Some thoughts on teams…

I love our team.  It is incredible to be at a church where everyone is willing to do the hard work that it takes to grow a church.  And it is fun to be somewhere that you can trust your team with your feelings, thoughts, dreams, and goals.

In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni said, “Every effective team I’ve ever observed had a substantial level of debate. Even the most trusting teams mixed it up a lot.”

It is important to leave from those healthy debates unified as a team. In Good to Great, Jim Collins said it this way: “You need executives, on the one hand, who argue and debate–sometimes violently–in pursuit of the best answers, yet, on the other hand, who unify fully behind a decision, regardless of parochial interests.”

My observation?  You just can’t have healthy debate without trust. You can’t have unity without having some healthy debate. And you can’t have trust if there isn’t any unity.  Real unity comes only when the team is united behind a vision.

Cole and I make a great team when it comes to hashing things out, arguing through things, and throwing a few punches.  Our wives can’t sit in a team meeting with us because they’ll leave crying and thinking that someone is about to leave the team.

At one of my previous churches, the lead pastor would present a unified team in public, but during the week, he never would even speak to us.  If we did come to him with an idea or something to talk about, his way was right and nothing was going to change.

It takes a lot of hard work to build a unified team, but after going through an experience where the lead pastor never unified the team and ran things like he was Castro, I’ll take the tough work that produces a team unified around a vision anyday.