I can only speak from what I’ve discovered with my teams, and hopefully it will inspire something for you. These are in no particular order to these since I believe each, in some way, informs the others.
A team is more than its individuals. There’s a tremendous difference between a group of people who individually divide up their work to accomplish a task and a group that works together toward something more. The former can produce excellent yet disjointed tasks that remain looking like a wall full of sticky notes. The latter evokes a budding art form that surprises everyone as it takes on a life of its own. One of the hardest things to do is encourage teams to move through individualistic (often brilliant) patterns into the realm where efforts and personalities create something that no one can create on his own. This process takes time and is certainly less efficient, requiring leadership that protects the process.
Process is more important than product. I don’t mean to be extreme (maybe I do). I’ve experienced too many teams complete tasks only to end up more unhealthy, more burned out, and more at odds with each other than when they began. Somehow the process got the product done but killed everyone in the meantime. I believe attention to the process nurtures transformation more than an end product. It’s where the members make meaning of their experiences and are challenged to reframe success beyond end results.
Often, this is where dysfunction is confronted—even the “beneficial” dysfunctions like workaholism, self-promotion, isolationism, or guilt/fear motivations. There are goals within the goal that surface as people get closer to a project, to each other, and to oneself. Leadership creates space for each person to reflect on how he is making sense of the project’s multiple layers, resisting internal and external pressures to merely produce. The end results, then, are celebration and formation, not merely checking something off the list and reinforcing dysfunction in the name of “efficiency” or worse, “ministry.”
Words, writing, and language matter. I get grief from my peers and teams for being a document guy. I like to write things down so my teams get the full context of my ideas. It’s through documents that others can interact with my ideas, improving them, making them better so an idea moves from becoming mine to ours. My goal is that, when our teams talk about research, ministry philosophy, or theological concepts, we all have a clear sense of what we mean and where we’re going together. Words, writing, and language become pathways toward dialogue rather than one-way orders or defensive walls. This requires great trust in each other to put an idea (and ego!) out there to be critiqued and changed, hoping and believing that dialogue is always better than monologue.
Reading, thinking, and discourse are crucial. My team also gives me a hard time for perpetually sending them articles I think will help them think about their interests. My hope is that they remember they’re part of a bigger conversation that’s happening around us. What’s fun is that I’m now receiving articles from my teammates. Maybe it’s payback, or maybe our team is developing the discipline of keeping an eye on this broader landscape of the conversation. And here’s my most hopeful secret—I believe they have something to add to the conversation. Watch for their articles. They’re coming…
Delegating is stupid. Go ahead and quote Jethro’s advice to Moses, but don’t use this as a support for delegation. Delegation often becomes a buzzword for leaders passing off things they don’t like to do, which is not encouraging to team members. True delegation (if we must use that term) is more about a leader admitting limitation, trusting others, and nurturing others’ callings. It is a posture of trust, not a posture of power. When you “delegate,” may you not only delegate task but also the authority that goes with it. May the receiver of delegation know that a new responsibility has been given to him because he is believed in and his contribution will help the team and his own next steps of personal growth. Any other sort of delegation that is shortsighted or last minute is stupid. If you doubt this, when you ask your teammates to do something, do they look up (pick me!), or look down (please don’t pick me)?
Teams can “lead” themselves.
A final thought is that leaders of teams have a role, but there is a greater corrective, and that is when a team leads itself; when quality is shared; when everyone is supportive; when help is asked for; when challenge is done in love; when there is laughter along the way; when each person is changing for the better. Then, something’s happening. The best thing a leader can often do is use her power to clear the way (time, resource, encouragement, etc.) to let things happen and allow the team to become just that—a team.
As I reflect on my list, one common theme I see is that my crucials are not quick fixes. Most are process-oriented postures that challenge me to commit to the long haul, to resist short-term success, to patiently nurture space for individual and group transformation. It’s the team that matters. Not me.
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As one who has led teams now for more than 25 years, I wish I could say that every team I’ve led has been a resounding success story, but I’d be lying. What I can say is that the longer I do this, the better I become at it. In the case of leading teams, experience really has been the best teacher.
That said, let me offer two suggestions I have found particularly helpful in leading ministry teams. (My focus will be on leading the team itself, rather than recruiting the team. Slant 33 did a series of articles on recruiting previously that can be found here.
Take time to build relationships with the other members of the team.
Some of us are so task oriented that we too often see team members as extra appendages of our bodies. Just give them a task to do and set them loose is our thinking.
However, that is a terribly misguided notion. We have to remember that the members of our team are people; people who crave relationships and who often work best in the context of community support and encouragement. When we fail to truly get to know others (their families and life situations, their passions, their walks with God, their talents and abilities, etc.), then we end up treating them as objects to fulfill our needs rather than seeing them as people made in the image of God who have valuable things to offer the team and the kingdom. Relationships should always precede tasks.
Building relationships with the other members of the team also allows you to build trust. The more you know about them, the more you can trust them. Similarly, the more they know about you, the more they can trust you. I discovered that when your team members know you are for them, they are much more willing to assume your decisions are for the best, even if they don’t always understand the why behind them. Without this type of trust, you can easily be misperceived in your decisions and direction. As a colleague of mine is fond of saying, “An action uninterpreted is an action misunderstood.” When we build this type of relationship with our team members, we become better at communicating the actions we are taking as a leader and explaining why we are taking them.
When I was a local church youth pastor, we did many things to encourage the building of relationships. We had monthly sponsor meetings, where the focus of the first 30-45 minutes was simply food and fellowship. I found that during this time, people would talk about what was going on in their lives. It became a wonderful time as people shared with each other, often taking time to stop and pray with and for each other.
We also tried to offer an annual sponsor retreat each fall. It was a lot of work to get enough volunteers to cover all the Sunday school classes, small groups, and other youth ministry positions that would normally be needed during a weekend. But I found it incredibly fruitful when we could gather all of our youth ministry workers and spend a weekend playing together, dreaming together, and planning for the upcoming year. As part of our worship times together, our adult workers learned that their community was the body of youth workers, and they learned to lean on each other the rest of the year.
Put people in positions to succeed, and then empower them to do so. Most of the volunteers I’ve had on my teams are professional people who are very talented in their jobs. They are given huge responsibilities at work and expected to handle the jobs flawlessly. And the vast majority of the time, they succeed.
Why is it, then, that when it comes to giving people responsibilities for ministry, we too often default either to not giving them any real responsibility, or giving them responsibilities but never any real authority to carry the tasks out, insisting that they run everything through us?
It’s important that we give real responsibility to people, but we also have to know their level of handling a task. (This can only happen through truly knowing the other person, as mentioned above.) It is demeaning to a well-trained person not to give her real authority to determine how to do something, even if she does it differently than you would. Similarly, it can feel oppressive to give someone a task he is not equipped to handle. All of us have had someone volunteer to take on a specific task of ministry only to fail. I’m convinced that most of the time, their failures are really our failures because we failed to make sure we had the right people for the right job.
In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins refers to this as getting the right people on the bus. For those of us in youth ministry, it means we first have to know what our real needs are then work hard to find people with the right mix of gifts who can succeed in the ministry areas to which we assign them.
When we lead teams by these principles, we develop a group of people who are willing to give everything to ensure the ministry succeeds. They do this because they believe in you as the leader and the vision you’ve cast. They do it because they find the community that is present to be vitally important in helping them live out their Christian faith. And they do it because they like to be successful, and the team allows them to do that.
Leading teams can be tough, but it can also be one of the most rewarding things you’ll ever do if you get the right people doing the right jobs and learning to build deep relationships one with the other.
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In Em Griffin’s IVP book from some years ago, Getting Together: A Guide for Good Groups, he summarized as succinctly as I ever heard how research on group dynamics collects around three factors that predict success and satisfaction. Whenever I think of leading teams, I run through my version of this mental checklist.
Where are we going? Ensuring there is a clear and commonly shared purpose, vision, and direction for any team is one of the most important elements to leading. A team imposes expectation of time and commitment on its members. Ultimately, everyone decides whether the cause is worth an investment.
The worst teams I’ve been part of have either been fuzzy about their reason for existence or their focus has shifted. Sometimes the change of direction is intentional. That’s fair, but team members need to have the opportunity to reevaluate their commitment when that takes place. At other times, teams simply get distracted by all of the other collateral causes they encounter while working on their main purpose. When that happens, the sense of dissatisfaction sneaks up on us a bit more slowly until we awaken one day to the realization that we “didn’t sign up for this.”
New coaches often bring changes in philosophy and direction to the teams they lead. They talk about how their squad has or has not bought in to the vision of what is now going to be attempted together. This psychological ownership of direction is a dynamic factor for those of us who lead teams. It should never be assumed, and we can’t work too hard at making sure that our purposes are clear and everyone is on board.
How do I fit? Teams are beautiful things when they work well. Their interdependence, coordination, synchronicity, and synergy introduce potential for accomplishment that simply can’t be matched by a collection of individual efforts. One of the important predictors of a team’s success is the degree to which every member of the team knows how she contributes to the common goal.
Sometimes these roles are identified formally. Bill always takes notes at our meetings. Jarrod translates our work for distribution through social media outlets. Nina pays attention to the calendar and ensures that our next steps are clear. But other roles emerge from within the dynamics of a group experience. We look to Tim for problem-solving analysis, and Joel supplies the right blend of humor and curiosity to keep things energized. It doesn’t matter much whether our team roles are formal or informal. What does matter is that every member realizes that the part he plays is necessary—not optional—as we co-labor toward a shared vision. Team leaders earn their keep by making sure everyone knows where he fits and feels valued for her contribution.
Are we tight? This last factor predicting team success is a little more slippery to get hold of. It testifies to a group’s cohesion, its members’ belief in each other, and the great sense of camaraderie that’s experienced together. Often it’s as simple as really liking being a member of this team. This factor should not be underestimated. It’s the glue that holds some teams together when challenges are particularly daunting. When it is not present, people begin to feel like belonging is no big deal.
Church softball or bowling teams all across the country are successful without ever posting winning records because they have created a sense of “we-ness” that is compelling to all sorts of non-athletes. When team members simply want to be part of whatever we’re doing simply because we’re doing it together, we’ve probably got a group that benefits from some good stickiness.
Leaders help make this happen by paying attention to the little things that pop up spontaneously to cement the group together. Shared experiences that supply vivid and colorful memories are particularly effective means to bind us together. We can plan for space to make them happen, like we do when we take team retreats. But we can’t always predict what amazing moments will take place or when. Good leaders notice the sparks that have the chance to fuel a fire of cohesion and fan them well.
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