My friend Ron Edmondson is sharing with us today.  Ron is  a great leader and friend who I am constantly learning from.  Whether you are on a team, lead a team or are building a team, be sure to soak this one in!

—————————————————————-

7 Traits of a Healthy Team Member 

We have a great team at Grace Community Church . We balance each other well with skills and interests. We have a wide range of personalities…just enough to be pleasantly aggravating at times to each of us. We challenge one another to greater things. We even like each other (most of the time)!

I was reflecting recently on what makes a good team member…a good staff member of a church. Here are 7 traits I came up with that make a great staff person…especially at Grace Community Church:

Sense of humor – It’s critical in our office that you be able to laugh…at life…at corny jokes…and sometimes at or with each other. We have fun together and that makes us a better team.

Team spirit - We have no lone rangers on our staff. We rebuke struggling alone! We are part of a team and there are no turf wars in our organization and no one should be drowning in a project without some help.

Work ethic - We aren’t great at managing people. We simply rely on people having the sense of responsibility and inner drive needed to complete the work. We like leaders who are passionate about Christ and people and willing to do what it takes to accomplish our vision.

Heathy personal life – We deal with a lot of messiness in other people’s lives. It would make it very difficult to maintain the level of ministry required of us if we were not personally living healthy lives spiritually, emotionally and, as much as it depends on us, physically.

Open spirit – We share burdens with one another. Our people don’t live on an island to themselves. The more we learn to trust each other the greater this process becomes. We are open to challenge the system, the ministry and each other in an attempt to make the organization better.

Loyalty - It is imperative in our organizational structure that a team member be dedicated to the vision, organization, senior leadership and the team.

Servant’s heart – If one cannot approach their position from a point of serving others and Christ then he or she will not work well on our team. It’s the model of our entire ministry and must be represented by our staff first.

Thanks Grace team for your amazing contributions to the Kingdom!

(For clarification, if needed, these are personality traits not spiritual qualifications. Those are Biblically scripted for us and would be covered in another post.)

Do you serve on a healthy team…or wish you did? What would you add to the list?

I love recruiting…

…but it’s also one of the trickiest things I’ve encountered in ministry.  As your church grows the experienced pool of candidates shrinks.  And so the recruiting sharks tend to swim in the same pool of a handful of hot, influential churches.

For many years we were the unknown church and we pretty much stayed off of everyone’s radar when it came to recruitment.

We’ve made some ignorant rookie mistakes in how we’ve gone about recruiting.  We’ve had to apologize to other churches for a misstep here and there.  And usually it was because we didn’t know the rules of engagement in regard to recruiting.

Different churches and leaders have different expectations in this area, however at the end of the day it comes down to respect (cue Aretha). 

How would I like to be treated if someone is recruiting someone from my team?

With that in mind, here are my rules of engagement for recruiting:

• If I have an eye on one of your staff, I will reach out to you (pastor or exec pastor) for permission to talk to your employee.

• If I have posted a job and your employee responds to it (without my prompting), I will interview them.  If they are a fit and I want to offer the job to them, I will then reach out to you to share my intention to offer them the job.

At the end of the day, I want my team serving where God has called them.  If one of my staff is called to your church, as much as I might not like it, I can’t argue with that or control it.

How do you handle recruitment?  What are your recruiting rules of engagement?

I don’t know how things are where you serve, but on any given Sunday at Cross Point things go wrong.  GASP!  Yes, it’s true.

In fact, a lot of things can go wrong… maybe not all of them are wrong per se but they certainly don’t always go the way we’ve planned.

It could be the gremlins in technology, it could be human error, it could be volunteers out sick, it could be a faulty alarm clock…

You name it, it’s likely to go wrong on Sunday – the day we need everything to operate perfectly.

Unfortunately I have a tendency to fixate on what’s not working.  I see all the little things that I wish had gone better and I fail to see what is good.

I’ve been feeling really challenged by this lately.

Not just at work/church but in my personal life and relationships.

Our society has taught us to be critics and some of us slip into that role easier than others.

But the constant critic loses hope and lacks joy.

The constant critic finishes the day feeling defeated and unsuccessful.

I’ve been challenged lately to really seek to find what’s good.

In fact, I’ve gotten into a habit of actually making myself write a “what’s good?” list every day.

My “what’s good” list reminds me of how God is at work in my life every single day.  Everything may not have gone the way that I thought it should go, but there are still so many things that are good.

I think this is a “grey” leadership tension that we all face.  We have to be aware of and manage what’s not working, but we can never lose site of what’s good.

So I want to challenge you to write a “what’s good” list today.  If you’re brave enough, share it with us in the comments.

Ok, GO!

Bill Hybels

Relentless learner. Driven to action. Deep, personal sacrifice. These characteristics have propelled Bill Hybels through 35 years of ever-shifting challenges as senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church and Chairman of the Board at Willow Creek Association. The author of more than two dozen books including current bestseller The Power of a Whisper, Hybels trains Christian leaders world-wide—and consistently pushes himself to get better as a leader, every year. Single-minded in his passion for the local church, he issues hard-hitting truths that challenge people to take their organizations to the next level. Hybels’ successes—and mistakes—bring high-definition clarity to the things truly worthy of your leadership time and investment.

———————————————————————————————————————————————-

Session Notes

When a leader stops learning, the leader should just stop leading.  Leaders should be insatiable learners.

When a leader gets better, everybody wins.

5 Critical Questions

1) What is your current leadership challenge level at work?

Under-challenged?  Appropriately challenged?  Dangerously over-challenged?

Where do you think you do your absolute best work as a leader?

Where do you think your best thoughts?  Where do you come up with innovations?

Most of us do our best work just a little above the appropriately challenged level.

If you stay dangerously over-challenged long enough, you will break down in ways that you don’t want to break down.

Do you think it’s possible for organizations to be under-challenged or over-challenged?

2) What is your plan for dealing with challenging people in your organization?

Your organization’s future is totally dependent on attracting and retaining fantastic people.

As soon as you see a bad attitude developing, you have to lean into it.  Make sure you set a time frame for resolving the issue.  Willow allows 30 days.

How long do you let an under-performer stay?  You must have a plan and timeline for this too.  Willow creates a 3 month plan.

How do you deal with a staff person who is not keeping pace with the organization’s growth?  Take time.  Honor their service but make the difficult decision.  Willow takes 6-12 months.

If you don’t deal with challenging people in your organization, you discourage and demotivate your best people.

**Recommended resource: Best Christian Workplace

3) Are you naming, facing and resolving the problems that exist in your organization?

Every organization has seasons.  We have to be aware of the the potential cycle and the problems that lead to deceleration.

Accelerating → Booming → Decelerating → Tanking

If you infuse reinvention when you discover deceleration, you can divert back to accelerating rather than tanking.

4) When is the last time that you reexamined the core of what your organization is all about?

Are we clear about our core?

5) Have you had your leadership bell rung recently?

Has any leadership book, talk, experience with God, or crisis rocked your leadership world?

Leaders rarely learn anything new without having their world rocked.

There is too much at stake in this world for leaders to walk around with defeatist mindsets.

Which of these questions challenged you the most?  What is God already stirring in your heart?

http://www.wcablog.com/

This week in our Leadership at All Levels discussion we’ll discuss leading our peers.

Peer to peer leadership is where you work out your leadership influence.  We all start here and if we don’t learn in this environment, we’ll rarely be given opportunities to lead in other ways.

This is especially critical for multi-site environments where you have peers across multiple campuses.  You can’t rely on positional authority to work together, you have to develop relational authority.

Here are some ways that I believe you best earn relational authority:

1. Give and earn respect. 

Respect – to hold in esteem or honor.

Respect is earned by:

• Being consistent
• Being dependable
• Being accountable

Do what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it.

When you do things, do not let selfishness or pride be your guide. Instead, be humble and give more honor to others than to yourselves.  Philippians 2:3

2. Combat silos, don’t create them.

• We’re on the same team.  Don’t be territorial.  None of it is ours anyway.
• What are the qualities of a good teammate?  Be that for your team.

3. Communicate Clearly

• Share information.  People are down on what they are not up on.
• Have the difficult conversations.
• Be intentional.  Always ask: who needs to know this?  It is selfish to not think through who needs to know the information you have.

How are you developing relational influence with your peers?

Other posts in this series:

Leadership at All Levels (overview)

Leading Self

I’ve made it through two weeks now without an office.

With a couple of staff additions and some office rearranging, I realized we didn’t actually have enough space for everyone.  After weighing all the options, I felt like it might be possible to office without an actual office space.  Kind of a crazy idea for a creature of habit like myself who loves routine and the comfort of my space, however I was willing to give it a shot.

Honestly? I’m really enjoying it.  Every day is a bit of a new adventure and I’ve kind of become the “where’s Waldo” of the office staff.

Here are some things that I’m finding are essential to making my non-office office work:

1. Evernote – no more paper. I like paper – a lot! But keeping up with paper when you don’t have the space for it can be really frustrating.  And let’s face it… if it’s not on the top of the stack, we’ve forgotten it anyway.  I’m learning to use Evernote for everything.  Every list and every project is managed with it now.  I feel a little naked at times without my notebooks, but I’m adjusting amazingly well.
2. Great laptop and laptop bag. I have the MacBook Air.  It’s so lightweight that I don’t mind taking it anywhere.  And of course I have a very stylish bag from Etsy that looks like an over-sized purse.  If I have to carry my office with me, we’re gonna at least look good.
3. A hub for files, books, essentials. I do have a nice enclosed bookcase that houses the things that I can’t take with me everywhere.
4. Inbox/outbox system that you actually use.  Not boxes that just get piled with stuff that everyone knows you don’t actually look at.
5. Accountability.  Of course this is critical whether you have an office or not, but my responsibility to communicate where I am increases when I don’t have a designated space.

Do you have a designated office space?

If not, what systems have you created to help you be effective?

Do you think officing without an office is a trend that we’ll see more of?

As part of a quickly growing church, it seems like we encounter new challenges every single day.  From human resources to safety issues to legal questions to staff communication process, etc.

And many times the gut reaction is to create a new policy to create rules and guidelines for handing whatever new challenge has come our way.

I think this season of any organization is a really critical one.  The temptation is to control the chaos with as much structure as you can create, but most of the time this is where we see young, thriving, dynamic organizations suddenly become rigid, stiff and “corporate” feeling.  You don’t realize that is where you are headed at the time.  It’s only in looking back after you find yourself stuck in the muckety-muck of corporate bologna that you wish you hadn’t policy’d the life right out of your team.

This is probably one of the most difficult “grey” leadership issues to navigate.

How do you wisely and safely create the systems, procedures and policies that are necessary for your organization without sucking the life right out of the place?

Policies to me are a last resort.  I will only implement a policy if I’ve exhausted every other leadership solution.  Here’s why:

1) Oftentimes we create policies out of fear.  You or someone on your team made a poor choice or judgment call and because of the fear it stirred up, you swing to the extreme of writing a policy that ensures it never happens again.  It might never happen again, but neither will a lot of other great ideas.  Make sure it’s not just a good conversation you need rather than a full-blown policy.

2) They hinder actual leadership. Policies are a scapegoat for having difficult and honest conversations.  Our human nature wants to create a policy to put the blame on rather than take ownership for coaching our team.  It’s much easier to say “our policy states…”  rather than “this was a poor decision because…”.

Managers make policies.  Leaders set precedent but leave room for the uniqueness of the situation.

Don’t get me wrong.  There are some good and necessary, in fact legally necessary, policies for you to have in place.  But I don’t believe you need a policy for every action of your team.  Instead, you just need good discerning leaders!

Have you seen policies used to an extreme?  How do you strike the balance?

I have no shame in admitting I’m a Catalyst Junkie. I have literally attended every Atlanta event since the second year it started. How many of you can top that??!!

This year I had the privilege of being a lab speaker at Catalyst West (which was amazing by the way) and in just a few weeks I’ll be a lab speaker at the first ever Catalyst Dallas!  That’s a Junkie’s dream come true!!

I would love for you to join me!

If you go register now with rate code FOB you can get 15% off of the current registration rate.

You won’t want to miss the Catalyst Conference in Dallas, happening May 11-13, 2011, where 3,000 young leaders will converge, including high-octane speakers, powerful worship, innovative programming, and an experience unlike any other.

Hear from leadership authorities including Andy Stanley, Matt Chandler, David Platt, Christine Caine, Donald Miller and Craig Groeschel , along with several innovative thinkers and practitioners like hip hop legend Rev Run, best-selling author Scott Belsky, International Justice Mission founder Gary Haugen, long-time activist Dr. John Perkins, ESPY winner Scotty Smiley, and charity: water founder Scott Harrison.

Plus, Catalyst Labs will feature innovative thought leaders like Michael Hyatt, Mark Batterson, Scot McKnight, Mike Foster, David Kinnaman, Samuel Rodriguez, Esther Havens, Shaun King, Anne Jackson, Gayle Haggard, Jon Acuff, Lecrae, Margaret Feinberg, Chris Seay, Vicky Beeching, Eugene Cho and others.

And because inquiring junkie’s minds want to know…

Have you ever been to a Catalyst event before?

If so, how many times have you been?  Can you top my 12?

This May I’ll be heading to the Dynamic Church Conference in Plano, TX. This is the conference created by Fellowship Technologies, makers of the leading web-based church management software, Fellowship One.

I’m excited to be one of the speakers for the Return on Ministry track.  I’ll be talking about “Leading in Shades of Grey – navigating the complexities of ministry leadership.”  I would love to see you there!

I have been given a unique $50 off registration code to share with you, my blog readers. This $50 off discount gets you access to my session, which is part of the DC11 Return On Ministry track, which is geared towards executive church leaders. There are over 25 classes in this non-Fellowship One track alone and over 50 sessions focused on educating users of Fellowship One software. Just enter in my code [jcatron] when you register to save an instant $50 bucks.

If your church uses Fellowship One, this is a must-attend conference for your administration & ministry staff while your executive leaders attend the Return On Ministry sessions. I hope to see you at DC11!

HELPFUL LINKS:
About the DC11 Conference: http://bit.ly/dc11experience
About the Return On Ministry Track: http://bit.ly/roministry
To Register: http://bit.ly/dc11registration <http://bit.ly/dc11registration>

“What you are doing is not good.”

Has anyone ever said that to you?

For a performance-based, people-pleaser like myself those words are painful, especially when they are told in love and they just happen to be true.

One of my favorite leadership lessons in the Bible is when Jethro evaluates Moses’ leadership:

Exodus 18:13-18 (NIV)
The next day Moses took his seat to serve as judge for the people, and they stood around him from morning till evening. When his father-in-law saw all that Moses was doing for the people, he said, “What is this you are doing for the people? Why do you alone sit as judge, while all these people stand around you from morning till evening?”  Moses answered him, “Because the people come to me to seek God’s will. Whenever they have a dispute, it is brought to me, and I decide between the parties and inform them of God’s decrees and instructions.”  Moses’ father-in-law replied, “What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone.

I wonder how Moses really felt when his father-in-law Jethro basically busted his chops for how he was leading? Moses wasn’t replicating himself. He was trying to lead and manage everything and he was wearing himself out and frustrating everyone else in the process.

I recently was in a similar place…

Continue reading at the Catalyst Blog