How To Cultivate Team Unity

Yesterday we had our Family Ministry Retreat.  A volunteer at our parish opened up his river house allowing for those of us in Children’s and Student ministry to get off campus.  The new scene allowed us to reflect on the past year and look ahead to next year with a fresh perspective.  While there was planning done on this retreat it’s main objective was to build team unity.

Courtesy of wonker/Creative Commons License

Team unity amongst your coworkers and your volunteer teams is essential.  Youth ministry (Any ministry) is not meant to be served alone.  While this is something most people understand there is a natural tendency to pull away and try to do it on our own.  Silos usually form in ministry because of:

• Distrust In Other’s Abilities
• Lack of Management Skills
• Pride

If you allow this to happen your ministry will become overwhelmed, overworked and burn out.  To build team unity you need to provide opportunities where the team can grow together.  It’s also important to build habits into the culture and you can do that by:

• Communicating Fluidly: Communication is essential to the productivity and efficiency of the ministry.  Make sure people on your team are aware of who to talk to about what issues and projects.  Encourage trust to fill any gaps in communication.  If there are any breaks in the communication guide people to lean into the tension to resolve any conflict.  As a leader you can never express this value enough.

• Growing Relationally: While you don’t have to be best friends with everyone on your team it’s important for you to get to know one another personally.  There are great tools like Myers Briggs and the Color Code Personality Test that will help you educate one another on your strengths and limitations.  The more you understand each other’s personality, the stronger the team unity.

• Leading Authentically: Leading authentically means conveying to your team what you do and don’t know.  It also means being transparent in your emotions and passions.  Do not try to be someone you aren’t, instead lead from where you are.  If you lead humbly people will be drawn together because they’ll want to follow you.

• Embracing The Vision: The reason why people will leave is because there is a disagreement or a lack of clarity when it comes to vision.  Your job as the leader is to cast it and share it.  If they start to make fun of the fact that you are always talking about it, good.  You want it to stick and you want them to know it because vision brings team unity.

• Praying Together: If your team doesn’t have Christ at the center then you can’t expect to overcome the major obstacles you will face.  Your ministry is to bring people closer to Christ and you cannot do that if your team isn’t doing that themselves.  Start meetings with prayer, find times to just pray together and make it the most important value of your ministry.

Stronger teams means stronger ministry.  As a leader you need to set the tone of the team and build in opportunities where the team will grow together.  Encourage positive relationships, eliminate gossip and have them focus on the vision.  Ministry is not meant to be done alone.

How do you build team unity in your ministry or staff?