I work with lots of teams that are either in crisis or transition. But I rarely hear of teams that are both achieving results and are a pleasure to be a part of. This is due, in part, to a misunderstanding of the "team."
Simply put, "team" is just business language for "community"—the glorious intersection of task and people. For thousands of years, the Bible has spoken of using our giftedness in community. Strong leadership emerges in biblically functioning, God-honoring, Christ-forming community. On the other hand, since community is made of people, you can be sure every community is susceptible to dysfunction. So how do we develop and sustain a group that doesn't simply tout the buzzword of teamwork, but is actually the real deal—a healthy, high-performing team?
My introduction to Patrick Lencioni's work on leadership came when my boss at Willow Creek Community Church assigned us to read the first 30 pages of The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive (Jossey-Bass, 2000) by our next meeting. I had been inoculated enough times to be skeptical of "the next best leadership book." So I took the book, nodded my head, and left with absolutely no intention of reading it.
The night before the meeting, a sliver of guilt prompted me, begrudgingly, to crack open the book so I could at least participate in a cursory discussion the next day. I read the book cover to cover—couldn't put it down—captivated by Patrick's leadership principles and his view of the dignity of people. I sensed I had just read one of those rare books that, if I could implement its ideas, would transform my leadership for years to come. Patrick's later book, however, may be his hallmark work: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Jossey-Bass, 2002). Focused on the leader's role in helping a team do its best work by overcoming common dysfunctions (I learned I was guilty of all five), the book is an excellent ministry resource. The result is a team that is aligned with their gifts, makes good decisions, gets great results, and loves working together. Let me explain how we applied his insights to our ministry teams.
Absence of Trust
Trust forms the foundation for everything else that happens on a team. Interestingly, though, I think ministry teams assume trust rather than work on building trust. Stop for a minute and think: can you name five things you have intentionally done in the last month to build trust on your team?
Trust takes time, but it doesn't take years. Trust can be broken, but it can also be repaired.
Conflict isn't pleasant, but it's your necessary friend. Don't avoid it. Insist on it.
Most of what has been written about trust focuses on character and competency, two key components of trust, to be sure. But Patrick pushes us to think of trust that's based on vulnerability. Vulnerability-based trust makes a team great; without it, people position themselves, and teams become what Patrick calls a "Petri dish for politics." Imagine, politics in a church?
When a leader admits to his or her weaknesses, they are inviting others to participate in leadership to fill the gap of what the leader cannot do. No one can do everything, and this kind of vulnerability allows for everyone on a team to contribute in meaningful ways.
I have worked for leaders who led from a façade of omni-competence and the best I could hope for was to be an implementer of their vision and their decisions. I have also worked for leaders who, because of their appropriate admission of weakness, have invited me to participate as a peer and really lead. I'll take the latter any day.
Vulnerability-based leadership invites others to initiate, innovate, and take ownership of the ministry by making significant contributions. In this way, energy is generated throughout the team and not only by the strong central leader. Our churches are hungry for this kind of leadership.
We recently spent two days with a church leadership team that, by all accounts, got along well but felt "stuck." They were a collection of well-run but very "silo-ed" areas without much collective direction.
Well into the second day, while we were talking about vision and strategy, the senior pastor interrupted and tentatively said, "I think I need to go back to yesterday when we were talking about trust. This is very hard for me to talk about, but …"
For the next thirty minutes or so, he poured out his heart. He explained how this had been the most difficult six-month period of leadership in his twenty-year career. He admitted that as it got more and more difficult, he hid more and more behind the façade of "I've got it under control." This invisible barrier created distance between himself and others. He avoided the difficult conversations as well as the honesty and vulnerability his staff needed, and they responded in kind by doing their work on the surface and ignoring the deeper issues that threatened to derail the church.
After he finished speaking, the staff responded in remarkable ways. The first person said how good it felt to get those words said aloud, where they could all respond to them. All of them said his words helped them understand what it would mean to really be a team that supported each other and had the courage to tackle the real issues they were all facing in the church.
Sometimes trust starts with just such a conversation, not a one-time conversation, but ongoing vulnerability that connects people in ways that produce significant results, both interpersonally and corporately.
Another significant thing that vulnerability does is cause our teams to be places where Christ is deeply formed in us. Church staffs and key volunteers ought to be the people who are the most "transformed into Christ-likeness." Our teams ought to be places of deep community where there is encouragement, challenge, prayer, and honesty. That can only happen when there are deep levels of trust.
This isn't just some touchy-feely concept; it is a practical component of leadership that allows teams to make better decisions, directly affecting results. If any teams ought to be building and maintaining trust, it is church leadership teams. The kind of community and leadership that exists at that level will inevitably replicate itself, in time, throughout the church.
Fear of Conflict
Of all the organizations we work with, churches tend to be the worst at engaging in conflict in an open and honest way. Somehow we've gotten the idea that Jesus was a Mr. Rogers character who just walked around with beautifully permed hair, blessing everyone. One look at the Gospels will tell you that Jesus was a walking defining moment. His call for transformation was often imbedded in rather terse and direct language.
Les and Leslie Parrot, Christian psychologists who work primarily in the area of marriage, insist, "Conflict is the only way to intimacy." That startling claim has enormous implications for teams as well as marriages.
Avoiding conflict almost guarantees that we will fail to build relationally deep teams, and that we will be unable to make the best decisions for the organization. When teams don't engage in healthy, passionate, unfiltered debate around the most important issues, they inject more politics into the organization and make mediocre decisions that will deliver mediocre results.
A number of years ago, we worked with a ministry team that found itself stuck in a number of areas. During our second day with them, some interpersonal conflict emerged that apparently had been simmering under the surface for years.
At the break, four or five members of the team found my partner and me and told us how glad they were that we were able to surface this issue, because it had frustrated them for such a long time. I was amazed that they had been wasting all of this time hoping someone else would talk about it. That team learned a lot that day about the value of honest, direct conversations versus languishing for months or years in chronic avoidance mode.
In another situation, one staff member had strong feelings about someone who had been fired five years previous. Interestingly, he had sort of held the rest of the team hostage since then by connecting almost every issue that came up for discussion back to this incident, which he perceived to have been terribly unfair.
At literally every break, someone on the team would corner my partner and me and tell us we had to confront this guy about his behavior—that it was the major obstacle to the team's functioning well. It was pretty telling that they thought this was our job after they had been allowing this to go on for years.
It was apparent that although his behavior certainly added to the dysfunction of the team, the rest of the team, by allowing him to get away with it, was no less dysfunctional.
When he finally brought the issue up one more time, I found myself exasperated and said, "Okay, let's assume that firing five years ago was the worst firing in the history of the church. And just for the sake of argument, I mean the Church Universal. Now, does there ever come a time, after discussion and process, that letting it go becomes the healthiest thing to do?"
The guy in question looked at me for about twenty seconds and then said, "I think I can do that. No one has asked me to do that before."
Everyone else on the team breathed a sigh of relief that someone had finally said it out loud, but I directed my next sentence to them: "You realize that by allowing this behavior to go on for five years without asking for a change, you have facilitated the problem."
A very interesting conversation ensued, and I could almost see the repair work being done on that team.
It's not always as simple as a conversation, but a conversation is almost always the starting point.
One of the biggest challenges a leader faces in helping the team get better in this is that you have to allow yourselves to do it poorly in order to learn to do it well. This isn't the kind of thing that you just read about, tell your team about, and then expect to do it well. It takes practice, sometimes painful practice.
But it is one of the most profound ways to grow a team. If one of the ways we can understand our ability to love is by our capacity to forgive, then conflict gives us a great arena in which to practice.
Conflict is basically energy, and when it is not dealt with directly, it goes somewhere else. Unaired conflict goes into the parking lot or behind closed doors. It becomes "malicious compliance" and results in artificial harmony, not deep community. Conflict isn't pleasant, but it's your necessary friend. Do not avoid it; insist on it.
Inability to Make a Commitment
Ever left a meeting wondering what, if anything, was actually decided? Ever lead one of those meetings? Healthy teams know when it is time to make a commitment, and they do it. There are no perfect decisions, but there are good and great ones. At the end of an appropriate amount of debate, there comes a time to decide and to plant the flag.
Different decisions require different amounts of time to debate before commitment. Great leaders help their teams calibrate the importance and time needed and then move the discussions toward that end. Once a decision has been given an appropriate amount of time, research, discussion, and input, great teams make commitments based on what emerges as the best decision possible.
Then, there is consistent execution based on that decision, rather than continual debate, second-guessing, or sabotaging the original decision. Doing the hard work before the decision allows you to release your full energies toward implementing the decision.
One team we are currently working with has just made some significant breakthroughs in this area. For years they had been operating in such a culture of fear that even when they made a decision, people were so afraid of making mistakes that they actually avoided the work that needed to be done.
They would end a meeting with a decision, and then the next week come back, either acting like they didn't know a decision had been made, or so overwhelmed with the work they already had on their plate that they came with a boatload of reasons why they hadn't gotten the work done.
Some of them didn't like the decision, so they were subtly sabotaging it by neglect, and others were just waiting to see if anyone really expected anything to change.
It wasn't until the senior leader began, at every meeting, reviewing the decisions that had been made and the resulting changes required that people on the team began to actually believe that they needed to implement the changes they'd decided on.
He started going around the team before the meeting ended and asking for a verbal "buy-in" to the decisions they had just made. Slowly—imperceptibly, at first—they began to gain momentum toward their ministry goals. Soon areas like evangelism and service to the poor began showing life.
Leadership is, at its heart, about the promises we make and the promises we keep.
Avoidance of Accountability
Holding people accountable is hard work, and it's not usually fun. In fact, I worry a bit about people who enjoy it too much. But we need it. And you don't have community or leadership without it.
In fact, most of us who have been leading for very long will have memories of a time when a leader we respected held us accountable. What might have been an awkward and embarrassing conversation, in retrospect, was a turning point in our development. Everyone needs that, and community is obligated to do that.
I have had ministry leaders talk to me about talks I gave that needed more work, leadership decisions that were not well thought through, and interpersonal relationships that could have been handled more honestly or kindly. In the moment, I did not like any of those discussions. I was embarrassed and hoped they would just go away. But they didn't, and now I am glad they didn't.
I delivered my fourth or fifth sermon as a staff member at Willow Creek when our senior pastor, Bill, was out of town. The previous sermons had been debriefed and coached through with him, and when he returned from his trip, he called me into his office to do the same with this sermon.
I had my pad of paper with me to take notes. Then he asked me, "What were you thinking?" I began to explain the structure of my talk.
"No, Nancy, that was a rhetorical question," he said. "When I listened to this sermon, I had no clear sense of what you were saying, and it felt to me like you had not given it the work it needed to be a good talk."
Now, at that moment I was wishing that the ground would simply open up and swallow one of us. I was just still debating which one of us. I was mortified, embarrassed, defensive, and mad.
Oh, and one more thing. He was right.
I'm not sure if it was because my first few sermons had gone well that I figured I didn't have to work as hard, or what. But he was right. I had not done the kind of diligent work on that talk that I owed the congregation. Not only was he right about my failure, but he was right, too, to hold me accountable.
Great teams get to the point where the members hold each other accountable. Failing to live up to group commitments does not result in private, one-on-one talks about the failure but to team discussions of accountability. Teams do this so they can pursue the cause about which they feel so deeply, and so that they are involved in helping each other learn and grow.
Inattention to Results
Here is the tension that we all live with in ministry leadership: the results are not completely in our hands, and we are to work with all of our efforts to accomplish the results. Much of leadership is about managing tensions, and this is a big one.
In Joshua, the nation of Israel stood poised on the east side of Jordan, waiting to cross. This moment was the culmination of over 400 years of captivity in Egypt and 40 years wandering in the desert. Generations had gathered their children by the fire and told of the coming day when they would be in the land that God had promised them: a land whose trees groaned under the burden of the abundant fruit they bore.
Repeated 14 times in the book of Joshua was the phrase "the Lord has given you the land." Sounds easy enough. We have waited for hundreds of years, and God promised, so let's go.
The second most repeated phrase in Joshua is "Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid." You see, Israel, even in the face of the promise, still had a lot of battles to fight. And for us, there's a tension between what only God can do and what he expects us to do to allow him to do his work.
As leaders in the church, we understand that results are not completely in our hands. We are not ultimately responsible for everything. However that is very different from saying that it is okay to rationalize the fact that the ministry is not moving forward because of our poor or misguided efforts.
Great leaders perform autopsies on poor results. They are constant learners and listen to God, as best they can, and relentlessly pursue doing things better and more effectively. They are passionate about results, because results affect people. Sometimes results are people.
Even in churches, it is possible to get our eyes off of people and onto the wrong things. People in teams should be transformed, and the people with whom we are doing ministry should be transformed. The work we do should result in the grace of God pouring out into his beautiful and broken world.
What could we have done differently? What did we learn from this, for future decisions? Has this ministry been allowed to go past its prime, and is there, perhaps, a new and better way? These are the questions of a team that build great ministries that deeply impact people for Christ.
As leaders it is great to see clearly what dysfunctions can derail a team and put our best efforts toward overcoming them. It will take courage and perseverance, but it will be worth it. It will create a culture in your churches in which teams become a place where people can come and do what they do best with people they love being with. What a great picture of the Kingdom.
Nancy Ortberg is a founding partner of Teamworx2, a consulting firm. She and her husband, John, live in the Bay Area of California. www.teamworx2.com
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