how much more would we invest in bringing honor to Him? Does your team understand this? Do they remember this? We know that humans invest time and resources into things they value. What does your family value? A person that loves travel will forgo eating out and extra expenses to save money for that trip to Costa Rica. So a significant standard that needs to be communicated to your team is that we value making music and the worship experience excellent. Worshiping God is worth sacrificing time, finances, and intellectual energy.
Is this standard clear to your team? Do you model humility to your team?
The second chapter of Philippians sets a high standard for how we are called to serve.
“So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain. Even if I am to be poured out as a drink offering upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad and rejoice with you all. Likewise you also should be glad and rejoice with me.” (Philippians 2:1-18)
Verse 3 reminds us to do nothing out of selfish ambition and arrogance but in humility to count others as more significant than yourselves. Do we see the sound technician as more important than us? Does the sound technician see the projectionist as more significant than themselves?
Verse 5 is mind-blowing. It reminds us that if anyone had a right to be arrogant, it was Jesus. He was, in very nature, God, but He didn’t consider that concept simple to grasp. Jesus made himself nothing and appeared as a servant, a volunteer, if you will, even to the point of an embarrassing death on the cross. Is humble servanthood a standard that your team knows is an expectation?
It is no accident that we have started this discussion on standards by discussing matters of the heart and an understanding of the pursuit of excellence. Once those foundations are established, we must address the standards for skill and aptitude. It would be unusual to invite a piano player onto your worship team who has never played the piano or a guitar player who has never played the guitar.
We realize that in a smaller community, it is not unusual to onboard musicians with little skill that are growing and learning their craft. I have spoken to many worship communities that have understood the value of paying for or providing lessons for musicians starting the journey. It often amazes me that many churches do not expect to have skilled operators in the tech booth. Of course, we all desire to have skilled operators at the soundboard, but I have observed that minimal effort has been put into seeking training for these technical positions.
On any given Sunday at any church, there could be thousands of dollars and thousands of hours invested in rehearsals and instruments in preparing those musicians to play together on stage. Hopefully, part of your standards for musicians is showing up prepared and familiar with the songs so they can serve the congregation without distraction. Yet how much time has been invested in preparing your tech booth? It would be uncommon to have a sound operator with a soundboard at home to practice during the week. It would also be unusual for your technicians to have a weekly lesson where they were working on skill development to prepare them for Sunday morning. Some churches are not able or do not require their tech team to be present for mid-week rehearsals. How odd.
It is no wonder that there is often low-grade animosity between musicians and tech staff, particularly sound technicians. Imagine a chef with a high level of culinary skill preparing a choice cut of beef to have a waiter burn the piece of meat on the grill. Imagine Leonardo Da Vinci putting all his creative passion into making the Mona Lisa and having someone in a gallery nail it to the wall with two nails in Mona’s eyes. Tragic, even absurd. And yet, on any given Sunday, the beautiful sounds of glory are butchered and unrecognizable after passing through the clumsy hands of the Sound Janitor.
My involvement in Ad Lib Music came out of a desire to serve those technicians who had generous hearts to serve but just needed someone to come alongside them and give them direction. We can’t expect a standard of excellence for worship to our Creator if we are not interested in investing in growth for our tech staff. In over ten years of providing training for volunteers, I have rarely encountered an individual who didn’t want to learn new skills to do their job better.
What is your plan for communicating standards for skill to your volunteers?
Next week, we’ll talk about your culture.
-Dave Helmuth
(purchase my book, "Worship Fertilizer: (the first hundred)" HERE)
How To Lead A Healthy Tech Team - Standards (Nº 376)
