Team Building Final
Jacob J. Oller
CBL551
2/20/24
Abstract
This paper seeks to describe what a Christian team leader should look for in a team member. The team member must have the desire to grow in Christ, to grow others in Christ, and to bring glory to God through the specific mission of the team. The paper then describes what the Bible has to say about team building and the desirable team member through exploring the requirements of elders being admitted to church leadership teams. Next, team building in action will be explored through the description of what a proper team member looks like, and how leaders should develop their team members. Finally, there is a lengthy discussion on the current team of the author, which will explore practical solutions to team-related problems which the author intends on implementing.
What is Team Building?
Team building is the practice of forming a team around a particular vision, balancing the talents of the team in a way that achieves the desired outcome. Team building can also refer to building up the individuals on the team, both spiritually and professionally. The rest of this paper will go to great lengths to describe the spiritual and professional developments of teams. The action of team building is usually done by the leader of a proposed team who sees a problem to be solved (the vision and mission of the team), and needs to bring in certain people, talents, or abilities onto the team for accomplishing that purpose.
The remainder of this paper will describe what Christian leaders must look for when creating a team. The purpose of the creation of the team can be nearly anything, so long as the mission coincides with the mission of the Christian, which is to edify the body of Christ and bring glory to God. These two practices will be played out on the day to day of the team, and the specific purpose of the team must be connected to the ultimate goal of glorifying God and building His body. Now that team building has been defined as the process of searching for members of a team, the following sections will describe what a desirable team member looks like, and what the professional relationship between team member and leader should be.
The Bible on Team Building
The Bible only has a few instances of teams. However, for the little material available, the Bible gives a clear understanding of what a good team member looks like. Elders, deacons, and other church team members are not chosen on what they can do, but who they are. This is the greatest concept of team building which is present in all proper teams in the Bible. Teams themselves must be built around a shared vision and mission, but the actual team members must be chosen based on who they are, not what they can do. Team members must be people of character, working for the purpose of bringing glory to God. The elder requirements in 1 Timothy 3 give a few especially interesting notes on this. Elders are team members on the leadership of the church, and apply well to the requirement of team members for other areas, when using the general guidance of the requirement list.
First, verse 1, the elder must desire to be on the team of the church leadership. Potential team members should care about the mission and vision of the team, and want to be a part of the team. If a potential team member does not care about the vision or is not willing to care about the team members, they are not fit for the team.
Second, verses 2 and 3, the elder must be self controlled and not given to alcohol, fits of rage, arguing, or gossiping. They must be people of self control. Team members must be able to exercise control over themself as far as it relates to their work, interactions with others on the team, and self character. Otherwise, the member will bring destruction on the team, one way or another.
Third, verses 2 and 3, the elder must be hospitable, gentle, kind, and a peacemaker. Team members must care for the vision and the other team members. They should be able to express this care in general acts of kindness. Team members do not need to necessarily do any one act of kindness, but team members who are cold to one another will not be able to function well and ultimately bring glory to God.
Finally, verse 2, there is only one mention of an ability of an elder among a dozen requirements of character. The team member must be able and willing to learn the requirements for the team’s vision. Now, individuals can likely learn anything if they are willing to and will put in the time, effort, and desire to learn well. That being said, the potential team members absolutely must be willing to learn. Every team context is different, so every team member, no matter how successful in another context, must be willing to learn how to do what they are called to in that context.
Every successful team in the Bible has these attributes. Teams must desire to be on the team (have a shared mission), have self control (not be wildly destructive), care about the other members (a desire to sanctify others) and should be willing to learn (a humility of self which brings the ability to improve). In other words, team members must come together for a shared vision of serving others for the glory of God in humility. Additionally, as an obvious point, they must be free from any bright red flags.
Attributes of a Healthy Team Build
There are three main attributes of a healthy team build: Mission, spiritual formation, and professional development. Mission here is used to refer to the whole of the direction, including vision (what the future looks like), mission (what the purpose is), values (what the team cares about) and goals (how this will all play out day to day and week to week). The spiritual formation is the centering on Christ which is necessary for all teams. All successful teams must build one another up in the Lord, as success is not only measured by productivity, but ultimately faithfulness to the Lord. Finally, professional development is key. Team members must be invested in and must be worth investing in. The team that is not being grown will not succeed.
There is a clear difference in this list between the leader and the team. The most serious determiner of team success will be the willingness of the leader to grow and invest in the team spiritually and professionally, and the willingness of the team to grow spiritually and professionally. If a team member believes they have arrived at the greatest they can be, they must change their attitude or not be on the team. They will be a cancer to the team. With this being said it is essential to understand that, on a team, the value of the ability and desire to grow far surpasses the value of one who is good but unwilling to grow. This is especially true when attempting to recruit a team member from another work context during team formation. Success on another team will not necessarily translate to success on this team. If the individual is not willing to grow, they will not flourish in the changed context. Team members absolutely must be willing to and desire to grow. However, if the ability to and desire to grow is laid, then the team can be built.
Mission
Ultimately, the team must be working for the glory of God. They must seek to grow (their personal mission), grow the team (their mission for the team), and ultimately glorify God through everything (their ultimate glory). If any of these are missing, there will be a problem. However, if they desire to grow themselves, they will have the attitude required for being successful in learning how to do the job well. If not, they are not fit for the team, and will disrupt team activities through an inability to grow. Seeking to grow means the individual is humble enough to acknowledge their own need to grow. Humility and the desire to grow, especially for the glory of God, is the kind of team member a leader desires.
If they desire to grow the team, they will be loyal and a team player who desires the best for others. If not, they will be selfish with success and seek only their own good. Seeking to build up the rest of the team must be done through the Spirit of God. The Spirit has given many gifts to many different people for this very purpose, that they would be able to specialize in something which brings a special advantage to the team (1 Corinthians 12:12-27). This includes the work of the leader, as well. The leader should seek to grow and develop the team. Otherwise, they are leading for selfish purposes.
Lastly, the glory of God must be their final aim in all they do, in order that all other actions will be measured against this. If not centered on bringing glory to God, who can know what their motivation is? Certainly not the goal of the rest of the team, which must be to ultimately bring glory to God. The desire to bring glory brings with it many other attributes, including a willingness to grow, character, a desire to build others, and a greater calling over and above the temporary mission of the team.
Spiritual Formation and Professional Development
Stemming from the desire to grow others and to grow oneself, teams must have the humility to accept spiritual formation and professional development. This requires work on the part of both the leader (the one to initiate personal development) and the team members (the ones to accept personal development). This brings out a very important idea about team building: A good team member is not measured on what they can do, but who they are.
Spiritual formation is important for glorifying God with the efforts of the team, and caring for one another. Team unity, prayer, Bible reading, confrontation, and stewardship, among other spiritual practices, are needed for a properly functional team. Work is a spiritual matter, as all teams must ultimately seek to minister to themself, to each other, to the vision of the team, and ultimately before God.
Professional development, as well, is essential for training the practical needs of the team’s actions. Once the team knows what they will be doing, why they will be doing it, and how they will be doing it, they should undergo the proper training for the tasks. This includes on the job training as well as off job training. Leaders must invest in the team members well in order to succeed in their mission. Team leaders choosing team members must pay attention to who the potential members are, because they should expect them to grow into what they can do through their job training. Who a team member is determines what they will be able to grow to do.
Conclusion
A healthy team build is composed of two main attributes, which have many smaller attributes attached to them. The team must center around a shared mission (personally, for the team members, for the specific conditions the team is built, and ultimately for the Lord) and must be willing to grow spiritually and professionally. The humility of desiring to learn paired with the desire to serve the Lord and honor Him in the team will result in the practically best team a leader can ask for.
Team Building at Work
Team composition
The healthy team must be composed of individuals who have the same mind for the mission, and should be able to support one another both spiritually and professionally. The CCBC kitchen will be evaluated on those three attributes: shared mission, spiritual formation, professional formation.
Mission
The mission of the CCBC kitchen department is not explicitly described, so everyone has a slightly different idea of where the workplace is going in terms of mission. After interviewing two other coworkers, they described the mission of the CCBC kitchen as serving the students food they enjoy, which is in the budget, with a God-centered work environment (one) and seeing the kitchen as being an efficient team, not depending on one individual. Now, while these two missions do differ, they reflect the shared mission of serving the body for the glory of God through serving food. The idea of serving food the students enjoy is the idea that the kitchen serves the students faithfully. Additionally, the emphasis on being an efficient team is another expression of faithfully working. Both of these goals reflect a shared mission, though the explicit expression of the mission and goals is not there.
The implicit mission of the kitchen, in my opinion, is to serve each other and the student body for the glory of God. The mission is vague, but this workplace does not have the ability to change direction, as that is very clear (serving food). However, more than serving food, the main mission of the kitchen is to serve each other (the coworkers) and the body of Christ (students and non-kitchen staff) for the glory of God through making food. This is the foundation for the four evaluative attributes of the kitchen: Mission, spiritual formation, and professional formation.
In terms of mission, the kitchen would not be rated highly on an evaluation. The mission is implicitly shared, though there is not much room for disagreement with a department made for a specific purpose (serving food). The kitchen staff would benefit greatly from an explicit statement of the mission of the kitchen. This would result in the ability to examine oneself against the mission, as well as what one does. This, I believe, would streamline much of the well-meaning work in the kitchen which does not contribute to the implicit mission. An explicit statement will benefit the kitchen greatly.
There is a simple way to make the mission of the kitchen commonplace: Repetition from everyone, and reflecting on the mission. Implementation of this is very simple. First, there must be an official mission from the department manager which agrees with the vision of the school for the department. The mission which I believes reflects the values and vision of the individuals working in the kitchen is: “Serve each other and the student body for the glory of God.” This has three parts which need to be reflected on: (1) Is this serving each other? (2) Is this serving the student body? (3) Is this bringing glory to God? All issues in the kitchen, whether interpersonal or professional, can be measured against this mission. Additionally, efforts can be streamlined to further this mission of the kitchen.
Once the official mission of the kitchen has been decided on, the easiest and likely most efficient way of making this a part of the culture would be threefold: (1) Every daily menu has the mission at the top, as a daily reminder of the purpose of the kitchen. (2) Repetition of the mission during twice-daily prayer (prayer will be revisited under “Spiritual Formation”). (3) Acting out the mission. The third point is open to interpretation. The remainder of the sections will cover how the mission should be reflected in what happens in the workplace.
Spiritual Formation
The spiritual formation in the kitchen is very high. Time is given for prayer and Bible reading, though it lacking a place for proper confrontation and stewardship development. These topics will be covered in two sub-sections.
Prayer and Bible Reading
The positive aspects of the spiritual formation in the kitchen is prayer and Bible reading. Time is given each day to pray for one another and to read a chapter or more of the Bible. Prayer was implemented into the culture of the kitchen in the same way as I anticipate the mission statement being implemented. Prayer was written into every daily checklist in order to make sure every day the crew was praying with one another. Bible reading was never mandated, but was a very desired activity, and naturally came into practice. Popularizing reading the Bible in another workplace may be difficult, but similar methods to mandating prayer may be effective. For a different workplace, a checklist method seems to work well. In the case that the workplace does not have a checklist, having a specific time (when new people start their shift, for this workplace) and place (a storage room, for this workplace), in addition to some sort of expectation (a sign may work) will likely show to be effective. This will begin to encourage the spiritual formation of prayer with the team. Eventually, prayer will not need to be mandated. This workplace no longer mandates prayer, as it is a regular part of the culture, and does not need to be mandated.
Healthy Confrontation and Stewardship Development
There are two areas this workplace does not handle especially well. These are healthy confrontation and stewardship development. Healthy confrontation refers to resolving interpersonal work or personal conflicts. Stewardship development is another term for faithfulness in time management, creativity, and treating the workplace as a method of glorifying God. These have been notoriously difficult things to popularize in the kitchen, though they have been growing better in recent months.
First, the workplace has great difficulty with conflict and healthy confrontation. I believe spiritual training in this area would be especially helpful. A whole-team mandatory training on conflict-resolution would improve the ability of everyone on the team to expect a culture of gently confronting others in both love and truth, lacking neither in their speech and actions. A short 30 minute lesson for all members (which can be whenever they work next) would make great change. Prayer and Bible reading has already laid some sort of foundation for this, and so all members of the team should be able to appreciate a short seminar on conflict resolution in the workplace, which centers on Christ, sanctification of both parties, and ultimately a desired reconciliation.
Second, stewardship development will need to be improved moving forward. As there is not a culture of safe confrontation, poor stewardship of time, creativity, or responsibility is not confronted in a helpful manner. Often, the issues are not confronted. Only occasionally the issues are confronted, which ends up making the confrontation seem much more serious and weighty than it should. The emphasis of stewardship development, allowed through a culture of safe confrontation, should focus on stewarding time, abilities, and responsibilities. Individuals should not waste time without purpose (Bible reading, for example, is not directly related to using time for making food, but has a purpose), should have a place to develop creative giftings and abilities (this has been improving significantly in the past few months for a few individuals, but must become more culturally normative), and responsibilities (taking on responsibilities and following through). An emphasis on this after a culture of safe confrontation will greatly move the team toward their desired mission.
Professional Formation
Professional formation is the more practical side to training. This is the training which is directly related to carrying out the spiritual mission of the kitchen through serving the student body. The kitchen aims to carry out this mission through serving tasty, filling food in a timely manner while staying inside the budget. The kitchen would rate medium in this attribute. While there is of course on the job training, the kitchen is lacking in off work training and often an attitude of service. These practices are necessary if the kitchen is going to act out its mission to bring glory to God through serving each other and the body of Christ.
On the Job Training
On the job training is very straightforward. Coworkers are trained in cooking food, cleaning, and serving food. Additionally, they are trained in time management, creativity, and improvisation, with a special emphasis on making judgment calls for prioritizing tasks, changing recipes, and time management. Improvisation is a large part of working in this department, so the instinct of making proper judgment calls is trained through repeated exposure to instances needing improvisation and a growing responsibility put on each member of the team. In this area, the kitchen would rate highly, though not without some flaws. Generally, the team can act independently with successful judgment calls on changing recipes, time management, and task management. These are essential for dealing with an ever-changing work environment.
However, many on the team still struggle to make those calls, and depend highly on the direct calls of the manager. To fix this, I would suggest implementation of guided discovery and problem-based learning. This method of teaching hands-on experience asks questions and requires critical thinking from the learners. The teacher will not give the information to the individuals, but leads them to the solution through their own critical thinking by way of asking directed questions (guided discovery), and after some experience allowing them to assess a situation, devise a solution, test the solution, and reflect (PBL) without direct input from the teacher. This would allow for increased critical thinking from all team members and an expectation to know how to navigate tricky situations.
Off Work Training
Off work training is the training given out of work. OFT is essentially additional investment into the individuals of the kitchen, rather than only the task at hand on a shift. Off work training is a weak attribute of the kitchen, and likely the most ignored. This topic is vast, so this section may only lightly overview some aspects. Off work training involves seminars, training through outside resources, reading, meetings, and many other training methods. The previous four will be discussed briefly below.
First, seminars can be a great way to invest in individuals. Up until recently, CCBC held a bi-monthly seminar every Friday on professional development. If this was a continued practice, the team members should be formally invited to the seminar as a work-related trip, either paid or unpaid, depending on the resources of the company. In other work environments, hosting a speaker related to the topic and asking team members to come for personal development or as a part of a paid meeting may be effective in investing in the individual team members. This has the advantage of making them more skilled, as well as helping them to see they are valued member of the team.
Second, outside resources should be used to invest in the individual team members. Taking for-credit undergraduate or graduate courses, or taking college-level professional development courses will be another way to invest in the individuals on the team. This would be far more simple to incorporate here at CCBC, which is a college, where the majority of the workers already have weekly courses and homework. A simple online college-level course held on Google Classroom, using various work-related videos from Youtube, in addition to weekly applications of the material, would greatly increase the professional development of the team members.
Third, as an additional outside resource specific to this place of work, creativity should be invested in through an official “Extra Cookbook.” An extra cookbook would function as a book of additional small approved items (such as cookies) one could challenge themself to make if time allows. The required resources would be low, and this would be a clear method of encouraging creativity within a clear set of boundaries, giving team members the work-cultural freedom to invest in their creativity.
Fourth, similar to the online college-level course is a professional book club. The team would slowly work through a specific book, reading one or more chapter(s) a week, would unify the team in expanding work-related skills. Two books recommended for my context would be The Gospel at Work, which highlights working for the Lord and conflicts at work, and The Call to Follow, which highlights leading by example in serving others for the Lord. I have personally read these through a handful of times and have benefited greatly from the entry-level material.
Finally, meetings can function as a great way to check up on the weekly progress of the team toward the mission and vision (the vision must be determined after the mission has been explicitly understood and explored). Meetings can be casual, hosted in an on-campus dorm room to practice the rest of the disciplines, including prayer, Bible reading, and reflection on personal and professional growth. Additionally, meetings can be a place to host the “class” videos, reading reflections, review successes and failures in the workplace, and safely confront one another.
Summary and Conclusion
The CCBC kitchen is quickly approaching a near complete overhaul of student workers at the end of this semester, in two months. While values and culture sometimes take years to develop, the manager will likely need to develop the previously discussed habits of a team and workplace in order to give that expectation of values and culture in the next semester for the incoming workers. If not, the old culture which needs to be overhauled, as discussed previously, will reign dominant for the following school year.
As a final review of the CCBC kitchen, the culture of the team must change in order to continue to make progress toward the vision of the kitchen by the mission of the kitchen. In order to bring glory to God through serving one another and the body of Christ, there must be radical change in culture, and quickly. The team building and culture overall rate high in spiritual development, but low in shared mission and professional development.
As discussed previously, the principles as extrapolated from the biblical material must be applied to the kitchen workplace in the ways previously discussed. Teams must be strategically composed in order to build one another up to do the work for the glory of God. This is the universal principle of team building. All teams will be different, and all teams will tackle different issues. However, if the team is not able to build each other up for the work in order to glorify God, there must be radical change implemented. As discussed for my present work place, radical change is necessary to be faithful to this call.
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