Teams That Thrive

Five Disciplines of Collaborative Church Leadership

Ryan T. Hartwig, Warren Bird

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780830841196
• eBook ISBN: 9780830897575
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Readers' Choice Award Winner

Outreach Magazine's Resources of the Year

It's increasingly clear that leadership should be shared—for the good of any organization and for the good of the leader. Many churches have begun to share key leadership duties, but don't know how to take their leadership team to the point where it thrives. Others seriously need a new approach to leadership: pastors are tired, congregations are stuck, and meanwhile the work never lets up.

But what does it actually mean to do leadership well as a team? How can it be done in a way that avoids frustration and burnout? How does team leadership best equip the staff and bless a congregation? What do the top church teams do to actually thrive together?

Researchers and practitioners Ryan Hartwig and Warren Bird have discovered churches of various sizes and traditions throughout the United States who have learned to thrive under healthy team leadership. Using actual church examples, they present their discoveries here, culminating in five disciplines that, if implemented, can enable your team to thrive. The result? A coaching tool for senior leadership teams that enables struggling teams to thrive, and resources teams doing well to do their work even better.

Part One

Why Read a Book About Leadership Teams?

1

Myths We Believe

How Many of These Do You Think Are True?

The chief object of education is not to learn things; nay, the chief object of education is to unlearn things.

G. K. Chesterton, All Things Considered

As we’ve studied, researched and observed senior leadership teams in churches, we’ve had many “aha!” moments where things we thought we knew about teams turned out to be just the opposite of reality for thriving teams. As we’ve listened to others, many have voiced similar harmful stereotypes. Here are some of the myths we hear most:

Myth: Great teams are primarily advisers to the top person, who makes the decisions.

Reality: The best teams make decisions as a group.

Myth: Meetings are places not to make decisions but to work through decisions already made.

Reality: The best teams both make decisions and “own” the implementation.

Myth: Teams first build trust, and then they learn to work together.

Reality: Trust is built in the trenches as the team works together, especially on major initiatives and tough, controversial decisions.

Myth: Senior teams are created by drawing a circle around the top positions on your organizational chart.

Reality: The best leadership teams draw from a diversity of roles and positions.

Myth: Bigger teams are better, drawing from eight to twelve people.

Reality: The optimal size is four to five in most cases, and sometimes three.

Myth: Shorter meetings are better than longer meetings.

Reality: Long meetings can be highly productive, if they are carefully structured to accomplish clear objectives and fully engage everyone’s strengths.

Myth: Team leaders can’t really be accountable to their group if they’re the lead pastor.

Reality: The best teams have an amazing level of mutual accountability and genuine camaraderie.

Myth: The senior pastor or person who’s been there longest is the best team leader.

Reality: The best teams rotate aspects of providing leadership to the team.

Myth: Most team improvement is haphazard, largely based on each member’s growth outside of team meetings.

Reality: The best teams continually work together on improvement as a team.

The last myth helps explain why we wrote the book. We’ve given you tools for your team not just to improve, but to thrive. Please read on!

2

Your Vantage Point

How Is Your Church Being Led Right Now?

Why collaboration now? Not only because we don’t really have a choice—but it’s the best choice we’ve got.

Michael Schrage1

Thriving churches are led by thriving leaders. Not one leader but many leaders. And not just by a group but by a team—there’s a big difference between the two.2

If it’s true that everything rises and falls on leadership, then it’s worth examining who—beyond title—is actually leading your church. Who influences others on the team and throughout the staff? Who is being followed? Who establishes vision and direction? Who develops other leaders? Who truly shoulders the main decision-making responsibility?

Every church has some form of senior leadership at its helm. If it’s a group rather than an individual, who is in that group, and why? What exactly are they trying to do, and how could they become more effective at it?

This book tackles these questions head-on, ultimately helping you develop a senior leadership team that thrives as it truly and effectively leads your church.

But first, this chapter provides the context for that discussion. In it, we will

• describe various types of leadership formations
• unpack the importance of a church’s senior leadership group
• help you identify who is, or might be, on your senior leadership team
• identify how to maximize your own role in terms of how you’ll be reading and applying this book

Who’s Leading Your Church?

Every Tuesday at 10 a.m. the staff and select volunteer leaders gathered in the pastor’s office. After he arrived, usually late and without apology, he asked for personal prayer requests, had someone pray and then asked each person “what do you have?” Sometimes it was information that everyone should know, sometimes it was a problem to be solved, and sometimes it was a statement that the person needed to talk about a situation privately with the pastor.

On paper, this group seemed like a caring, involved team. In reality, everyone knew that their information mattered but not their opinion, that the pastor would make all the decisions himself, and that the only people who truly had his ear and could challenge his choices were his administrative assistant and the assistant pastor. All others who disagreed with him were put down verbally or described behind their backs as disloyal. Though the team led the church on paper, in reality the lead pastor held tightly to his role as singular leader.

The more you can clearly identify who provides actual leadership at your church, the better you can explore what it’s truly accomplishing—including questions like whether the group is the best size, uses the best meeting strategies or involves the best people for what you actually need.

Identifying your actual leadership “team” might not be as simple as you think. Too often the officially named group is not the actual leadership team. Sometimes no group exists on paper, but one does in reality. On rare occasions, the leadership “group” is largely just one person.

Which of the following terms most closely describes how your church is led? You might pick more than one option:

• Organic/informal. Your leadership team is informal, perhaps not even identified as a team. A large number of people have access to the pastor, and all of them feel they are organically influencing the big picture at some level.
• Fluid. The leadership team seems to change month-to-month, and sometimes even day-to-day. If people are needed for their expertise or relevance, they’re pulled into the decision-making circle. As new issues or circumstances arise, the makeup of the circle changes. Some would go so far as to say there is no fixed leadership “team” beyond the lead pastor.
• Inner circle. A designated group is supposed to work with the pastor to lead, but in reality the pastor has a “kitchen cabinet” of just a few people who actually make most leadership decisions.
• Family based. If two or more family members are heavily involved in the church’s top-tier leadership, a large number of leadership decisions occur at family gatherings, often over meals or in the pastor’s home.
• Better-halved. Whatever the designated leadership structure, the real person in power is the pastor’s spouse. Regardless of how thoroughly a decision is prepared and processed, if it doesn’t pass muster over pillow talk at home, the next day it gets voided, reversed or modified.
• Pastor’s staff. The team is formed by simply drawing a circle around the top one or two tiers of the hierarchical organizational chart.
• Senior pastor–executive pastor partnership. The top dogs run the show, connecting with each other regularly but often not inviting significant input from anyone else. Even if they do ask someone’s opinion, everyone around knows who the real power brokers are.
• Ceremonial. You have the right people with the right titles meeting regularly with a full agenda and making constant decisions—but never about truly big-picture issues. This team is great at perpetuating the status quo, but no one has permission to raise tough or controversial questions. You’re called the “leadership team,” but you’re limited to keeping the train on the tracks rather than charting new territory.
• Cheerleading only. Your team focuses only on the good news of what’s going well. You thank God for your blessings and affirm the servants God used. Any feedback that seems negative, even if constructively intended, is unwelcome. Any challenge to the status quo is out of place.
• Advisory only. Your team discusses true top-level leadership issues but only in an advisory capacity to the pastor. The group rarely makes the actual decision; instead, the pastor alone weighs the input and makes the final call.
• First responders. Your team is mostly responsible to carry out the pastor’s plans. You gather to hear the latest idea, which often requires a drop-everything approach to make things happen on short notice. The team contains senior-level people, but they are more implementers than co-dreamers or co-deciders.
• Fire department. You meet primarily when someone or something is on fire. When crisis hits, you feverishly meet and extinguish the issue, only to quickly resort back to the status quo of day-to-day individual functioning, to the neglect of strategic envisioning.
• Leader’s support group. You use the word team without truly functioning as one. You look like a team from the outside, but the leader still calls all the shots.
• A thriving leadership team. Together your team truly leads your church. You establish and carry out vision, set direction, wrestle with thorny issues and come to conclusions, fight for unity, and model gospel-centered and mission-driven community for your staff and congregation.

Software Upgrade or New Operating System?

Each option above, except the last one, contains one or more fatal flaws to a high-performance, healthy, thriving team. The goal of this book is to help your team be more intentional, strategic, healthy and effective—an ideal that involves guiding you to move toward more of what a true team is all about.

We want you to understand how to do teamwork well. Good teaming is far more than a pair or loose group learning to work more efficiently. Sure, efficiency is often useful, but great teams aren’t necessarily efficient. Ra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part One: Why Read a Book About Leadership Teams?
• Part Two: Why Do Leadership Teams Make Sense?
• Part Three: How Well Is Your Team Thriving?
• Part Four: What are the Collaborative Disciplines of Teams That Thrive?
• Part Five: What’s Your Best Next Step?
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Top Ten Tips to Help Your Team Thrive
• Notes
• Additional Resources
• Praise for Teams That Thrive
• About the Authors
• Praxis
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press