Barnabas File

In these challenging times for the church, a staff leader must step up and recognize the importance of investing in their staff team.  This is something that we did not learn in seminary but can learn.  Dean Phillips, who has served with the  U.S. Air Force and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has written a helpful article on developing high performance teams.  There are insights here for working with a church staff team. CREATE A SHARED SENSE OF PURPOSE Although identifying a sense of purpose to achieve a common goal is important for high-performing teams, a critical step is providing clarity and context around each team member’s role. Everyone brings something unique to the team, but how does that skill base contribute to the overall mission of the church?   We can no longer work in silos in our roles as church staff leaders. Not only must we share our gifts to enrich each other’s work, we can dig deeper and discover ways that we can f...

Through the work of Daniel Goleman, most of us have been exposed to the concept of personal emotional intelligence (EQ) and its components—self-awareness, self-management, other awareness, and relationship management.  Understanding our own EQ contributes to our mental health, resiliency, and allows us to relate to others effectively.   The authors of Team Emotional Intelligence 2.0 have applied this approach to teams with the goal of developing high-performing teams.  They identify the four skill sets involved as emotional awareness, emotional management, internal relationships and external relationships.     Under each set, they offer strategies to enhance the awareness, health, and effectiveness of a team and give concrete examples of successful application as well as planning ideas.  The approach is very practical.  The primary concern is that the leader or group facilitator not become overwhelmed but focus on a few key st...

You would think by now that we would have learned to play well together, but until we do, there will be place for books like the latest from Patrick Lencioni.   The Ideal Team Player follows Lencioni’s usual approach.   He tells a fable or story about the principles he wants to present and then provides additional information and applications of the model. This time he tells the story of Jeff Shanley who suddenly finds himself at the head of a large construction company founded by his uncle.  As he solidifies the leadership team already in place, attempts to deal with troublesome employees, and add new team members, he and his team learn what (according to Lencioni) makes the ideal team player. In his classic book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team , Patrick Lencioni laid out an approach for tackling the group behaviors that destroy teamwork. Here he turns his focus to the individual, revealing the three indispensable virtues of an ideal team p...