Being on a team that is filled with joy, passion, and purpose is invigorating. Being on a team where the collective soul lacks joy adversely impacts everyone. A joyless team harms the people on the team and those the team serves. Here are five common reasons joy eludes a team:

When the mission is unclear, team members scatter and move in a plethora of directions. Unity around a shared mission and clear direction breathes life into a team. People show up knowing what the team is on the planet to accomplish. What is often most satisfying is also most challenging, so a grand mission can raise the buy-in and energy of the team.

It’s time for our annual round-up of the biggest Pinocchios of the year.

The 2016 presidential campaign has dominated our coverage of false claims. In particular, businessman Donald Trump — who has soared to the top of the GOP field — kept us busy. In the space of just six months, he earned 11 Four-Pinocchio ratings, far more than any other candidate.

Most politicians drop a claim after it has been fact-checked as false. But Trump is unusual in that he always insists he is right, no matter how little evidence he has for his claim. Frankly, it’s really not interesting to fact check The Donald, as his assertions are so easily debunked. Still, he scores a hat trick on this list.

Exactly seven years ago, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to almost zero in order to nurse the ailing economy back to health. Today, it changed direction. The Fed believes that the economy is strong enough that it can withstand slightly higher rates and that now is the time to take action to prevent excessive inflation from breaking out in the future.

But what does it even mean when people talk about “raising rates,” and how does it actually affect the economy? It turns out they’re talking about an intricate series of events affecting everything from how many people have a job to what they pay for groceries. It’s kind of like a Rube Goldberg machine, those incredibly complicated devices built to accomplish a simple task. So we built one to explain what happens when the Fed raises rates.

Democrats hold advantages in party identification among blacks, Asians, Hispanics, well-educated adults and Millennials. Republicans have leads among whites – particularly white men, those with less education and evangelical Protestants – as well as members of the Silent Generation.

A new analysis of long-term trends in party affiliation among the public provides a detailed portrait of where the parties stand among various groups in the population. It draws on more than 25,000 interviews conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2014, which allows examination of partisan affiliation across even relatively small racial, ethnic, educational and income subgroups. (Explore detailed tables for 2014 here.)

I recently had a coaching conversation with one of our most effective small group leaders who is phenomenal at discipling students. He is so effective, in fact, that he has recently multiplied his small group into two thriving small groups. He shared with me that his small group was growing and thriving, yet his soul was shriveling and dying. You see he was not in biblical community himself. He was all in as a leader. He knew exactly how to teach students the importance of modeling community, but he had failed at leading himself. He was in the beginning stages of burn out.

As I coached and mentored him on his own need for small group community while sipping on my hot pumpkin macchiato, I began to realize how I also lacked and longed for more community after taking a break for the summer with our own personal small group.

I wonder how many are sitting in the very same place? We may be good at preaching about small groups and community while being awful at truly practicing what we preach.