Organizational Development with Church Leadership, Team Building and Performance

​Church Leadership Development

At the outset, distinguish between management and leadership.  Management focuses on the nuts and bolts of achieving organizational goals and objectives:  budgeting, purchasing, scheduling, staffing and similar activities. 

Leadership means influencing, ideally inspiring, others to strive toward achieving organizational goals and objectives.  Influencing teams is virtually, if not literally always, an important aspect of leading.

Leadership development focuses on a wide range of skills:  one-on-one communication, feedback, conflict management, innovation, negotiation, presentation skills and a host of other interpersonal skills.  Leadership also turns on attributes like character, empathy, emotional intelligence, inclusiveness and integrity. 

Organizations use a wide variety of methods to accomplish leadership development, including many of the methods in the list of OD approaches here:  education, training, mentoring, coaching, assessments, 360 feedback and teams. 

Well-done leadership development gets linked strategically to other OD efforts, especially succession planning, culture, organizational change, recruitment and hiring.

​Church Team Forming and Team Building

A group transforms into a team when the members collectively commit to a common goal, and focus on what the team needs from each member, rather than what they individually need to get from the team.

Much of organizational work, from IT and cybersecurity to marketing, sales and customer service, gets done in teams.  And the trend has been toward more teamwork for decades now.

Consequently, business school researchers, social scientists and organizations have spent extraordinary amounts of time and effort examining teams, how they function (or don’t), how to form them and lead them, and what common elements occur in successful teams. 

All of that research and documenting best practices has yielded substantial and useful approaches to selecting, forming, developing, leading and operating through teams.

​Church Performance Management

Performance management refers to efforts and methods to improve individual, team and organization performance.  Classically, the dreaded annual review with the boss has been the cornerstone of performance management, too often the total effort at performance management.  So much anxiety precedes these annual conversations, and so little follow-up usually results, that the return on the investment of time and effort is minimal. 

More effective performance management provides ongoing feedback on whether individuals and teams not only get results, but also how they get those results.  Ongoing means much more frequently than once a year and from more than one source. 

Effective performance management also links strategically with other OD efforts, including most of the ones in this list.
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Organizational Development with Church Leadership, Team Building and Performance

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