Guiding Principles
Every team needs core principles to govern team interactions and facilitate collaborative ministry.
Guiding Principles
Encouragement
The team needs motivation and encouragement to push forward, maintain focus and achieve key objectives.
Development
Team leadership development is another way to build a culture of best practices and continuing improvement.
Communication
Internal communication among staff is vital for vision alignment and team morale.
Lax communication is routinely cited as a major problem area for big companies and organizations. When leaders get this piece right, the effect on team culture is huge:
Leaders who effectively manage the flow of information within their company tend to share a certain outlook—and a certain set of practices. They adopt communication methods that enable them to get closer to employees. They put in place communication systems that promote dialogue, as opposed to monologue. They engage employees by allowing them to become active participants in the communication process. They rigorously pursue an agenda that aligns their communication efforts with organizational strategy.
They put a premium on ensuring that people in their organization talk with each other, and not just to each other.
Team communication solutions might include:
- Adopting a group text or SMS notification service to encourage team communication. GroupMe is a free private messaging option with iOS, Android and Windows apps.
- Pulling the entire staff team together either weekly or monthly for group information and communication. These meetings typically include every on-site employee—ministry, support, maintenance, auxiliary staff.
- Using loop-in summaries or regular weekly communication to keep everyone on the same page. A loop in summary is a coordination document that outlines key events and initiatives, along with needed cross-department logistics conversations.
“The Silent Killer of Big Companies ” by Boris Groysberg and Michael Slind, Harvard Business Review (October 25, 2012), https://hbr.org/2012/10/the-silent-killer-of-big-companies.