5 Ways to Optimize Your Church Staff Teamwork
You’re at the table with the rest of your team, ready to brainstorm new ideas or plan the next ministry project. Looking around, their faces are reassuring – you know this is a bunch of talented and experienced individuals. Working together you have the potential to achieve so much more than you ever could alone.
And yet … so often group work fails to deliver. Or worse, it leads to calamity.
History is littered with examples of disastrous group decisions leading to banking collapses, political crises, and commercial meltdowns. Thankfully, important research has been published over the last decade highlighting ways to avoid the pitfalls and maximize the promise of working together.
1. Note everyone’s initial ideas.
A fundamental strength of teams is that each person brings their own unique knowledge and perspective to the table. This is the crux of the classic “wisdom of crowds” effect first documented early in the last century – that is, the judgment of a group of people will usually be superior to the judgment of any individual in that group.
Group wisdom was undermined when team members were given the chance to modify their initial answers.
2. Test drive the team.
Individual assessment is such a fundamental part of working life, yet we often take it for granted. If you want the best person for a job, you put the candidates through their paces to see who comes out on top. The basic assumption is that if they do well in the test context, they’ll also excel on future projects. It turns out the same principle applies to groups – U.S. researchers showed in 2010 that a team that does well in one situation will tend to do well on other challenges too.
It’s a mistake to think that putting together a bunch of skilled individuals will automatically create a gifted team.
3. Mix up group membership.
Although effective teams have certain qualities that make it likely they’ll be successful on future challenges, there is a balance to be struck. If the same personnel always work together, there’s a risk of the group becoming insular and detached from reality – part of a process known as “Groupthink.” Often, instead of the group context leading to a balancing of opinions, a team’s judgment will become progressively polarized. Dissenters are sidelined and enthusiastic team members rally around an outspoken flag-bearer, one who holds a more extreme version of their own views.
Familiar teams feel friendlier and more creative, but it’s newly formed teams that often generate more and better ideas.
4. Conduct a pre-mortem.
To help safeguard against the unrealistic optimism that often bedevils creative teams, decision-making expert Gary Klein recommends a technique called the pre-mortem – a form of “ritualized dissent”. Team members (working on their own initially) are asked to assume that their project has already met with disaster and to come up with reasons why. This fosters an atmosphere that values the input of those who have doubts and reservations. Most importantly, the technique highlights ways to strengthen the project plan before lift-off.
5. Pay attention to when.
Time spent on team activities doesn’t come free. All the while that your top people are sat around talking, planning and brainstorming, they’re obviously not at work busy doing what they do best – executing the ideas that are going to turn your project into a success. This means it’s vital to schedule intelligently and punctually. When US researchers surveyed 367 employees across a range of industries for a 2011 study, they found that perceptions of meeting quality weren’t related to the length of the meeting or the number of breaks, but to whether or not meetings started and ended on time.
If time is short, one sure way for keeping meetings efficient is to conduct them standing up. Research by management scholar Allen Bluedorn found that stand-up meetings were on average 34 percent shorter than the seated variety, with no cost in terms of decision quality.
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Much of the evidence-based advice available for improving teamwork and group decision-making seems intuitive. Yet, in so many walks of life, from board meetings to jury deliberations, these five principles above are ignored, allowing pushy personalities to dominate and bad reasoning to thrive. Teamwork can lead to shrewd decisions and flourishing creativity, but only if you pay attention to the social psychology that comes into play in a group setting.
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Tags: Christian Jarrett, Leadership Engine, Staff, Staff Development
