Changing Team Culture By Lisa Cooper

Changing team culture is a long-term goal.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

By Lisa Cooper~

More than two years ago, I was promoted to lead a team. What I found was there was a lack of accountability, no established common thread of faith and unclear expectations for staff performance.

I set out to change a culture of fear and intimidation into a culture that embraced servant leadership.

To achieve those goals, I needed to identify major issues, work on staff development and promote spiritual growth. Identifying the major issues within our team was much more difficult than I first envisioned.

I had my leadership team, five individuals and myself, write down what we each thought was a major issue in our work environment. We defined five different issues without a clearly common theme.

We then looked at a team member’s area and wrote down issues that we saw in their specific area. There were five different major issues.

Next we evaluated what we believed our mission statement would be for our small piece of a greater mission. That helped us to put our finger on our major issue: inconsistency.

We were inconsistent with following policies. We were inconsistent with accountability, and we were inconsistent with our faith.

How do you fix inconsistency?

How can we all be of one accord?

I started by making sure all team members had a clear understanding of policies that we were to uphold as the operations team. We discussed the benefit of consistency, and it was unanimous that would be our focus for the full year.

Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, watching over them — not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock – 1 Pet. 5:2–3

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Lisa Cooper is director of operations at The Crossing for Denver Rescue Mission . This is an excerpt from her article in the 2016 winter edition of Outcomes magazine.

Lisa Cooper will be serving as faculty for the Outcomes Conference 2017, April 4-6. She is teaching a workshop on the Spiritual Development of Your Team. Participants will learn to:

• Identify major issues that cause the lack of spiritual development in our teams
• Recognize new twists for staff development to encourage momentum
• Articulate the importance of spiritual growth among your team

Don’t miss this workshop and all the others offered at this year’s annual training event.

What? You haven’t registered for the Outcomes Conference 2017!

Get off the fence and reserve your spot today!

www.OutcomesConference.org