Alban Weekly from The Duke Divinity School in Durham, North Carolina, United States "PRACTICAL WISDOM FOR LEADING CONGREGATIONS: How to Ruin a Team Ministry in Five Easy Steps-BUILDING AN EFFECTIVE TEAM MINISTRY IS DIFFICULT;
RUINING ONE IS EASY" for Monday, 29 August 2016
"How to Ruin a Team Ministry in Five Easy Steps""BUILDING AN EFFECTIVE TEAM MINISTRY IS DIFFICULT; RUINING ONE IS EASY"Practicing team ministry is like assembling Ikea furniture without the instructions. With both, there are many parts, each with a specific function, and no obvious clues for how everything fits together. And with both, you're sometimes tempted to toss everything aside and quit in frustration. It is by God's grace that bookshelves and ministry teams come together.
Whether in a congregation with many pastors, a church or school staff, or any other setting, ministering in partnership with others is a challenge. For it to work well, team ministry requires loyalty, patience, forgiveness and much, much more.
Building a thriving team ministry is difficult. But ruining a team ministry is easy. It is so easy, in fact, that it can be accomplished in just five simple steps. Follow these, and any team ministry is certain to implode.
Step 1. Have a large ego
If you want to destroy a team ministry, make sure that you always know best. Know, and make known, that your team members' ideas are always at least slightly inferior to your own. Their sermons are less engaging than yours, and their work ethic -- well, let's just say they could stand to work as hard as you do.
Egos destroy ministry teams. Keep the egos in check, and the ministry team can thrive. Easier said than done -- reining in the ego requires daily contrition, unending humility and being honest before God and others about your own failures.
Read more from A. Trevor Sutton »
Faith & Leadership
MANAGEMENT, TEAM MANAGEMENT
A. Trevor Sutton: How to ruin a team ministry in five easy steps
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Building a thriving team ministry is difficult, but ruining one is easy, says a Lutheran pastor. Follow these five simple steps, and any team ministry is certain to implode.
Practicing team ministry is like assembling Ikea furniture without the instructions. With both, there are many parts, each with a specific function, and no obvious clues for how everything fits together. And with both, you’re sometimes tempted to toss everything aside and quit in frustration. It is by God’s grace that bookshelves and ministry teams come together.
Whether in a congregation with many pastors, a church or school staff, or any other setting, ministering in partnership with others is a challenge. For it to work well, team ministry requires loyalty, patience, forgiveness and much, much more.
Building a thriving team ministry is difficult. But ruining a team ministry is easy. It is so easy, in fact, that it can be accomplished in just five simple steps. Follow these, and any team ministry is certain to implode.
Step 1. Have a large ego
If you want to destroy a team ministry, make sure that you always know best. Know, and make known, that your team members’ ideas are always at least slightly inferior to your own. Their sermons are less engaging than yours, and their work ethic -- well, let’s just say they could stand to work as hard as you do.
Egos destroy ministry teams. Keep the egos in check, and the ministry team can thrive. Easier said than done -- reining in the ego requires daily contrition, unending humility and being honest before God and others about your own failures.
Step 2. Keep score
Once you have established that you are the best person on the team, begin keeping a running tally of others’ failures. Keep a list of grievances, including such offenses as unanswered emails, overlooked details and botched sermons. Use your imagination! The possibilities are endless.
Watching for the mistakes of others is cancerous for team ministry. Scripture describes this as “counting up wrongdoing” (1 Corinthians 13:5).
Obviously, accountability should be a given in team ministry; clear expectations, high standards and mutual responsibility are vital. But if all you look for is others’ mistakes, then that is all you will find.
Step 3. Speak only for yourself
Don’t speak on behalf of your ministry teammates. Always, always avoid using words like “we” or “our.”
For example, don’t say, “We are working on …” or, “Let me tell you about our …” or, “Our team is focusing on …”
Instead, try to use singular pronouns as much as possible. Teams that are bound to collapse say things like, “He is trying to get everyone to …” or, “I don’t know anything about that -- it’s not my area” or, “She thinks that our leaders …”
The difference is in the pronouns. Team ministry lives and dies by first person plural pronouns.
Working together in a team ministry requires speaking for others. You must answer questions about your teammates’ areas of responsibility. You will have to defend your colleagues and their work. You may even have to promote their ideas over your own ideas.
Suggestions, questions and skepticism must be given privately; praise, support and enthusiasm must be given publicly.
Step 4. Stop praying for the team
If you’ve followed Steps 1-3, the hard work is over. The next step in destroying a team ministry is easy: stop praying.
This can take many shapes. Maybe you stop praying for God to give you humility, patience and love in your interactions with your team. Perhaps you stop praying for the others on your team. Or perhaps you stop praying with each other. The options for how to stop praying are endless, but the results are always the same -- a dysfunctional team ministry.
Prayer makes or breaks team ministry. Coming before God, admitting your mutual failures and seeking Christ’s forgiveness will protect a team ministry from implosion. Paul was serious when he said to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17).
Step 5. Lose trust
The coup de grâce for a battered team ministry is broken trust. A team may be able to survive inflated egos and petty score keeping. Partnerships might even endure long periods of ungenerous speech and prayerlessness. But broken trust spells the end of a team ministry.
Trust can be broken quickly. Lying and deceit, stealing and manipulation are certain to destroy it; such actions need happen only once. But trust can also be broken slowly. Minor breaches in trust -- fueled by the preceding four steps -- can build up to toxic levels. A ministry team without trust is done. Over. Gone.
So if you want to destroy a team ministry, follow those five easy steps. But if you want to build a team ministry that thrives, then do everything possible to avoid them.
Keep your ego in check. Keep no record of wrongdoing. Speak kindly and publicly on behalf of your teammates. Pray for them. And work with integrity so as to build and preserve trust.
God uses many different teammates to proclaim the gospel. Imperfect, broken, sinful people are on God’s team and doing the work of ministry. God leads us with the humility of Christ Jesus, unending forgiveness, generous speech, constant prayer and unbroken trust.
God’s kingdom is built with imperfect, broken, sinful people. And God can build a great ministry team in and through you.
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IDEAS THAT IMPACT: MINISTRY TEAM DYNAMICS
"Designing a Staff Team for Ministry"Whether you're working from the ground up to build an organizational structure where none existed or working with a broken structure inherited from a predecessor, four basic design features need to be addressed and resolved.
Read more from Gil Rendle & Susan Beaumont »
Designing a Staff Team for Ministry
Whether you’re working from the ground up to build an organizational structure where none existed or working with a broken structure inherited from a predecessor, four basic design features need to be addressed and resolved.
Division of Labor
How is the work that needs to be accomplished going to be divided among the available workers? And how will those divided tasks be grouped together?
In a structure with a horizontal orientation, staff functions are added on the same organizational level as the needs of the community grow. Jobs are grouped at the same level of the hierarchy according to processes or functional needs of the community.
The advantage of a horizontal structure is that people stay well connected to the vision of the leader. There isn’t much that goes on without the knowledge or involvement of the primary leader.
Of course, this is also the weakness of a horizontal structure. The size of the organization will be limited by the oversight capacity of its primary leader as the leader struggles to keep pace with the number of direct relationships that must be managed. This type of structure also struggles with communication barriers between functional areas. Each functional area tends to develop a silo mentality, seeing itself as distinct from each of the other functional areas.
A second division of labor option is to take a vertical approach to design. An organization with a vertical orientation might also be thought of as a tall organization. This type of design builds checks and balances into the system by adding levels of oversight. A disadvantage of vertical organizations is that they tend to be slower at decision making, and they do not develop critical decision-making skills at lower levels of the organization. The taller the structure, the longer it takes to work change through the system.
Ultimately, the choice that a leader makes about the division of labor on the staff team should be reflective of the mission of the congregation. As you make decisions about the division of labor on your staff team you need to consider what is unique about your context, the constituencies that you serve, and the values that you embrace.Integrating the Work
Integration refers to the extent and means by which an organization holds together its various parts and helps them work together to accomplish a shared goal. The primary ways that an organization’s design can contribute to the coordination of work efforts is through mutual adjustment, direct supervision, and the standardization of processes (drawing on the work of Judith Gordon, Organizational Behavior: A Diagnostic Approach).
- Mutual adjustments are the informal but direct communication links that develop between individuals within the organization. For example, the youth director and children’s director meet over coffee once a week to talk about family dynamics that are impacting students in both of their ministries. The amount of mutual adjustment within a staffing structure is as much a function of the culture of an organization as its design. However, a poor organizational design can prevent natural communication links from developing by creating arbitrary barriers.
- Shared direct supervision creates linkages within your system. When a supervisor has direct responsibility for two or more employees, the grouping of employees that he or she supervises will form natural linkages to one another. If the youth director and children’s director both report to the same supervisor, they are more likely to coordinate their work, either in joint meetings with that supervisor or informally, because both are operating from the same set of shared expectations. Each of these direct reports receives consistent messages about vision, approach, and outcomes because each goes back to the same source.
- Standardization of work processes. Two functions within your congregation that share the same database are more likely to develop natural linkages with one another than two functions that develop their own systems. Likewise, two functions that share a common leadership development pool will form natural points of connection. For example, if the youth director and the children’s director both engage the same processes for tracking attendance and participation, their work will more naturally align because both will be operating with a shared set of data.
The third major dimension of organizational design that should influence your staff-team design is the extent to which you desire centralized or decentralized decision making. In a centralized structure decision making is limited to the top post(s). In a decentralized structure the responsibility for decision making is disseminated throughout the organization.
Certain organizational designs will reinforce a centralized approach to decision making. The more vertical the organization, the greater the degree of centralized decision making. The flatter an organization, the greater the degree of decentralization. Why is this? The layers of an organization are decision-making repositories. The middle levels of organizations exist primarily to handle out-of-the-ordinary decision making and problem solving. When we reduce the number of levels in the structure, employees at all levels are forced to take on more decision-making responsibility.
Managerial Span of Control
The fourth and final dimension of organizational design is the managerial span of control. What is the optimum number of people and functions that a supervisor can oversee effectively? This question is basically concerned with the volume of interpersonal relationships that a supervisor can reasonably expect to maintain. The answer is different for every organization and for different parts of the same organization, so there is no easily prescribed answer.
As you consider the span of control for any individual manager, you need to consider both the number of formal and informal relationships that the supervisor is likely to have. This is important because the number of potential interpersonal relationships between a manager and subordinates increases geometrically as the number of subordinates increases arithmetically. Managers have to handle three types of relationships among their direct reports.
- First, they manage the one-on-one relationship between themselves and the direct subordinate.
- Second, they must manage their relationship with the group as a whole.
- Third, they manage the interpersonal relationships that unfold between members of their team.
he level of contact that a particular group of subordinates need. Employees that need more oversight will of course need to work for managers that have fewer direct reports. Greater one-on-one contact time is required for roles that have a greater level of ambiguity in design. Greater one-on-one contact time is generally required for staff members who are newer on the job. Supervisors who oversee these types of employees need to have fewer direct reports.
Jobs at lower levels of the organization tend to be more specialized and less complicated than jobs higher in the organization. Supervisors at lower levels of the organization can generally oversee the work of more employees because the jobs they are overseeing are less complex. At higher levels of the organization roles tend to become much broader and less specialized. Overseeing jobs at this level requires a much greater scope of knowledge and information. The higher you go in the organization, the fewer the number of direct reports that can be supervised effectively.
Finally, the ease of communication between the leader and subordinates will determine the number of direct reports. If some of the employees that the leader oversees are located at another physical site or work on a different schedule or come from a different cultural background, it may be difficult to establish easy lines of communication. Reduce the number of direct reports that an employee is responsible for if the lines of communication between supervisor and subordinate are difficult for any reason.
What’s the ‘Right’ Answer for Your Organization?
When it comes to the tricky work of staff-team design there are few right answers or formulas to follow. The four design features presented here are intended to provoke dialogue among the leaders of a congregation about what might work best in their setting. Ultimately, the leadership of a congregation is the only group that can decide whether the staff-team configuration is appropriate or not. Is it working well? Why? Does it seem broken? What might be changed to make it more effective? In all likelihood, the conversations about staff-team design will be more beneficial than whatever chart is drawn to depict that design.
Adapted from a forthcoming book on leading staff by Alban consultants Susan Beaumont and Gil Rendle. Copyright © 2007 by the Alban Institute. All rights reserved. For permission to reproduce, go to our permissions form.
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Creating a Culture of HelpfulnessHelping is a behavior that an institution (or a congregation) needs to inspire -- rather than force -- by integrating it into the way of work.
Read more from Gretchen Ziegenhals »
Faith & Leadership
MANAGEMENT, TEAM MANAGEMENT
Creating a culture of helpfulness
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FacebookTwitterEmailPrintHelping is a behavior that an institution needs to inspire rather than force by integrating it into the way of work.
A former participant in Foundations of Christian Leadership(link is external) told a sad story about the culture at her office. Despite the fact that she was new, she was repeatedly denied help from several colleagues whom she approached about a clerical matter. She was aided eventually by someone who told her that her officemates had refused to help her because she had used the wrong terminology.
What are the impediments to giving and receiving help at work? Why are some organizations better than others at embodying a culture of helping? Why is a culture of helpfulness important to well-run organizations?
As Christian leaders, most of us think of ourselves as nice, helpful people, but when we are in work settings, not-so-helpful dynamics often come into play. If we are feeling uncertain of our status within an organization, we are sometimes less inclined to help someone whom we view as competing for status. Other times our own pride and unwillingness to look weak or incompetent get in the way of our asking for help when we need it. We can also sometimes mistrust colleagues’ judgment or ability to help us get something right.
A recent article in Harvard Business Review looks at one organization’s emphasis on the importance of “collaborative help(link is external).” Collaborative help at IDEO lends “perspective, experience, and expertise that improve the quality and execution of ideas.” In fact, CEO Tim Brown says, “I believe that the more complex the problem, the more help you need.” But helping is a behavior that has to be inspired, not forced, according to the authors. IDEO has made helping the norm, through four strategies.
First, the top leaders need to support and model the idea of a helping culture. They need to not only ask regularly for help themselves, but be available and ready to help others within the organization. The leadership needs to expect that work will be done collaboratively.
Second, both the helpers and the “askers” need to be encouraged. Both are important aspects of the process. At IDEO there is no shame in asking for help, and not only the experts are approached. Employees were asked to rank their top five most helpful colleagues. While their number one and their number five had fairly equal expertise, number one was the most trustworthy and accessible, available in person and by email and not too overworked to help.
Third, “help is embedded in the entire design process.” By incorporating ways of asking for help into the brainstorming sessions, the design reviews, and the ways others give support and encouragement, IDEO “builds essential habits of mind.” Helping becomes habit when it is a built-in way of doing business.
Last, a key to collaborative help at IDEO is “allowing slack in the organization.” Incorporating some “give” in employee schedules means that people have some time to help one another, without feeling too stressed about their own responsibilities. Because the organization wants to encourage (not enforce) helping, it avoids overloading people with tasks of their own.
For Christian leaders, collaborative helping doesn’t just ring true theologically, it makes good organizational sense.
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FROM THE CONGREGATIONAL RESOURCE GUIDE:LET YOUR MISSION BE YOUR GUIDEYour congregational mission and vision statements should guide your work every day. These tools should focus your thoughts and actions as you carry out the work of your congregation. Center for Congregations president Tim Shapiro explores mission and vision in this blog on the Congregational Resource Guide.The Congregational Resource Guide (CRG) offers information and a variety of resources to help you create a mission and vision for your congregation. If you want to find information on other subjects, visit the CRG and type your topic into the search bar.
FROM THE ALBAN LIBRARY
No pastor sets out to fail, but statistics say 15 to 20 percent of pastors leave pastoral ministry within the first five years. One seminary administrator said that every person he had heard of leaving the ministry had done so because of a relationship failure. We cannot escape relationships in ministry, yet few seminaries offer courses in how to build healthy relationships. The assumption is that the type of person who is called to ministry will have all the "people skills" they need, which sadly is not always true. In Blessed Connections, seminary professor Judith Schwanz focuses on the person of the minister and the relational system of the minister's life. She spotlights three areas of connection -- relationship with self, relationships with other people, and relationship with God. Attending to these three primary connections will strengthen the pastor and cushion her or him against the pressures and stresses of daily ministry. Blessed Connections is ideal for seminary students and new pastors and includes "Assessment Journal" questions at the end of each chapter for personal application.
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Alban at Duke Divinity School
VISIT OUR WEBSITE
Alban at Duke Divinity School
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