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Leading Teams with Care - Lesson 11

Team Decision Process

In this lesson on Christ-Centered Leadership, you will gain knowledge and insight into the importance of leading teams with care. You will learn practical ways to care for your team and how to lead with grace. Additionally, you will learn about the role of emotions in leadership and how emotional intelligence can impact team dynamics. Finally, you will gain insight into effective communication, including the importance of active listening and addressing conflict.

Rick Sessoms
Leading Teams with Care
Lesson 11
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Team Decision Process

Lesson on Christ-Centered Leadership: Leading Teams with Care

I. Leading Teams with Care

A. Introduction to Leading Teams with Care

B. The Importance of Caring for Your Team

C. Practical Ways to Care for Your Team

D. Leading with Grace

II. The Role of Emotions in Leadership

A. Understanding Emotions

B. Emotional Intelligence in Leadership

C. Emotional Intelligence and Team Dynamics

III. Communication in Leading Teams with Care

A. The Importance of Communication

B. Communication Styles

C. Active Listening

D. Addressing Conflict


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  • Learn about Christ-centered leadership, including leading with care and compassion, building and leading effective teams, and the example of Christ.
  • Learn about the importance of caring for your team, trusting God with your team's vision, people, and resources, and cultivating Christ-Centered teams.
  • Learn how to lead teams with care, build trust, and communicate effectively through this lesson on Christ-Centered Leadership.
  • This lesson on Christ-centered leadership covers the dynamics of teams, the importance and benefits of Christ-centered leadership, leading with purpose and vision, and creating a culture of care.
  • This lesson teaches you the importance of leading with care, how to develop a culture of care in leadership, and practical steps for leading with care.
  • Learn how to care for team members and create a culture of caring as a Christ-centered leader, and discover the benefits of doing so, including increased team member engagement and productivity, higher job satisfaction, and improved communication and collaboration.
  • This lesson on Christ-Centered Leadership covers leading teams with care, leading with vision, and leading with wisdom, providing knowledge and insight on building a healthy team culture, communicating a compelling vision, understanding the nature of wisdom, and applying biblical wisdom to leadership decisions.
  • By completing this lesson on Christ-Centered Leadership, you will gain insight into team building, leading with care, creating a culture of care, and balancing results and care.
  • Learn how to lead your team with care by understanding the importance of caring for your team members, effective communication, and setting clear expectations.
  • In this lesson, you will learn how to lead with care by understanding the importance of caring for your team, the qualities of a caring leader, and practical strategies for creating a safe environment, building relationships, providing support, and offering encouragement and recognition.
  • In this lesson on Christ-Centered Leadership, you will learn the importance of leading teams with care, how to practice it practically, the role of emotions in leadership, and effective communication methods.
  • Learn how to lead and develop a caring team, overcome obstacles to team sustainability, and gain insights into the characteristics of a leader who cares and a caring team.
  • This lesson on Christ-Centered Leadership will teach you how to lead teams with care, lead through change, and lead with humility.
  • Learn how to be a Christ-centered leader who cares for your team by understanding the biblical foundations, creating a culture of care, leading through change, and sustaining care for yourself and your team.
  • This lesson on Christ-Centered Leadership provides knowledge and insight into creating a safe and secure environment, promoting individual growth and development, building a cohesive team, developing a culture of care, and practical tips for leading teams with care.

Teamwork is the will of God for the people of God.

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Dr. Rick Sessoms Leading Teams with Care mc611-11 Team Decision Process Lesson Transcript [00:00:01] So then we've talked about the team decision. Keep in mind is quality and acceptance pays. Now let's talk about the team decision process. Team decision process. Whenever a decision is being made on any team, there is always this dynamic tension between task. Now we're getting the job done and relationships maintaining healthy. Relationships. And I know we've all felt that when we've been on teams, you know, there is this sort of tug back and forth, Are we going after relationships? Are we going to get the job done? You know, it's kind of back and forth like this. It's just it's just part of the process. And that's a healthy thing. This is a healthy tension between task and relationship. It always is on a team and maintaining that healthy tension between task and relationships is the role of leadership on a team. Now we talk about the team decision process. We don't talk about making decisions. We talk really about this, how decisions emerge on a team. There's a difference. The reason is maybe, maybe you as you think about a team that you've been on, have you ever been part of a team? And you're discussing something. You're discussing a decision that needs to be made and nobody around the table has ever spoken and said, now this is a decision. But it's somehow through that process, Everybody around the everybody around the table knows kind of a decision has been made that it's all about how decisions emerge within teams. So we want to emphasize in this in this process, it's the team emergence process. Yes, decisions are made ultimately, but that's almost a rubber stamping. It's almost an officializing of this process that's been going on, where these decisions emerge out of the team dynamic, this tension between the task and relationship. [00:02:09] Am I clear there? So it's very important to understand that this is a this is a process that if we will allow this emergence process to take place, that balance and that that balance of task and relationship, that balance of quality decisions and decision acceptance will find a much healthier space to coexist. And so the first phase in the process is what we call forming now forming in the forming phase as you think about task in relationship this healthy dynamic. The task is low. The relationship factor is high. Now, think about when you first go into a team and you are supposed to tackle a project. How do you feel when you walk into the room? It may even be with people that you already know. Typically. There's. You're polite to each other, right? You're kind of holding back about your opinions. You're sort of feeling out what other people are thinking and feeling and you're not. Nobody is very critical. Even if somebody makes a stupid comment or suggests something really off the wall. Most people kind of just hold back and wait. And this is the part about forming. It's about forming the team. And it's about the process around that. We gather around making these important decisions in this forming phase. The relationship is high. The task focus is low. That's the time to get acquainted. It's a time of clarifying issues. It's a time of not rocking the boat. You know, you just kind of don't want to put your foot out too far. It's we're sort of testing the waters at this point, and then it's time to generate ideas. It's usually a good time to brainstorm and to and to put things on the table, because at this point, people are not in a place to want to be incredibly critical of one another, because, again, the relationship factor is high, the task factor is low. [00:04:27] But guess what? The next phase is the storming phase. Now this is the phase in which the relationship factor. Becomes lower. And the task becomes higher. This is where our opinions begin to become get expressed. We get strong about what we believe. We start to share openly and aggressively at times about what we really believe about the subject at hand. And so that's why we call it the storming phase. There can sometimes be polarization. People can sort of take sides on an issue openly. And, by the way, recognize that this is a healthy, a step in decision emergence process. If you skip this step or you try to bypass this step, the team does it to its own its own liability. So I'll later allow this step in the process, allow the storming to take place. Now, obviously, we want to keep the issues on the issues and avoid personal attacks and that kind of thing. But this is the time when it's natural for that task to go high and the relation emphasis on relationships to go low. Are you following this? Does that make sense? Have you felt that when you're on a team in the past? So that's the storming phase. And then and as I said, the coalitions are formed. The third the third phase is what we call a norming phase. This is when the task and the relationships start to come back together slowly. Now, by the way, this isn't an overnight process. Usually this can take a long time, depending on the weight and the significance of the issue at hand. It can take quite a long time to go through this process, this this four phase process of decision emergence. The norming phase is when the coalitions start to weaken, People begin to come together as the group, the outcome starts to become more apparent. [00:06:43] You notice at the beginning I said sometimes we just aren't real sure when the decision is actually made, but it just seems to start to emerge among us and we begin to get the idea of where this all is headed. And then then finally, phase four is the performing phase. And this is where both the task and the relationship become optimized. There's an integration of opinions at this point, and then unity is achieved. This is the phase that that we're hoping that all of our decisions get to, because this is where we've optimized both the task and the relationship. Decision Quality. The decision acceptance is at its utmost at this point. This is what the decision emerges process is all about. This is based on a many, many years of teamwork and team research. The key is to allow the process to take place. I was not allowed to. I wanted to use the Nike swoosh here to indicate what this pattern really is. You start at the, you know, relationship being high, test low, but then you feel like you're going into the valley when you hit the storming. But then eventually, if will allow the process as leaders pay attention to it, respect the process and respect this healthy tension between task and relationships will eventually see the norming and performing that will prevail in that process. Questions. Comments. Does this feel intuitive to you as to what you've experienced on teams? I have to say, I know that a storming is a hard that even a strong term of the ones we have up there, we could all be comfortable with forming warming of. Yeah, but the storming. Tell me about that with the I think you said it well. [00:08:45] How do we become more aggressive? How do we share? How do we have form coalitions without it being a personal attack or even being perceived as a personal attack? Sometimes it can be well done for whatever history or relationships are involved. You can be see perceived as an attack. If it wasn't. That's right. It's not intended that. Back to Roger's point before I. What I think this is pointing out to us is that the storming phase is very important for decision quality. It's very important for decision quality. Without the storming phase, we can end up in group think very often. And so that's why we need to allow this process to take place so that that task really gets the full attention that it needs throughout this phase. In that example I mentioned earlier, and I think people were so scared of squirming, differing of that, that that that's why it's just, okay, we're just going to keep. Right. We tend to want to go straight across from forming to norming, don't we? Yeah, I would think as a pastor, I'd be afraid to allow whatever team I was leading from the church I was pastoring to go through the story for fear that there would be splits within the church or teams of just kids and eventually get to the norming in performing part. So it would be my natural tendency to want to go right into performing to an audience. Yeah, I don't I don't know. I mean, obviously a story is needed for how do you get there in a safe way? Well, we'll deal with that when we come to the conflict resolution, the peacemaking in the course that deals with that, because that's a very important question. But this storming phase, the way I like to describe it, is if you think of this whole phenomenon as a as a big balloon and if if we don't allow the storming phase, it's kind of like pressing that balloon underneath the water and acting like it isn't there. [00:11:00] Guess what happens Eventually that thing is going to come back, get you. And when it's when it's released, sometimes it's released with way more power than it ever was to start with. And so this storming piece is critical to allow part of the issue has to do with our theology of conflict, and we'll get into that. But one of the questions that will entertain is, is conflict healthy or is healthy conflict healthy? I can just tell you that in many among many church leaders, the answer is, is a categorical no. It's not healthy. It's not to be part of the church. So we back off of that and say, well, are disagreements healthy? And so part of that is where this lies, that the implications are huge within this process. Yes, Robert, But as a leader, if you really need. Sure. That the forming process, you know, was you know, you took enough time to actually get to know one another and make sure that all the team members got to know each other and built that relationship to the point where they aren't comfortable enough to be able to write, you know, when they disagree so that they can get to you. So sometime, you know, if the forming process is really short and it's just on the surface, then, you know, people just don't feel comfortable with it. So it's about relationship, isn't it? If we've done the work of relationship in the forming phase, then the starting phase won't destroy us. But if we go into that storming phase without having the relationships intact, or if we allow our relationships to be compromised or to be or to be assaulted within that phase, that's a very dangerous thing for the team. [00:12:58] This is the minute I use this model all the time in business school. Which model? This is not the form of forming based on that. And we did it a lot in the context of consulting teams and that we would be with, you know, four or five of the people that you never met before, put together on a team to work on a project with. You know, professors were very intense on making sure that we spent time that was jumping right down to the problem, but get to know each other first so that we can work together better and have those disagreements about what our approach is going to be. And so this is a that forming point you said. So the relationships in the forming phase were critical. Now, did the did the person that was leading the group, did they how did they handle the storming? Did they allow that? They encouraged that phase. Yeah. And I think, you know, in that context of, you know, sort of business, school people don't mind disagreeing when they do. It's not some sacred cow like it isn't church, you know, where people are afraid that they're going to. Split the church for some reason. But all these people have big egos and they disagree about everything anyway, so they don't it doesn't really hurt anybody's feelings. But it is important to them not just to have that forming base if you can disagree, than actually productive afterwards. That's interesting. Several years ago when I was working at a college, I had a staff of very young staff of about there were about ten of them and all but one were not long out of college. And it was just an exciting time. But we learned this and we began to respect this process. [00:14:46] And in this storming phase, it was kind of let it all hang out, sort of a process that we went through as a staff every week. And it was a wonderful thing we could, you know, because the relationships were intact. But we had this storming all on a regular basis when we were wrestling through issues. And they loved it. I mean, these were Gen-Xers we called them back then and they just absolutely loved that. It was interesting that when we brought on a person eventually onto that staff who was about 50 years old and had been in another department in the college, and when she came on staff, she was horrified by what she saw because she simply didn't understand it. It was not the way that department was run. And so it does take some adjustment to help folks to understand how this works. But you're absolutely right. In the forming phase, that relationship is built. But the storming is where the quality, the quality of the decision comes in. Other comments, another negative thing that I've seen with the team is where you have a dominant person who comes in and there's their maybe they officially have the leadership role of that team or the coordinator or whatever. And instead of allowing some of this process, they right away give their opinion how they solve that problem. They don't want to go straight into the performing tribe. There's a little bit of intimidation. Yeah, they're not really respected, but maybe there are some other ideas that can come forward. I think it's a great point. And that's where if you build the relationship and the learning process, then you can go into the storming and tell them I disagree with what you're saying. [00:16:36] We should take my time. So, yeah, I mean, once again, you know, even with those times, people like you, you know, you have developed that relationship. You can, you know for sure what takes every step takes so much time. Right. It does. It sure does. Very often you don't have that one. Right. And that is a problem when we don't have enough time to do it right. And the question is, are the decisions going to be good decisions in that in that kind of environment?
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