The Making of a Great Team

by Dan Holloway

The Super Bowl has come and gone for another year and fans of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are rejoicing in their team’s success. With a new quarterback and a change of coaching strategy, the team once known for its many losses has now reached the pinnacle of professional football. Even those who pulled for another team have acknowledged the excellence of this group of athletes and the ways they helped one another to succeed.

Few of us will ever play on that kind of team and certainly not in front of that many people, but at one level or another, all of us know what it is to be a part of a team. Whether it’s a staff team, a ministry team, a church leadership team, or a church choir, teams play a crucial role in our faith lives. The same is true for community groups, work teams, and volunteer organizations beyond our communities of faith.

But as all of us understand, teams don’t always work as effectively as we might like. Despite the best intentions of those who have planned them, some meetings go off the rails. Participants leave frustrated and angry, imagining all the other ways they might have used their time. While teams at their best are empowering and hopeful, at their worst they can be discouraging and even destructive. I dare say most of us have been to more of the latter than we would like to remember.

What makes the difference? Many things go into effective team meetings but one particular thing comes to mind today and especially in light of today’s changing culture. Effective team meetings are those where everyone present has a chance to learn something new. A team is great when it’s members learn something that they wouldn’t have learned alone. The best team meetings are always understood to be a place of learning and growth that comes from an interchange of ideas and beliefs. Success comes when everyone leaves feeling encouraged by what they have learned together.

But this can only happen when certain conditions exist. For learning to occur, members must feel safe with one another. There must be a level of trust that allows team members to risk asking questions and to know they will not be judged for proposing ideas that may or may not succeed. So it is that team leaders must pay as much attention to team culture as they do to the agenda. Team culture has as much to do with team success as what is actually planned for the meeting.

Obviously great teams also have a purpose and set goals for their work. They have some sense of where they want to head and remember to keep that mission before them always. But the context for reaching these goals most effectively and joyfully is continuous learning by all on the team. The best team leaders not only understand this but give time to making such an environment possible. They will model shared learning as the secret ingredient that makes meetings so very tasty.