Digging Deeper

Leadership is ongoing, day by day, bit by bit developing your people and creating a team that works as one well-oiled machine. We seek to build a team that plays to each other’s strengths, covers each other’s weaknesses and delivers great results. They win together and they lose together. Then, they stand back up and do it all over again. It’s a messy business and often requires us to dig a little deeper to understand what makes each individual tick and to know when they are at the end of their rope.

There has been a lot of chatter in recent years about emotional intelligence. We have come to find that without it, it is impossible to create an empowered team that gets results. Using the leadership discipline of empathy lets you know your team well enough to set a person up for success and put them in exactly the right spot in your organization. It requires identifying their strengths and aligning them with your purpose in the day-to-day operations. We do this through observation and assessment, evaluating team members to highlight their strengths and understand their weaknesses or blind spots.

Focus on Strengths

Real success comes when we focus on our strengths and our team’s strength...

Unfortunately, we are living in times where we often compare and contrast leadership strengths and styles. The tendency is to see our weakness as the areas in which we need to improve to be a better leader. Real success comes when we focus on our strengths and our team’s strength, and acknowledge that areas of weakness are gaps to be filled by one with those strengths. One body with many members.

Therefore, once we have helped team members identify their strengths, we need to encourage them to focus on their strength and not their weakness. That is the secret to building a team of excellence.

Build Up One Another

As it says in 1 Thessalonians 5:11-13: “Therefore encourage one another and build each other up, just as in fact you are doing. Now we ask you, brothers and sisters, to acknowledge those who work hard among you, who care for you in the Lord and who admonish you. Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work.” 

A wise pastor once said to me, “Whenever you see the word Therefore… back up and see what it is there for.” Therefore statements are not to stand alone. Therefore connects the sentences preceding it. This is Scripture’s way of setting up God’s instruction to his children after observing their actions. As his children we are all called to hear his instruction and follow his lead in living out his purpose for our lives using the gifts he gave us. And as such, he expects us as leaders to know our team, their strengths and their weaknesses so they can do good work.

One Body

A team that operates in their gifts and their strengths achieves their goals. That is because they are all working within God’s gifts for God’s purpose. We all would agree that our strengths are those things to which we usually excel. Romans 12:4 said, he gives good gifts so that we might form one body of work. We form one body because we all work in tandem together – each with a set strength and a job to perform.

As you reflect on the stewardship of your team, ask yourself, “What is my therefore statement?”

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Lauren Vanaman, CCNL, is the Executive Director of Banning Leadership Foundation and Aspire Leadership whose mission is to train leaders through disciplines of Curiosity, Humility and Empathy. With a passion for people she is one of the creators of The Aspire Experience. She obtained her CCNL from Christian Leadership Alliance in 2018. For more information on stewarding though strengths email her at lauren.vanaman@aspireleadership.com.

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