This is an excerpt from my leadership book, Leading into the 21st Century…and Beyond! 2.0. If you enjoy it, click on the link to get your copy! It is available as both a paperback and an ebook.
How Healthy is Your Team?
“Since God chose you to be the holy people whom he loves, you must clothe yourselves with tenderhearted mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. You must make allowance for each other’s faults and forgive the person who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others. And the most important piece of clothing you must wear is love. Love is what binds us all together in perfect harmony.” (Colossians 3:12-14)
It is no secret that the health of our leadership team is what will ultimately determine the health of our organization. An unhealthy team will eventually affect the entire church, company, or organization. What are some of the things that we can do to keep our team healthy?
1. Support your leaders.
This sounds so basic, yet how often do you hear people criticizing and berating those who are over us? We should always speak well of our leaders in public. If we criticize and gossip, we are giving everyone else in the organization permission to do the same thing. If we have disagreements, they should be handled behind closed doors, not in public.
Another way that we can support our leaders is to give them positive feedback. Just because they are the boss does not mean that they do not need encouragement. Encouragement is oxygen for the soul and those over us need it like everyone else.
Another aspect of supporting our leaders is that we need to give them grace. As the passage above says, “You must make allowance for each other’s faults…” Everyone has a bad day, even the boss. Let’s extend the same grace to them that we would like to have extended to us.
2. Support your fellow team-members.
As a team we have to look out for each other. This does not mean that we have to all be best friends. Of course, it helps if we are friends and actually like each other. Team dynamics, though, often can create tension in the relationships on the team.
One of the ways that we can support our team-members is by speaking well of them in public. It is always easy to criticize someone that we do not like or agree with. By having a default setting of always speaking positively of our co-workers and teammates, we are presenting a unified front to the rest of the organization. If we have a problem with a co-worker, we should be mature enough to confront them instead of gossiping about them.
Encouraging our fellow team-members is another way that we can support them. It can be difficult sometimes to encourage a co-worker’s accomplishments, especially if we feel that we are in competition with them. Encouragement, however, helps us to create a positive atmosphere on our team. Everyone wants to work in this kind of atmosphere. If we can create a culture of celebrating each other’s successes, we are going a long way to creating a healthy team and ultimately, a healthy organization.
Another way that we show support for our co-workers is by giving them grace. As we said above, everyone can have a bad day. If we can learn how to extend the grace that we would like to receive when we are having a bad day, things will go much smoother.
3. Remember your mission.
Why are we there? Our organizational mission should define everything that we do as a team. Everyone on the team should be clear on the leader’s vision and where the organization is going. It is good to revisit the vision from time-to-time to keep everyone focused on what we are supposed to be doing. A strong sense of mission will go a long way to creating a strong sense of unity among our team.
What other things would you add to the list for keeping your team healthy?
Annie and I are serving the Lord in the US, Africa, India, and in South America. Would you consider joining our team? Just click here to get involved. Thanks so much!
