Mistakes to Avoid in Building a Team, pt1
Leadership in Context with Keith Tucci
Episode 059
If you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go far, you go with a team. Building a team is front-end loaded. You have to put more investment into that team than what that team is able to do initially.
When building a team, the very first thing that should take place is that your team should pick up on your care, your concern, your heart. Vision without care and concern is just a strategy that falls to the ground.
How does our team pick up our heart? They don’t get that from a Sunday morning sermon. They may get inspired, and that may be the tool that God uses to open their heart, but often good preaching goes airy because we don’t follow up. Preaching plows the ground, but the seed still has to be planted. That seed, in this case, is going over the Word that was preached, asking what God is doing in their life, meeting with them one-on-one.
Multiplying ourselves is critical if we want to go far.
The book of Titus is a great leadership manual. The first three chapters are about what to do and how to lead.
Titus 3:3
For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another.
This is surely not a list of leadership qualifications. Paul was reminding them how they started out. He is asking them to remember how they were until the grace of God really gripped their lives.
Mistake #1: Putting team building on hold to wait for better people.
My philosophy and strategy is that you use what you have. Your initial leadership team and subsequent leadership teams—even if they aren’t the greatest preachers, teachers, strategists, prophets, administrators—they are people who can be the conduit for your DNA to seep into the soil of the ground that you are trying to saturate.
2 Corinthians 8:12
…it is acceptable according to what a person has, not according to what he does not have.
Developing a Team
1. Develop relationship with the best candidates you have.Sit down with them one-on-one. Don’t ask them about joining a team or to do anything. Sit down and minister to them. Ask them what is going on in their life, how you can help them, if you can get them started in a Bible study, etc. See how they respond to your leadership. Meet with them a few times and try to connect with them. Do that with 2-5 people simultaneously to help figure out what you have.
2. Pull them together and get them interacting with each other. Meet with 2 or 3 of them at the same time. See how they interact. See what their comfort level is. See what happens when you add someone else in. Getting started isn’t fast; it’s very methodical. Don’t invite them to a leadership meeting. Invite them all to hang out with you at your house. As you are hanging out with them and you are sharing some things with them, ask, “What if we met every week or every other week?”
3. Meet with them weekly.Once a month won’t work. You cannot build a team that way. You can monitor a built team. You can give duties to people. But you can’t build a team with comradery meetings 12 times a year. I always like to meet at least once a week. In the early days, I’d meet with everyone individually once a week and then meet with the whole team once a week. If you want to do it right, if you want to dig deep, if you want to break up the fallow ground, there is a lot of work involved to bring people on page with you and to find out what their gifts are and how they can best be utilized.
4. Process and share with them. As you start meeting, start sharing things and processing things. You share what you are praying about doing and ask them what they think. They become involved. You gradually bring them along. You’ll find some people who will speak up, have input and influence, and they are able to add to the process.
5. Give them delegated authority.Have them take care of one area. often, we make someone a leader and they haven’t led anything yet. They are just good people with leadership qualities, but they haven’t been in the trenches leading a department or ministry yet. If you are a small group-based church, this is where you get your small group leaders. You develop them like this, and you observe how they lead that small group. That is the best evidence in the world. Some will lead a group and it will be a good, solid group, but it may never grow. Others will not be able to hold their group together. This is going to tell you a lot about the people you are trying to develop as leaders.
A common mistake that is made when building a team is putting it on hold and waiting for better people to come along. Start with what you have. Be methodical. Be intentional. Draw out a strategy. Begin to bring people together. Create a pot for that flower to bloom. It has to be organic, but even things that are organic have a biological structure to it—make sure you supply that.
Join us next week as Keith Tucci continues to put leadership truth in the context of the local church. And as always, please like, share, rate/review, and invite others to listen. See you next week!
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