Whether your church or organization is large or small, it needs a team. Better than that, it needs a high performing team.
How do you get one in place? Warren Bird studied some of the best teams around today, and shares his findings.
Welcome to Episode 28 of the podcast.
Guest Links
Teams that Thrive: Five Discipline of Collaborative Church Leadership
How to Break Church Growth Barriers: Capturing Overlooked Opportunities for Church Growth
Links Mentioned in this Episode
OrangeConference.com/SeniorLeader
The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business by Patrick Lencioni
Cracking your Church’s Culture Code: Seven Keys to Unleashing Vision and Inspiration by Samuel R. Chand
The 7 Practices of Effective Ministry (North Point Resources) by Andy Stanley
3 Things You Can Do Right Away
Your team is one of the biggest assets to leadership, and how you function as a group can either accelerate or kill the growth of your ministry. Warren Bird has worked with multiple churches and compiled a series of research to determine how teams can be more productive and what forwards the church’s mission.
1. Kill church conflict. Replace it with constructive debate. More than anything else, church conflict kills growth. Do whatever you need to do to stop the bickering, fighting and quarrelling that kill far too many churches and organizations.
Instead, replace it with constructive debate. The way to have a constructive debate is to ensure your team is aligned around a common mission, vision and strategy. When that happens, real discussion is much more constructive and productive. If you’re wondering how to get the right people around the leadership table, I wrote a post on who you can trust in leadership here.
2. Break the lone leader model. Even if you have no team, create one. For example, if you do hospital visitation as a pastor, bring someone with you next time. Never lead alone. Start training, empowering and releasing your team. The first step is to stop leading alone.
3. Decide which level of delegation you’ll assign to your team. Delegation within teams happens in multiple stages:
a. Tell me what you think I ought to do, and then we’ll do it together.
b. Tell me what you’re going to do and then proceed.
cb. Take care of it, but let me know what happened.
d. Take care of it. As the leader, I don’t need to know what happened.
So often, misunderstandings happen because of a miscommunication about delegation. Understanding your level of empowerment is part of the rhythm of a healthy team and a delegated ministry.
People can’t read your mind as a leader. If you’re stalled on making a decision, you’re never going to grow. If you have to wait every month or every week to make a decision, you can’t respond and be lean enough to make the kind of calls you need to make in the moment as a team.
Quotes from Warren
CNLP 028: How To Create High Performing Teams in Any Size Organization—An Interview with Warren Bird Click To Tweet CNLP 028: How To Create High Performing Teams in Any Size Organization—An Interview with Warren Bird Click To Tweet CNLP 028: How To Create High Performing Teams in Any Size Organization—An Interview with Warren Bird Click To Tweet CNLP 028: How To Create High Performing Teams in Any Size Organization—An Interview with Warren Bird Click To TweetA New Episode Every Week…Just Subscribe
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Next Episode: John Stickl
At 29, John Stickl became the pastor of a church of 1500.
4 years later, the church is 4500 and is growing with millennials who are anxious to connect with God.
John talks about how his leadership team listens for the voice of God and how this journey has stretched him as a leader.
Subscribe for free now, and you won’t miss Episode 29.
