I had another post I wanted to write but then I saw Penelope Trunk’s post “Figure out how much you should be paid (and three cheers for transparent salaries)” and I had to share it. Pastors please read her post! Please!

I can only comment from my own experience. In all the secular jobs I have had salaries were on a pay grade meaning all grade 7′s were paid the same except for length of employment increases. I believe my current ministry job also uses a pay grade structure to standardize salaries which is awesome and keeps everything transparent.

When I accepted my first ministry job outside of Los Angeles I had to sign a contract saying I would not discuss my salary. At the time I thought this was normal. My last position also wanted salaries to be covert. The reason given was if people know what other people are paid it would cause trouble between them. The real truth is leadership wanted to pay people differently and in many cases far lower than what their position is worth.

I do understand the need for saving money and payroll is a huge expense but there is no justification for salary abuse. Usually it is women who seem to be the biggest victim. Please don’t hate me for being honest because it is the truth.

When I found out how low of a salary one of my female employees was being paid I was in shock. I immediately went to correct the situation because she was a great employee and the situation was wrong. A male new hire that basically manipulated his way into a position that was not nearly as vital was hired at a salary far above what this girl made after years of faithful service. Leadership was upset with me for even trying to right this wrong because they didn’t understand management. My priority was to help the organization first. Then the employee! A happy employee is a productive employee and even a minor correction in her salary would make this situation better. If by chance this girl found out what the new hire made she might have left and I would not blame her one bit. As a worker her worth was far above the new hire so as a manager, although I was never given any authority to manage the department just responsibility (for one example this was the only job I have ever experienced where managers had absolutely no say in employees schedules. Employees literally told management when they were going to take time off and the person making the decision had utterly no knowledge of department workload. Extremely backwards and dysfunctional) I risked my own job to help the organization by asking leadership to increase her salary. It was the right thing to do. Eventually after I left the girl was given part of my responsibility and a few promises of a salary increase. After waiting two months the promises were never kept and she eventually left. I am proud of her for having the courage to make the change. If she had not left nothing would have changed because she was a quiet type and she was a woman. This hurt the organization as a whole because all of the staff knows what really went down and since she was the best the department is left with mainly marginal employees.

Please know this particular organization is headed by good people who just don’t know management and they are doing what they think to be right. Interesting enough the majority of church leadership has never had any real management or business experience. In addition, this is not any particular church – it is many! The story I wrote in the previous paragraph was not meant to condemn but to illustrate a real life example of how common it is for ministries to have covert employment policies and the adverse effects it has on the organization and employees. We speak on Sunday about integrity then we should have integrity in everything! You’ll hear me say this over and over. If you have to be covert about something and it is not a surprise birthday party then chances are it is NOT of God! If you want a healthy organization have EVERYTHING on the surface.

While I am here let me address two more issues in salaries. One is nepotism. It is in every organization yet in ministry it seems to be the norm. Phil Cooke wrote a great post on the subject “Why Nepotism Hurts Organizations” and I hope you all read it. Let me just echo Phil by saying your employees know what is up and they not only have lost respect for you, but also your relative or friend that is getting paid at a higher rate and not holding his/her own. Chances are your employees will never say anything but they are thinking about it, talking about it, and hating it – guaranteed!

The other is performance based bonus. Two years ago I received $17K in cash bonuses. It was literally blinding because I saw green and not reality. Not all “blessings” are of God and often a blessing can be given to manipulate. I am a little torn here because I do agree with a reward system yet I also see much wrong in it. Seth Godin wrote a post on how he was against bonuses which you can read here. At the time I was receiving huge performance bonuses so I didn’t agree or understand. Now I do! What happened to me and why I have changed my mind is my job was changed without communication meaning not only did I not have a say in it, I was not informed about it. I asked yet never received an answer. My performance did not change. In fact, I started to work harder and harder. But since my job changed, and there was absolutely no communication of what my new job was or what leadership wanted of me I stopped getting bonuses. If a bonus structure is established that is performance based, and you change an employee’s job so no matter how good they perform it is no longer relevant, than there is something seriously wrong with the system. It caused all kinds of different emotions in me and I was powerless to make any changes because open and honest communication was impossible to establish.

In ministry we are to be about people and about integrity. If your employment policies (including your salary structure) are kept secret than obviously you do not have a healthy organization. And no matter how hard you try to keep it a secret your employees (and volunteers) know everything and they talk about it often. If you don’t think they know, or that they are not talking about it,  you are not honest with yourself. The very best policy is being upfront, honest and transparent about everything including salaries.

“Never forget justice is what love looks like in public.” -Dr. Cornel West (thanks Brad)

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 12th, 2008 at 9:29 pm and is filed under My Big Mouth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.