I’m Scared of Heights!
We just got back from our Cross Point fall staff retreat. I’m very blessed these days to serve along side 19 of the best people I know.
God has done some amazing things through this group of people over the past few years. I’m proud to call them colleagues, friends and most importantly family.
During our retreat we focused on vision, team building and the calendar for 2009. We’re finding that planning a yearly calendar that includes 3 campuses is extremely challenging. CLICK HERE for some pictures of the retreat on Jenni’s blog.
On Tuesday morning part of our team building included a high ropes course that the Deer Run Retreat staff led us through. Here’s a little video of our team building time…
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/2036383/]
I would love to hear what you think about effective teams.
What is the one characteristic or element you think a team needs to function in an effectice and healthy manner?
A team must have confidence in their leader. Nothing is more important, and nothing will break a team apart quicker than losing confidence in the person at the top
I agree with Tom but I also want to add “respect for each other.” We all bring unique perspectives and ideas to the table and each one counts. And piggy-backing on Tom’s suggestion: the leader must be the one to model this respect.
COMMUNICATION and a relationship with the group…so very important in my 15+ years of project managment. I’ve led as few 5 and currently as many 100+ and I have found these to be the most helpful. With this comes the respect and confidence a leader needs and uses to encourage and motivate.
Authentic and healthy accountability.
i agree with everybody else. i think it is also essential to make sure everyone is working towards the same goal, one vision.
Communication and trust has to be at the top of the list. I grew up a PK and born in the churches baptismal waters. I wonder when it is that a pastor quits expressing his opinion and begins just nodding his head. Is that a generic trait or trained characteristic? Possibly it is when he realizes sheep bite?
I’m super impressed that you all did that ropes course. It made me feel sick watching it!! I love the climbing up, just don’t like the coming down.
Communication, support, supervision (accountability), encouragement and understanding that everyone has something to contribute (1 Corinthians 12:12-31) and giving space for each other to do that. Complimenting and encouraging one another in your strengths and weaknesses.
I was blessed to run a ROPES course for several years. You really get to see how people work together and get a sense of trust doing these things.
Teams to me are effective when people focused on the same thing and communicating the entire time. That is how teams are effecitive on ROPES courses and in life.
giving into the yearning to laugh
bearing toward the strength associated with bearing each other’s burdens
understanding the cost of saying yes
It’s unfortunate but some times teams don’t always get along. If one finds themselves on a team like this they should focus on the fact that God can use both of them for the ministry and that the goal of the team is more important than ones own personal feelings. Actually this may be a chance to grow spiritually if one finds themselves having to love somebody who makes it difficult.
Not a very happy answer but there are teams like this… unfortunately.
I am sure you guys get along great
Whoa! Awesome video… that looks like fun. It reminds me of the youth camps I used to chaperone when my daughter was in high school… you sure that wasn’t youth camp?!
I don’t like heights, either, but I think I’d try the ropes coarse since you’re provided a safety belt. I did the Skycoaster once in Old Town, Orlando. That was thrilling!
In addition to all the great responses above, one element to teamwork: Respect.
Open honest communication is the key to solid teamwork. I have been apart of teams that don’t speak openly and honestly with one another and also a team that speaks openly and freely with each other. I think it is about giving the team permission to discuss everything with a critical eye in order that we can make the greatest kingdom impact.
@David, you are very right. Well said.
loyalty in public .. honesty in private
I wish there was ONE thing.
I love it that the pastor feels comfortable enough to yell, “Oh, CRAP!” when he’s scared! Then feels comfortable enough to share it “with the world”! Thanks for being transparent Pete!
It’s already been said…communication is probably the number one need in a well run organization, but important caveats to that are that it be two-way communication and honest. Following communication would be accountability and following that would be trust. I list trust third because generally, it has to be earned and isn’t earned immediately. The other two are actions that can be implemented/executed immediately.
@Sherri & Alan Murphy, Do you know how spiritually mature you have to be to only yell “oh crap” when falling that far!
Yes, Pete. We’re very impressed!
Why is this one hard for me to answer right now? I do agree with so many of these…all of these. It is also so very hard to be a part of a team that doesn’t function as a team. Ick.
I’m not gonna lie… I totally forgot to breath while you showed shots of being “way up there” as you kept repeating.
If I was meant to be high in the air God would have made me a bird.
Effective teams? There are so many elements, but I think people need to be more willing to listen than to speak. I used to be in meetings where no one was listening… everyone was just thinking about their next point or how they were going to argue their point of view, or what they wanted for lunch. There always has to be the moment where you’re willing to put the other person first and focus on them. Sometimes listening is the hardest skill to remember to use.
Humility
John Wooden said, “It is amazing what can be accomplished when you don’t care who gets the credit.”
At the very core of true teamwork is humility. It is the reality of not working for something or someone, but working together with a vision.
Repeating what so many have already said “Communication is KEY” to any successful team.
When rock climbing, communicating with your partner can be the difference between life and death or serious injury. If you can’t hear what your partner is yelling at you from 50 meters above (because the wind is blowing or they’re over a roof), you better have a backup plan so you know if they need slack or want you to take up rope.
Communication. Trust. Relationship. Success.
Oooh, I wanna do that zipline sooo bad!!! It would be good training for my Survivor audition.
Seriously, I think a good element for a team is respect for one another. Even if you don’t agree, it’s fair to listen to each others ideas and opinions.
Open minded LEADERSHIP
Conflict!! Nothing Great ever happens without some good old fashion conflict. My Pastor expects conflict…and we bring it, understanding that at the end of the meeting and when a decision is made we go away in agreement and supporting the decision he has made.
In a surgical medical team, each member is a professional and know one’s function & role: from principal surgeon to technicians manning the equipments to the nursing staff (and the cleaners) as room and instruments and equipments must be kept sterile! Every member must be on the alert during the surgery.
However in church, we’re dealing with people. We need to respond and NOT react. When we respond, we enter the spirit of charity — graciousness and understanding in why he said or did that. By responding there must be some form of action taken thereafter — gratitude or change of attitude.
didnt read thru the comments, sorry, might be repeating this…but…
important element a team needs… know the ‘vision’ – share the vision.
Understanding that we all have different gifts, talents and strengths and having enough confidence to encourage one another to succeed and to utilize those talents toward a common goal.
Totally off-topic here, but I’m just letting you know you are a recipient of the Honest Weblog prize on my blog. You can go here to see if I say nice things about you: http://gitzengirl.blogspot.com/2008/10/honest-weblog.html
Love the video!!! I lost my breath when you let go~
My daughter’s fiance says this to her all the time…
(We’re on the)”Same team Bethany, in it to win it.”
Such a powerful reminder to pause and remember the end goal.
Wow! That place has changed a lot since I went there. We had a group of about 50 people and all they had at the time were the rustic cabins and 2 port-a-johns that were in bad need of being emptied after we spent the night. Let me just say that it was gross! Looks like it has been fixed up really nicely now. I did learn a lot from their team building activities.
Heights – ya, not cool. I’m with you.
Well-mannered people with Intergrity.
While leadership and communication are of course great answers, they just seem too obvious and convenient to me. There are a lot of good leaders out there, and we have better communication technologies and processes than ever before, but we still seem to struggle to put together truly effective teams. There is another aspect of teams that I believe is key that I am having a hard time coming up with a single word for, but the closest I can some is “humility”, which I guess is really another way of saying the willingness for all members to be “team players”.
Look at the output of the team like a math problem. The goal is to get the best result out of the work of the team, which we could say would be the highest possible score. Each individual member of the team had different abilities that can contribute to that total score. In order for the whole team to achieve the highest possible score, each member of the team must be allowed to make their individual greatest potential contribution, based on their skill levels and the skill levels of other members. In every team, you will have stronger and weaker contributors, but the key is in finding the maximum potential total team score based on each individual’s ability to contribute to the score. As an example, if my skill 1 score is a 8 and my skill 2 score is a 7 and Joe has a skill 1 score of 6 and a skill 2 score of 4, the maximum score we can get together if we each only have time to do one of these things is 13 (Joe doing skill 1 work for 6 points and me doing the skill 2 stuff for 7 points). Where teams lose effectiveness is in two areas that tie directly back to humility. If I insist that I am going to do the skill 1 stuff because I like it better and after all, it is my highest score, the maximum score we can achieve is a 12 (8 from me doing skill 1 and 4 from Joe doing skill 2). If I insist that I do it all because I have higher scores in both areas, the best we can get is a 7.5 (half of my score on each since there the assumption at the beginning was that each person only had time for 1 task, so I could only get half of each done if I try to do both). You can play with these numbers a lot of different ways, and depending on the skill mix and strength of each person, at times I might get to do the skill I like best or that I have my personal highest score in because that is how the greatest total benefit happens to add up in that case. Humility, however, comes in when each team member is willing to forego what they desire personally and go with what is best for the team as a whole. If I have skills as a greeter, musician, and Kids World teacher, I need to do what I can that contributes most to the score of the team as a whole, no matter how much I might want to be the musician.
What is interesting about this model as you think through it is that if tends to contradict a general principle that I believed before you asked this question and I thought through this. That principle is that you allow each person simply do what they are best at. While that may improve your overall score to some degree, it will not necessarily achieve your maximum potential score. That can only be realized by each of us deferring to others in a way that sometimes has us working on our second or third best skill because that is what the team needs.