Building Your Leaders
October 1, 1999
How to develop key people
"You have to learn to share." Coaxing from my mom didn't convince me. Nor
did seminary discussions on servant leadership. Only when I decided to move our church to a team-based ministry did I begin
to learn what shared ministry really meant. In the past I would have argued
our church was team-friendly, but we weren't. Teams, I discovered, are
mostly about sharing—sharing goals and sharing life. It takes the first
to act like a team and the second to feel like a team. Sharing goals
Team members, of course, need to accomplish something to feel productive.
Like the players of any sports team, each needs to know that she or he has
executed the play and seen some results. But drift and entropy are constant
threats. Each year every staff person develops a MAP—a Ministry Action
Plan. These plans are distributed to the entire staff, and then each person
discusses his MAP with his or her ministry team. When the
tyranny of the urgent begins to crowd out someone's stated goals, the
team leader explores the reason behind it. One person was recently challenged
to evaluate whether the changes in her activities were on purpose or simply
covering for the lack of growth in another staff person. The point is that to function effectively as a team requires process. The
management maxim "Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result
you're getting" is true. In an effective system, the leader acts as
a catalyst, ensuring there is an agenda for each meeting, that there are
individual assignments with accountability, that progress is evaluated and
measured. Systems allow a team to be process-oriented rather than
people-dependent, freeing up people to do the work of the ministry. Fun ...
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