Across the churches with at least three consecutive quarterly snapshots, volunteer-reported Team Health scores consistently move before every other measured group's do — usually by two to three quarters.
Leadership scores, by contrast, tend to hold steady even as the underlying number erodes, because leaders are the group furthest from day-to-day friction and the last to feel it directly.
That ordering makes volunteer sentiment a genuinely useful early-warning input, not just one more data point to average in with the rest.