Everyone on a team needs to add excellence, which means leaders first need to place people in roles that make the most of their gifts and talents.
Imagine that you get a call from a nationally respected headhunter. She represents a company that wants to hire you. In fact, she’s offering a signing bonus and a 20 percent pay increase. Your authority would increase, and you would get an ownership stake in the company. It’s a job you know you could handle with responsibilities you know you would enjoy.
The drawback? You would work on a team with a reputation for mediocre work. It is known in the industry for doing no more than what it takes to get by, and there’s no indication that the leadership at the company plans to change that. Mediocrity is so much the rule at that company, in fact, that you’re a little concerned that they would want you. Do they really think you’d fit into that culture?
Despite the material benefits, many of us would turn down such an opportunity, rightly recognizing that it fails to satisfy one of our most basic needs – the desire to work with people who share our commitment to excellence.
The Best Strive for Excellence
The best want to work with the best. In fact, just one weak link can dramatically influence an otherwise strong team – ultimately leading to turnover among the best producers. So if we want to recruit and keep the best people for our teams, we have to recognize the importance of a strong weakest link.
We can demonstrate the impact of the weakest link with some basic math. If you have a five-person team and all five people are “10s,” then you might add that up and say your team is a “50.” But what if one of those people goes into a funk and becomes a 5. Now your team is a 45, and its effectiveness drops by 10 percent.
That’s a pretty big impact, but it still falls short of reality. In the real world, synergy exists, so our impact on a team is more like multiplication than addition. One and two doesn’t equal three in teamwork; with synergy, one and two can equal ten.
Consider the previous example but with multiplication. 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 equal 100,000. But 10 times 10 times 10 times 10 times five equal only 50,000. One weak link reduces the team’s effectiveness by a whopping 50 percent.
Clearly, the way to keep good people is to keep them around other good people. When good people find themselves working with people who are not carrying their share of the load, dissatisfaction creeps in. Pretty soon, the productivity of the really good people begins to fall off too. They lose motivation for excellence or they just get worn out from carrying someone else’s share of the work. Eventually, the best leave for greener pastures.
Everyone on a team needs to add excellence, which means leaders first need to place people in roles that make the most of their gifts and talents. But a person with the right skills and the wrong attitude is still like the proverbial bad apple that spoils the whole batch. So if you want a team that experiences low turnover and high success, fill it with people who are both capable and committed to doing great work.
monthly e-newsletter: Leadership Wired available at www.INJOY.com.
John Maxwell grew up in the 1950s in the small Midwestern city of Circleville, Ohio. John's earliest childhood memory is of knowing that he would someday be a pastor. He professed faith in Christ at the age of three, and reaffirmed that commitment when he was 13. At age 17, John began preparing for the ministry. He attended Circleville Bible College, earning his bachelor's degree in 1969. In June of that same year, he married his sweetheart, Margaret, and moved to tiny Hillham, Indiana, where he began his first pastorate.
While serving in his second church, Maxwell began to study the correlation between leadership effectiveness and ministry effectiveness. On July 4, 1976, while preaching at a service commemorating America's bicentennial, John sensed that God was calling him into a ministry to pastors. Within days after that event, pastors began to contact him, asking for his assistance in nurturing their churches. Over the next four years, on an informal basis, John helped scores of fellow pastors. Then, in 1980, he was asked to become Executive Director of Evangelism for the Wesleyan denomination.
Though his time at Wesleyan headquarters was productive, John soon realized that his deeper desire was to help pastors from numerous denominations. He knew that desire would be unfulfilled if he were to stay at denominational headquarters. As a result, in 1981 John accepted the call to return to the pastorate, this time at Skyline Wesleyan Church in the San Diego, California area. But he did so with the church's blessing to pursue his vision. The Skyline congregation allowed him to continue mentoring and assisting pastors even as he led them to new levels.
In 1985, as he continued to equip and encourage other pastors, John took the next crucial step in leadership development. He founded a new company called INJOY and created the INJOY Life Club, featuring a monthly tape for leaders. The fledging operation, established in the corner of a garage, was soon bursting at the seams. The INJOY Life Club tapes were received with great enthusiasm, and the number of subscriptions quickly increased from hundreds to thousands. Simultaneously, the demand for other resources and seminars exploded. Pastors from coast to coast were responding, and their desire for help was even greater than John had anticipated.
As the years passed, INJOY began demanding more and more of John's time. In 1995, he resigned from his position as senior pastor at Skyline following a very fruitful 14-year tenure. The church had tripled in size and its lay ministry involvement had increased ten-fold. Dr. Maxwell is in great demand today as a speaker. Through his bestselling books, audio and video resources, and major conferences, he communicates directly with more than one million people every year. He is frequently asked to speak for organizations such as Promise Keepers and Focus on the Family, but his greatest joy and desire is to help pastors become better leaders.
Because the need for leadership development knows no borders, John established EQUIP, a non-profit organization which trains leaders in urban communities, academic institutions, and within international organizations. EQUIP is also spearheading a movement which has enlisted more than one million pastoral prayer partners who covenant to pray specifically for those who shepherd God's flock.
John continues to seek new opportunities to help churches and church leaders. He knows that one thing is constant: the only hope for the world is salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ, who gives life abundantly.
