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Rich
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Unseminary Podcast Host
Welcome to the Unseminary Podcast, the place where church leaders get practical insights, tips and strategies for ministry growth. Today, you're stepping into something bigger than just a conversation. This podcast is part of a bold mission to help 100 churches grow by 1,000 people. Whether you're dreaming of increasing your impact in your community, empowering your team or or reaching more people with the message of Jesus, you're in the right place. We're here to bring you the stuff you wish they taught in seminary, ideas and tools you can put into action this week to see transformation in your ministry. Let's dive in.
Rich
Hey friends, welcome to the Unseminary Podcast. So glad that you have decided to tune in. Listen, listen, listen. Pull in close because today's conversation I don't even know your church, but I know that a large portion of your budget is being spent on the thing we talk about. In fact, lots of churches, it's like half of their budget and it's an even larger portion of the outcome of your ministry. It's incredibly important what we're talking about today and so you do not want to miss this. And we've got an expert that has worked with not tens of, not hundreds of, but literally thousands of churches like yours and wants to help you take steps forward. Excited to have Tim Foote with us. He has nearly 30 years of experience, which I'm not sure how that's possible. Such a young man as a leader, pastor, coach, speaker, musician in both Australia and North America, bringing a diverse background to his role as the CEO and president of Slingshot Group. If you're not aware of who Slingshot Group is. They take the guest work out of nonprofit and church staffing. He's recently written a book that I'm excited for you to learn more about. But Tim, welcome to the show. So glad you're here.
Tim Foote
Rich, it is. So glad. It's so great to be on with you today. Excited about this conversation.
Rich
So good. I'm excited for it too. Why don't you kind of give us a bit of the Tim Foot background, tell us a little bit about you and kind of give us the how do we end up here in this conversation today?
Tim Foote
Yeah, it's interesting. I often say to people I had no idea that I'd be on the other side of the world to where I started doing what I'm doing. But this is what happens, Rich, when you say keep saying yes to God. Born and raised Tasmanian. Worked as a musician and in ministry in Sydney for 10 years after moving from Tasmania, then relocated to Boulder County, Colorado in 2002. Been here for 25 years now in ministry at a great church called Lifebridge Christian Church. Built ministry there for 10 years and went bi vocationally. Started working with the Slingshot Group when there was a handful of us doing a handful of staffing and coaching work. And then things exploded and I really, really hit my sweet spot and saw how God had been preparing me for so many years to work with teams. Love teams, Love the strategy of teams of teams. Love working with people. Love the fact that placing the right leader on the right team exponentially moves the mission forward and affects culture in all kinds of ways. And so I've had all kinds of roles in Slingshot over the years. Now get to lead our team of amazing consultants around around the US Serving so many and beyond serving so many ministries and teams. Move mission forward.
Rich
Love it. So glad that yeah, this is going to be a good conversation. You know, one of the things I want to take advantage of is the fact you're really an expert. You know, you've worked with you and Slingshot have worked with thousands of churches and organizations and you really get a chance to see churches at an interesting inflection point. You know, often when we're hiring a team member, bringing someone in or trying to develop our teams, you know, we're thinking about the future and we're taking a step back. And like you say, I do think it's a transformative inflection point that you're involved in. So your sitting across the table from a lot of reader leaders and maybe even some leaders who their mission is stalling, like things aren't maybe going as well as we would hope. Are there any patterns in that you're seeing or are there things that you see time and time again in churches that, that might be holding us back?
Tim Foote
Yeah. I immediately thought of a common question we'll ask teams when we're bought in. When it comes to needing a new person on the team or helping coach leaders, we're often bought in, in crisis moments, moments. But they're also moments of incredible opportunity. And we'll often ask the question, hey, do you want a painkiller or do you want a vitamin? And so often the team is thinking they want the painkiller, they want the pain to go away, they just want to, they want to solve the problem, they want to fill the seat or they want to break through whatever it is they're struggling with. But honestly, deep down, they need to start a regimen of vitamins to help them get to a healthy place to move the mission forward. We often will see an unawareness that the wrong people are around the table or an unawareness that they need other leaders around the table to help them move forward. Whether it be vocational, paid leaders or volunteers. We'll often see misalignment and a lack of focus on the right things, communication misfires around why the mission actually matters. We'll often team see teams that are task driven at the expense of relationships and then an unawareness of strengths and weaknesses and how they complement each other, how they help move you forward or how they hold you back. Other patterns are a lack of structure to support the work, elephants in the room, taboo topics, fear around failure that leads to lack of innovation. So many different patterns will see and be able to diagnose and say, hey, we need to have conversation around that because I think uncorking that will help you accelerate the mission.
Rich
That's cool. One of the things I love by reputation that I love about Slingshot is I love that you're asking those bigger questions, that it's not just like, okay, how do we get to. Let's just, let's get the next hire done and move on. It's like, you know, you're trying to ask those bigger questions and which I, which I think, you know, compliment to you and your organization that you're trying to. Because, you know, we, we know when we need the painkillers, but really we need to take some good vitamins over an extended period of time to make our things more healthy for sure.
Tim Foote
You know, Rich, when we jumped into staffing work almost 20 years ago now, we had to educate the church on the need to have outside advice around staffing. But it was a lot of art and as much science, and now we've developed so much science around the art with. With things like our candidate match tool. When you're looking for a leader, you have to align around what you actually want in that new leader. So many teams will say, hey, we need this, this, this, this, this, this, this. And in the end, they're looking for a purple unicorn. And, and that's not going to help. And we'll talk about that as we get deeper in the conversation. But Rich, last time I looked, unicorns are still mythical creatures and so need. And getting an awareness around alignment with who's around the table may actually change your idea of what you're looking for. Alignment is so important, and getting an awareness of what our strengths and weaknesses are. Are we focused on the right thing and are we actually moving the mission forward right now or is it stalled out?
Rich
Yeah, yeah, that's good. I. One of your consultants, I remember once I was in a conversation about that very issue and, and you know, we had really lofty goals for what we were trying to hire. And, and they walked us through that conversation where it was like, okay, well, let's think about how many of these people are actually out there. And you list off a half a dozen things that we were looking for, and you cut back and you think, well, how many people actually work in the church? How many people have worked as long as we want to work and have had experience that we did and have done the stuff that we want to do? And you literally get down to like, well, there might be three people, you know, like, you know, and so anyways, that's, that's, that's so true.
Tim Foote
That's what we'll often say there. There are maybe three to five people. When you have all of these filters in place, they can actually fill this role. And that's why you need to focus on ministry and you need to let us focus on finding those people.
Rich
That's good. Yeah, that's good. That's great. And, yeah, and if there's three to five and one of them is Jesus, the other is the Holy Spirit. So it's like, you know, you're down to just a very few.
Tim Foote
And Rich, let's not talk about why many, many teams wouldn't hire Jesus these days.
Rich
Yeah, yeah, that's a whole other topic. That's, that's great. Now you've got said something once that caught my attention and it's in my head has been branded to you. And it's that most of us were trained on a model, a leadership model that nobody named out loud, that everyone that we've all absorbed. What is that model? You know, what does it look like? And I know when you named this, I started seeing this everywhere I looked. I was like, oh, wow, I can see this in multiple different places in myself and in our organization. What is this model?
Tim Foote
Yeah, I mean, the model we see is hero driven leadership. It's when we rely too much on individuals to actually carry the mission. And I think the cracks have happened. I mean, we've seen it Rich, you and I, similar ages. I think the cracks are happening generationally. The builders and boomers were wired differently for a different time and culture. And us Gen X's, we can code switch. I mean, we see that happening all the time. And as we stepped into leadership, the cracks started to appear. I mean, we see it every week, another leader burning out, doing stupid things because of too much pressure. Then millennials and Gen Z are now leading in a new way that we need to embrace. And so I think we're seeing those cracks around that hero dependence and we're starting to see the need more than ever to have a team aware, a holistic approach, or we're just going to have leaders continue to burn out. And we see it around unrealistic hiring expectations, lack of support for great leaders when they're hired, a lack of development. Hero dependence is a terrible staffing and growth strategy and becomes a massive trap when it comes to a number of the key focus areas or patterns. We've seen that healthy teams focus on and move mission forward.
Rich
Yeah. See, this is the thing. When you, I heard you say that once and it, it literally I sat up and I was like, oh man, I've seen that in my own, you know, my own hiring. I've seen that in the way I've talked with, you know, I see the leaders around me. You see these people who, they've kind of built the entire ministry around themselves and they've built. It's like it doesn't work if they don't. It's like they're such a unique individual, they have to lift it all. But what makes that model so sticky? Like, why do we keep coming back to that?
Tim Foote
Why?
Rich
Even if we know, like intellectually in our heads, yeah, that's not good idea. It feels like we just keep coming back to this same thing, time. In fact, we actually reward it. We'll be like, wow, isn't that great? This person's amazing. And we just kind of keep moving on. Why is that?
Tim Foote
It's the shiny object trap. I mean, the shiny object, AKA the talented leader that we think is going to catapult the ministry. Often we see it in hiring conversations when a particular organization wants to go after somebody that's been at a much bigger organization than them. And often that person, if, if they can attract them, will come in with a playbook that isn't uniquely suited to the organization they're stepping into, or there aren't systems to support that new leader and the growth that's going to happen. And burnout happens at every level. But, but we both know rich, busy work makes us feel productive. But is it the right work? And, and we know that we can be ourselves, the shiny object. We, we want to. It feels good to be the hero. It feels good to be the one that's solving problems. It feels good to be the one that has all the answers. And I think that's one of the biggest threats in healthy leadership today, is feeling like you have to have all the answers. Because I think one of the most powerful statements from healthy leaders and healthy teams is, hey, we don't know what to do next, because it actually opens up the room for new thought, it opens up the room for collaboration, and it opens up the room for two teamwork. But it's easier to move quick. It's easier to move quick and be surrounded by people who agree and play it safe. And then down the road, we realized that we weren't growing in every sense of that word, and the mission was stalled out. We know we often have to slow down, re strategize, look at who's around the table, work out how we work together to move faster in the long term. We have to be vulnerable to make a team work. And sometimes it requires us to actually help others win than focus on heroes. I mean, you think about a winning sports team, it's not about just one person out there doing all the work. We've got to work together as a team. It's how do we work together and have less dependence on that shiny object, those standout leaders or those heroes.
Rich
Yeah, that's good. I love that. I remember years ago, we had a coach come in as a lead team and basically spent a week with us and then try to help us get better in our leading of our people. And I remember at the end of the week, the leader we brought in said, you answer way too many questions and I was like, what do you mean by that? And they're like, you need to ask more questions than you answer. You're putting yourself way too much in the middle of all of this. And you're not letting. And I was like, ooh, that's a good insight. You know, we're not raising up other people. We're trying to, you know, make it all about us rather than about our teams. Well, I'd love to talk about your book. So the title is Reaching for Remarkable. The seven Key Signatures behind Every Remarkable Team. Let's start with the word remarkable. You literally have it twice in your title and subtitle. Why remarkable? And how does that relate to hero? Because I was like, isn't that the same thing? Like, isn't it? Couldn't this be reaching for the heroic? So unpack that.
Tim Foote
I love that word, remarkable. And it's always been our mission at Slingshot, we build remarkable teams through staffing and coaching. Because your mission needs a remarkable of the team to move it forward. Jesus left us with the most remarkable mission and. But it wasn't enough. He needed a team to move it forward. And if Jesus needed a team to move it forward, we need to move it forward as a team. And so we've all got these unique expressions of that remarkable mission. But if that mission matters, your team matters more. And so when it comes to remarkable, it's about the mission. It all comes back to the mission. And we never fully arrive rich. We're always reaching. We've always got to be focusing on the right things, doing the deep work of, of, of reimagining, reinventing and removing forward to reach for remarkable momentum when it comes to our mission. But we're, we've got to focus on the team and the right areas to move that mission forward.
Rich
Yeah, that's good. So you actually talk about these. There's these seven key signatures. Can you take a little bit of time and just unpack those? We won't be able to get into all of them, but kind of talk us through. How does it hang together as kind of a big idea?
Tim Foote
Well, I'll give you a little bit of context behind why they're called key signatures. You mentioned it in the intro. In a former life, I was a working musician and I would do solo gear gigs. It was my tent making job to do ministry back in Australia. I would work three to five nights a week as a musician. And I always had way more fun working with other musicians in a team setting because a band is essentially a team. And my Best experiences, Rich, was when I was on stage with other musicians who are often better than me, but I was leading the band. We all lifted each other and to achieve remarkable results. There was structure to it. I mean, you know, there's structure to music. There's harmony and there's rhythm, and there's key signatures. There's tracks to run on that allow us to have a remarkable output. And so as I move from that world into team strategy world, team specialist, world building teams world, I realized, hey, there are also tracks to run on as a team to reach for health and reach for remarkable, remarkable output and remarkable momentum. And so that's where we came up with these seven key focus areas that we call the seven key signatures behind every remarkable team. And they're a pathway. They work together, and I'll. I'll run through them quickly, and then we can unpack what you. What you want to unpack with the time that we have left, Rich. But. And they're simple. I mean, these are patterns that I've observed over the last 16 years, staffing teams, but the last 30 years, growing in teams, learning from teams, leading teams. I mean, you and I both grew up in church, Rich, and I learned a lot of leadership lessons from being a volunteer on teams in my late teens and early twenties. So much. But these patterns, this pattern, or these key signatures start with number one, conviction. Conviction, which is a shared sense of why you exist and what you're called to do. It's the why behind the what. It's the Simon Sinic people. People buy why you do, not what you do. So that's number one is conviction. Number two is a message, a compelling and consistent way of communicating what matters most. Because, Rich, everything communicates. What's the story. Our leadership is communicating what we say, what we don't say, our actions, our systems and processes. What story is it communicating? That's number. Number three is culture, the values and behaviors that shape the soul of our team. How are people experiencing your ministry organization or your team? Number four is roles, unique contributions for remarkable impact, roles that clarify how we work together. Number five is systems, which is scalable design for remarkable growth system scale, ambition. Number six is friction, because healthy friction moves the mission forward. How do we embrace healthy friction for growth? And then the Last 1, Number 7, and these all build on each other is risk, which is bold moves that drive remarkable outcomes, initiatives that lead to breakthrough strategic risk, not blind gamble. So those are the seven.
Rich
Love it. And, you know, friends, I. I do think I would highly recommend that you Pick up copies of this book. To me, when I, when I saw this, to me, this feels like the kind of book that we should read together as a leadership team. Like, hey, let's pull this together. You know, maybe you're looking for a fall thing to do with your leadership team. This would be a great book for you to pick up and go together. There's a couple I would love to tease out a little bit. I'd love you to pull out for us. Help us understand. You differentiate between conviction and message. Two different things. Yes. I think lots of times we might collapse those into one. Why are they two separate? Help us understand the difference between those two.
Tim Foote
Absolutely. Conviction, again, is why we do what we do. Without shared conviction, you won't move the mission forward. There won't be a reason behind initiatives, they'll fall flat. There won't be a reason behind the message you're communicating. That's why they're different. So conviction is what keeps us in on the days we want to quit. I mean, think about the early church in Acts 4. It's a great, the best example of conviction, Peter declaring in Acts, Acts 4:20, we cannot help but speak about what we've seen and heard. They didn't just believe, they acted. It drove every decision. If the disciples were just compliant when Jesus ascended, they would have scattered. But because they were convicted, they nearly all of them gave their very lives for the mission. Conviction is our North Star. It's like calling. It's what keeps in the days, keeps you in it the days you want to quit. And Rich, we know there's going to be plenty of days you want to quit. Message, however, is, is the story we're communicating. It's how we hire fire onboard, develop. It's how we communicate our conviction and our overall mission. And we, in the book, we list a bunch of traps for each of these seven key signatures. And we can chat about some of the most common traps. But a common trap for message is assumption. We assume people understand and care like we to end care. And we don't ask enough questions. I mean, it's why Jesus ministry was full of questions, Rich, because he was, he was cementing conviction. I mean, Jesus asked the best questions and rarely gave the answers. He lived the answers and he teased the answers out because that's what led to conviction. That's why they build upon each other. You can't have a story without conviction. You can't have a message without conviction. And you can't have a healthy message unless you are asking the right Questions to make sure people are hearing and understanding it. Did you like, like did you understand what I just communicated? What did you just hear that I, that I said?
Rich
Right?
Tim Foote
Why, why, why are you so convicted to it by our mission? Why are you committed to it? So many great questions. The book is full of questions too. I'm a, I'm a serial question asker. They used to call me Quiz when I was a teenager because I questions. And it wasn't until later that a mentor and co founder of Slingshot Stan, and he called, I think you know him, Rich, that he, he convinced me that my proclivity for asking so many questions was actually a spiritual gift and not a special need. Because questions, questions move conversations forward.
Rich
Yeah, yeah, it's true. It's so good. And yeah, as I've shifted into full time coaching, I have found, yeah like that the, the skill of asking a good question. It's like, you know, I think the best moments I have with the people I'm working with are when we're, I'm asking questions and they're discovering they're tripping on to their own answers that maybe are a little different even than I would have, but just asking good questions. Super important. Okay. The. Another one that stood out to me of the. And again, friends, you're going to have to read all this. Obviously we can't cover this in just, you know, half an hour conversation. But, but talk to me about friction, healthy friction. So I literally have said as an executive pastor, my job was to remove friction from the organization. So when you say, oh, you know, lots of us are trying to remove it, I was like, ouch, that's me. Because I would, I want to find places where we're stuck and say, how do we get those unstuck and push this thing forward? So talk to me about why I'm wrong about friction.
Tim Foote
I was there too, Rich. I was absolutely there. But when I get to number six, when we're where speaking on this or teaching on this, I will often say, hey, number six is a. Wait. What. I thought this was the sign of an unhealthy team. I used to think that. I used to think that the harmonious teams were the healthy ones. That when I walked into a context where there was all harmony with the team that it was, there was health. The absence of friction was health. But it's not. It's a sign of unhealth. And I'm talking there's two kinds of friction, healthy and unhealthy. I'm talking about healthy friction. I mean you think about a car and how the rubber meets the road, causes friction, moves the car forward. If you don't have friction in your team, your mission isn't going anywhere. It's interesting. Zipia workplace survey found out that 76% of employees in the workplace avoid conflict, which is a real problem because healthy friction sharpens and aims teams while avoiding conflict leads to complacency and stagnation. Teams where members are passionately embracing friction will not only push through and forward to great results, they'll attract and retain, which is really important. They're going to attract and retain top leaders. It's where the mission truly comes alive and evolves to all it can be. Good leaders Rich know to allow it. They know not to control it, but closely monitor it. It we get to decide if the tension or friction we allow is healthy or unhealthy. We call this the loaded gun of the seven key signatures. Because when this gun goes off, it either breaks through a door or a wall that you needed to break through or somebody gets hurt. And good leaders know how to monitor that and help it break through and not damage other leaders.
Rich
Yeah, let's double click on that. Help me understand. So yeah, I'm going with you. I can see what you're saying. You know, healthy frict, you know, unhealthy friction, good friction, bad friction. So give me an example. You walk into it, you're working with a church and there's some telltale signs of friction. That's, that's negative. That's actually pulling the organization back. That's, that's, that could be potentially hurting or maybe has gone too far or what's, I'm not sure the best way to say that versus hey no, here's some, here's some good friction. That's actually some good heat here that's pushing the tires forward. Help us what does that look like?
Tim Foote
Like when it becomes personal rich. That's always the way, you know, it's trending towards unhealthy. We'll get to it in a minute but we've got a team assessment on our website now around these seven key signatures and we talk about unhealthy, inconsistent, functional, remarkable. Most, most teams live in that functional space. If you're below unhealthy, it's trending toxic. And that's when you need the, that's when you need the foresight group and Jenny Catching to come in and do some, some deep, deep culture work. I'm all ecosystem. I know you are too Rich. It's like when you need the deeper work, then you need the specialist, but right now you got the general practitioner. But, but when it gets, when it gets personal, you know that that's unhealthy friction. And let's go back to the harmony piece because that's one of the traps when it comes to friction. It's, it's the harmony trap. And it's like it's you wanting there to be, you know, violins and birds singing and for everybody to be loving each other. That' also a sign that there is unhealthy friction because there's things lurking that have been pushed down below the surface that are going to come out sideways, that if you had just dealt with it straight away, it actually could have become momentum for your mission. It's the unspoken influences trap. It's the, it's the elephants in the room. It's what everybody's thinking about, but nobody's talking about. That's going to. That's going to be insidious and it's going to chip away at the health of your team and it's going to become unhealthy friction. And so that's a great question to ask and that's in the book too. What's every thinking about? Nobody's talking about. Because that's what we need to engage now. If we think that's going to lead to unhealthy friction, let's have the conversations outside of the meeting so that when we get to the conversations inside of the meeting, we can engage. This is healthy friction that will actually address the topic and will move us forward rather than becoming personal and eroding relationships.
Rich
That's good. Yeah. That question, what's everybody thinking about that nobody's talking about? That's powerful. And I can see. Yeah. That even, even the organizations I've led, you can see where there's seasons where we try to push away that friction. And that can be just super negative. You know, it's like this. We're all just in la la land. We're all just, you know, I could see that for sure. So you wrote this book, you put this resource together, help me understand how you're hoping it will help our churches. You know, I'm picture I'm a church of a thousand people, maybe I'm the executive pastor. I've got a team of 12 to 15 people on my team. And how could this be a helpful resource for us?
Tim Foote
Well, I believe this is the most important work we need to be doing, Rich, because if your mission matters, your team matters more. So often we get so focused on the people we're serving that we forget the people we're serving with. And if we're stalling out mission mission wise then, then we're not moving forward and that's not and, and we're not being obedient to God's call. And so what I'm hoping is, I mean personally our kingdom first principle at Slingshot is to leave teams better than, than the way we found them. And the last thing we want to do is place great leaders on unhealthy teams. So what we're hoping is that teams are going to focus around these seven alignment areas and start to move mission forward, attract great leaders, retain great leaders. When we place, I mean I, you and I have both had healthy long term ministries at churches and it is a massive blessing when you, if God wills it and you stay somewhere long term. I want other people to experience that and that happens when the right leaders are placed on the right team. So what I'm hoping churches do is they take our team awareness assessment on our website reaching for remarkable.com which is attached to slingshotgroup.org and they get a sense of okay, where might we need attention in these seven key areas because it heat maps, it gives you percentages, you can take it as a team. And then to start the real important conversations, I mean I've been in rooms with this work rich where you start to see teams have conversation around alignment and teams that were, that were stale or leaders that were burnt out start to get a glimmer of hope that oh, if we start to have these conversations around these areas, if we walk this pathway, if we focus in these areas where we're struggling right now, we're going to start to see results. I mean I even think about the key signature of systems. You know, it's systems that scale remarkable growth. If we're not building systems to, to accommodate the growth that we keep praying for, God's not going to bring the increase because God isn't going to bring growth if it's going to hurt us. We have to be building the right kind of systems to support our teams and leaders so that the growth can come. It's a stewardship issue. So what I'm hoping happens in churches all over the place is that they start to focus on these key signatures and see mission momentum results. That moves them forward as an organization.
Rich
Yeah, that's so good. Why don't you tell us, you've mentioned it, but tell us a little bit more about the team Awareness assessment. Give us like a bit of a, you know, you've kind of given us an overview there. Give us a little bit more why we should take that test and give us that URL again that we can send people to.
Tim Foote
It's reaching for remarkable.com and it's, it's literally 10 minutes or less and it's free. As a leader, you can jump in and take it or you can sign up and, and take it as a team. And it gives you obviously the team percentage on each of these key signatures, but your own results. And when we've worked with real high performing teams, it's fascinating to watch these great leaders compare their individual percentage on each of these key signatures with their entire team. And just to see alignment start to happen in the right conversations to happen because we want to be able to focus in on where alignment is needed most. It may be real simple, Rich. Most teams live in that functional space, functional functionality, fine. But it's not going to get remarkable results. And our mission is too important. We have to focus on team alignment to move it forward.
Rich
Yeah, it's so good. Yeah. I was talking to a leader recently of a very large church and they were saying, you know, I just feel like, I feel like we got a GoPro. And what he was saying is, exactly what you're saying is like, hey, we're fine, we're functioning. But man, we want to go remarkable. We want to go from just, just because we can do this thing week in, week out in their case, have thousands of people show up, tens of thousands of people show up. But it's like, that's not enough. We got it. The mission's too important. We're trying to reach people. How do we go? Remarkable. Which to me, I think picking up a copies of these book to as a team would be a great first step. Where do people, where can people pick this up? Where can they get your book if they're looking for that? I'm assuming Amazon. But is there anywhere else we want to send them?
Tim Foote
No, Amazon. Amazon's the place to go. I mean we know these days where everybody's going. Amazon's away. And I would just add too Rich, that as a leader you want to know, this is information you want to have. I mean we talk, we've talked so much about self awareness and if we're in leadership, we need to show up to our team. Self awareness. So many profiles. We don't talk enough about team awareness. You need to know as a leader, if you're moving your mission forward or where you might be stalling out because it's too important. And these seven things, as I said earlier, Rich, they're not rocket science. I mean, I like to couch it this way. Conviction shapes the heart. Message shapes the voice. Voice culture shapes the atmosphere. Role shape contribution systems shape sustainability. Friction shapes growth. Risk shapes the future. And that's why I hope you'll dig into this with us, because we want to see the kingdom move forward and we want to see churches full of healthy teams that not only great leaders want to come be part of, great volunteers want to be a part of and help move this forward.
Rich
That's so good. Well, I think that's a great place to end it. I was like, man, that's. I'm like, I'm going to preach. Amen, brother. That's fantastic. If people. So we'll send them to Amazon, we'll put a link in the show notes for that. If people want to track with you or with Slingshot, where do we want to send them online to connect as well?
Tim Foote
Slingshotgroup.org is our company website and there's a bunch of great stories there. There's places that you can engage. We would love you to be in our ecosystem and yeah, you can jump over there to reaching for remarkable.com and we would love to come alongside you and help you continue to move forward in the unique ways that God has called you to.
Rich
Well, Tim, it's great to see you. It's. We were just remarking before we had dinner together a couple months ago. That was fun. But it was fun to put the recording on today and connect a little bit. Appreciate you, brother. Thanks so much for being here today.
Tim Foote
Thanks for having me.
Unseminary Podcast Host
Rich, thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Unseminary podcast. If you found today's conversation helpful, I'd share it with a friend in ministry. It's a simple way to spark new ideas and grow together. Also, don't Forget to visit unseminary.com to sign up for our email list. You'll get exclusive resources and practical tools delivered straight to your inbox to help you lead your church more effectively. Most importantly, importantly, take what you learned today and put it into action this week. Ministry Impact starts with small, intentional steps. See you next time.
unSeminary Podcast with Rich Birch and Guest Tim Foot (Slingshot Group)
Episode Date: June 18, 2026
In this episode, host Rich Birch welcomes Tim Foot, CEO and President of Slingshot Group, to discuss critical lessons in church leadership, team building, and the pitfalls of hero-dependent cultures within churches. Drawing from decades of experience, Tim explores why relying on superstar leaders is an unsustainable growth strategy and introduces practical frameworks from his new book, Reaching for Remarkable: The Seven Key Signatures Behind Every Remarkable Team. The conversation delves into tangible steps for cultivating healthy teams, leadership development, and creating church cultures primed for sustainable mission advancement.
"Placing the right leader on the right team exponentially moves the mission forward and affects culture in all kinds of ways." – Tim (03:51)
"Other patterns are a lack of structure to support the work, elephants in the room, taboo topics, fear around failure that leads to lack of innovation." – Tim (06:29)
"They're looking for a purple unicorn... Last time I looked, unicorns are still mythical creatures." – Tim (07:36)
"Hero dependence is a terrible staffing and growth strategy and becomes a massive trap when it comes to a number of the key focus areas." – Tim (11:33)
"It feels good to be the hero. It feels good to be the one that's solving problems... I think that's one of the biggest threats in healthy leadership today, is feeling like you have to have all the answers." – Tim (13:01)
"If Jesus needed a team to move it forward, we need to move it forward as a team." – Tim (15:48)
"They're simple...these are patterns that I've observed over the last 16 years, staffing teams, but the last 30 years, growing in teams, learning from teams, leading teams." – Tim (18:59)
"Conviction is what keeps us in on the days we want to quit." – Tim (21:04)
"Message, however, is the story we're communicating. It's how we hire, fire, onboard, develop." – Tim (21:36)
"If you don't have friction in your team, your mission isn't going anywhere." – Tim (24:41)
"If you had just dealt with it straight away, it actually could have become momentum for your mission." – Tim (28:05)
Tim introduces the free online Team Awareness Assessment at reachingforremarkable.com, which helps leadership teams diagnose strength and alignment across the seven key signatures.
"It gives you obviously the team percentage on each of these key signatures, but your own results... Most teams live in that functional space. But it's not going to get remarkable results." – Tim (32:59)
The book is positioned as an ideal team resource: a practical, question-driven guide for leadership teams eager to move from merely functional to truly remarkable.
"If your mission matters, your team matters more." – Tim (29:53)
The conversation is candid, practical, and filled with good-natured humor, relatable church leadership stories, and a deep commitment to mission-focused teamwork. Both Tim and Rich blend vulnerability about their own journeys with actionable advice for ministry leaders.
This summary provides a comprehensive roadmap of the episode’s most critical insights and is designed for ministry leaders seeking practical tools to move their teams beyond heroics to lasting impact.