{"id":288,"date":"2018-10-28T09:00:59","date_gmt":"2018-10-28T16:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/?p=288"},"modified":"2018-10-27T21:02:31","modified_gmt":"2018-10-28T04:02:31","slug":"response-to-daniel-northouse-team-effectiveness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/2018\/10\/response-to-daniel-northouse-team-effectiveness\/","title":{"rendered":"Response to Daniel – Northouse, \u201cTeam Effectiveness\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Daniel, in your blog post<\/a> you talked about a situation with your church where your board was not supportive of you and your wife in your leadership when you started at the church you currently pastor at, and where you had to ask someone to step down from a position. This sounds like you stepped in to a difficult situation with a lot of pressure from your board to increase attendance to your Sunday services, without the necessary support from the board to be able to really accomplish this.\u00a0Being in full time ministry myself I can relate to how difficult this must have been.<\/p>\n

My experience in Christian ministry has been that often there are not clearly articulated goals, one of the characteristics of team excellence (Larson & LaFasto, as cited in Northouse, 2016, p. 369), which can result in many different understandings of what the team is trying to accomplish. This can cause frustration amongst team members, and can result in people trying to accomplish different things.<\/p>\n

Alternatively, sometimes I think a team can be trying to accomplish the same goal, but when the approach of members is different this can cause tension and pain. The situation I was in involved another staff member who was trying to help improve some of our systems and structures. In the process he forgot that \u201cpeople and process will always be more important than tasks and organizational structure in accomplishing goals and productivity\u201d (Page & Wong, n.d., The Concept of Servant-Leadership section, para. 7). This led him to conduct himself in a way that hurt many other staff, and he was also hurt. In this situation, I saw that his actions were a problem and I brought it to the attention of his leadership, but they did not intervene soon enough causing this staff pain as well as others around him.<\/p>\n

In the midst of this situation I cognitively understood the problem, and I tried to help his leaders understand the problem but did not feel that they saw it. I realized that in what I was communicating I made the mistake of saying that this staff member was the problem instead of identifying his behaviour as the problem. I think in that process, I brought unnecessary hurt to him because even though I never said those words to his face I am sure my actions reflected my thoughts. Furthermore, I did not demonstrate the servant leader characteristic of empathy (Spears, 2010) during this time because I was too caught up in my own hurt of feeling like his leaders did not hear me that rather trying to understand why this staff member was acting the way he was, I concluded that he was the problem.<\/p>\n

What I learned through this experience is that especially when emotions are involved, it is hard as a leader to remember to be empathetic towards everyone involved in a situation. I also learned that it is easy to jump to blaming people instead of identifying behaviour that is problematic. As time went on, I was able to see how this staff member\u2019s behaviour was problematic and it needed to be addressed, in my opinion in more ways than it was, but at the same time I can to realize that he also was hurt and in reality our structure was not the best fit for him and the personal growth that he needed.<\/p>\n

This situation that I walked through reminded me\u00a0of something I often tell people I am discipling: we cannot change the people around us we can only change ourselves. The situation I was in was definitely challenging and there was much pain involved for many parties. In the end all I could do was look back on what had happened and try to learn from my own part in the situation. When difficult situations occur, I think that is the best thing any of us as leaders can do.<\/p>\n

References:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice, Seventh Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.<\/p>\n

Page,D., & Wong, P. T. P. (n.d.). A conceptual framework for measuring servant-leadership. Retrieved from http:\/\/www.drpaulwong.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/Conceptual-Framework.pdf<\/p>\n

Spears, L. C. (2010). Character and servant leadership: Ten characteristics of effective, caring leaders. The Journal of Virtues & Leadership, 1<\/em>(1), 25-30. Retrieved from\u00a0https:\/\/www.regent.edu\/acad\/global\/publications\/jvl\/vol1_iss1\/Spears_Final.pdf<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Daniel, in your blog post you talked about a situation with your church where your board was not supportive of you and your wife in your leadership when you started at the church you currently pastor at, and where you… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":294,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,25,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ldrs500","category-ldrs500-responses","category-unit-5"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/padnTM-4E","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/294"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":291,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions\/291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.twu.ca\/b121\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}