Resilience has long been known as an important quality in leaders, particularly ministry leaders and church planters. But it’s not just you as an individual leader that needs to be resilient; it’s your whole team. The time you spend building team resilience is time well spent. So, how do you build resilience into your team? Here are two of my own best practices:
The time you spend building team resilience will always be time well spent. Share on X
Look objectively at your strategy for building team resilience.
Taking time to reflect is the biggest key. Consider what worked and what didn’t work. Make sure you set aside time to take a step back with your team and take in the view from the balcony, so to speak. It’s best to look more objectively from a greater distance sometimes to get a wider perspective. Given that view, your team can reflect on learnings together so you become wiser about what you will do in the future.
The Army does what I believe is called a post-action review. That process involves thinking through not only what got done, but how you worked together through past challenges. How did you support each other as a team? How did you have each other’s backs? What holes in your strategy can you see after the fact?
Celebration has a important role in building team resilience.
Also take time to cheer each other on as a team. What wins did you have? Remind each other of those. Pause to celebrate. Rehearse the faithfulness of God. Review the track record of how you’ve pulled together as a team in the past. Only then should you begin refocusing on where you want to go next. Too often leaders skip the celebration and reflection—two elements that are crucial to creating team resilience.
Check out this article from the Harvard Business Review on the importance of building team resilience and strategies for doing so: The 4 Things Resilient Teams Do.
Resources:
The Leadership Difference- Church leadership skills go beyond seminary training. This book bridges the gap by focusing on the key skills needed to be an effective leader. Anyone in a position of leadership, whether they’re leading a church, a team, or a small group, needs these skills and strategies that result in lightening the own load, developing the skills of others, and getting the job done effectively.
Team Building- Effective teams do not simply “happen”. They have to be built. Team-building can be applied to an old or new team, a temporary or permanent team, or even a team formed specifically to achieve one simple goal in a very short time-frame. In every case, the team needs to be built step-by-step to ensure that it performs to its highest potential through each of the stages of team development. This collection of resources are designed to help you build effective teams, or to help you coach someone in developing their team building skills.
Photo by Natalie Pedigo on Unsplash