One of the best ways to re-engage energy from a team is to go through a process of planning. It doesn’t have to be a very complicated process, and the plan itself doesn’t even have to be that ingenious, but the process itself has tremendous value, maybe even more value than a written plan.
Re-engage your team to really think about your vision for what you are trying to accomplish in the lives of people.
NOT the vision for the organization, the ministry, BUT the vision for what you want to see happen in the lives of the people.
Get the team thinking about how to develop team skills instead of working individually. What are the team skills? What does it look like for us to work and function as a team? A great way to do this is to make people aware of their own strengths and the strengths of other team members.
Work through the StrengthsFinder book with your team and have everyone take the test. This can be incredibly effective in helping people to understand their unique strengths in the context of the team and will open up all kinds of great conversations about what it looks like to work together.
The quality of questions you bring into a planning process is really going to drive the value of the process, and even the result.
Here are some example questions:
- What does success look like for us in a year from now?
- Five years from now, what does this success look like? How will we measure it?
- How do we know that what we are doing is actually effective? What evidence would we offer?
- What is the gap between where we are now and where we want to be? Define that gap. Instead of simply saying, “we want to get better,” think about what success looks like in a year or five years. Look at where we are now. How do we define the gap?
- Where are we manufacturing energy? This is one of my favorite questions for teams. In other words, where we are doing some work that we kind of have to take a deep breath before doing it, or we are trying to crank ourselves up to have to do this one more time. It is a very insightful question to help you know where people are getting worn down or where things might need to be changed or upgraded.
- What do we need to start doing?
- What do we need to stop doing?
- What can we do better as a team? Rather than what we need to do individually, define what it is that we can make better by working together as a team?
Sometimes we forget that God calls us to work together because together, we are better. It sounds like a cliché, but we can easily miss the fact that the team’s goal is not to have one plus one plus one equals three. It is to have one plus one plus one equals ten, or twenty!
I believe we can accomplish great things more effectively by working together as a team.
Let’s continue the conversation! Take a moment to add yourself to my personal phone book so that we can connect personally via text. Yes, it’s really me!