by Shawn Lovejoy: Has your team ever gotten along just enough to keep moving along? Conflict goes unresolved, under-performers skate by with no accountability, toxicity becomes the norm and morale is non-existent? Some organizations exist in that space. Having harmony on the exterior while tension exists just under the surface. Artificial harmony beneath the surface eventually leads to disunity at the surface. 

These are the moments when leaders lead. Leadership requires daily courageous conversations! Especially with people who aren’t getting the job done or don’t display the values to which we claim to hold.

As you wade into these conversations, I want to give you some “worst practices” to avoid at all costs.

Assigning Blame

So many leaders enter a coaching or corrective conversation ready to blame the other person. Rather than placing blame on the person you’re meeting with, level the playing field by starting the conversation with, “It could just be me, but…” before confronting the issue at hand. Avoiding accusation opens people up to receive development from you rather than being defensive towards you. Pre-deciding someone is to blame blocks you from being able hear that person’s side of the story. Besides, people who blame things rarely change things. Don’t assign blame, lead for change.

Texting Rather Than Talking

Tone, facial expressions, volume and posture often communicate deeper than words. Guess what, none of those things can be conveyed better than face-to-face. Too many leaders rely on text, direct messages or email to handle conflict. Almost every time you do this, your team reads your message through the lens of a worst case scenario. When it comes to quick relays of information or details, text and email work well. For a hard conversation, face-to-face is the only acceptable way to engage. Let me be clear, texting a hard conversation is the opposite of courageous and does more harm than good. 

Assuming the Worst

Most of us are overexposed to negativity. We’re almost hardwired to think the worst about a person or their motives before we know the truth. Discipline your emotions to assume the best about the team member you’re having a difficult conversation with. Assumptions influence outcomes. When you are intentional about searching for good in others, they can sense that and often respond accordingly. Entering these tough discussions by assuming the best also reshapes how you see people. When you look for the gold in people you don’t focus as much on the dirt.

When you handle conflict the right way, you bring peace to your team and life. Deal with these conversations using “worst practices” like this, and your result will be drama! Drama in your organization, on your team, in your relationships, in your leadership and in your life!

Conflict is inevitable; but Drama is a choice. Courageous conversations are one key to creating a drama-free organization…but it’s just one of the keys!

You’re invited to join me for a free training designed to help you “drama-proof” your culture. Join me on October 15th at 10amCST for “Creating a Drama Free Culture.” All you have to do is SIGN UP HERE!

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Source: The Wrong Way To Have Hard Conversations

The post The Wrong Way To Have Hard Conversations appeared first on Passion for Planting.

From Carey Nieuwhof: This is a guest blog post by Dillon Smith. Dillon is my content manager and is a member of my new Speaking Team. You can book Dillon to speak at your next event here.

By Dillon Smith

It’s true, I hate conflict. Maybe you do too.

Your heart rate rises, you get goosebumps, and you oftentimes want to say something you would later regret.

For those of you that don’t mind conflict, odds are, you work with many people who don’t like conflict. This post will give you a better idea of how their brains work, and how you can work with them in the future.

To give you some context on where I am coming from, here are my top 5 strengths on Strengthsfinder:

Restorative
Harmony
Connectedness
Belief
Includer

I am not wired for conflict.

So, why am I writing a blog post about how it fuels growth?

Because it does, I have been wrong about it for years, and I see many pastors and leaders that struggle with it in the same way I do.

My train of thought makes sense to me:

I don’t want to risk damaging a relationship for the sake of improvement.

That motivation feels right to relational leaders, but it is often the wrong move. And everyone in your church probably sees it.

If you want your church members, volunteers, and staff to grow, both in numbers and in maturity/discipleship, you need to embrace little moments of conflict.

If you want your church members, volunteers, and staff to grow, both in numbers and in maturity/discipleship, you need to embrace little moments of conflict. Click To Tweet

But Dillon, conflict in the church is bad, right?

Wrong. Not all conflict in the church is bad.

I totally agree that:

Nobody wins in an unhealthy church split.

Nobody wins a screaming match in the office.

Nobody wins when a church makes a decision to close its doors.

These are all disasters that are packed with division and conflict, but they can be avoided.

How do we avoid them?

I’ve had to learn that minor moments of healthy conflict help you avoid massive moments of division that lead to disaster.

Minor moments of healthy conflict help you avoid massive moments of division.Click To Tweet

It’s like a flu shot. You get a little bit of the disease (hard/uncomfortable conversations) that your body can handle so that you don’t end up getting the full-on flu (division and disaster) later.

The same thing happens in marriage. If you never talk about the things your spouse does that bother you, one day you end up blowing up at them, and you both leave that conversation hurt and angry.

Your blowup could have been avoided if you would have had a minor, difficult conversation about their habit earlier.

That earlier conversation is difficult, but not as difficult as the later conversations that are inevitable if you bottle it up.

We have to talk about small issues before they become big issues.

Your church is the same way. Minor moments of healthy conflict help you avoid massive moments of division.

We have to talk about small issues before they become big issues.Click To Tweet

Here are 4 forms of healthy conflict that will help your church grow:

1. Avoiding conflict is avoiding truth

Here is the problem with avoiding conflict as a Christian: Part of speaking the truth is inherently confrontational.

A church that doesn’t know what it’s against can never know what it’s for.

A church that doesn’t know what it’s against can never know what it’s for.Click To Tweet

It’s critical to know what you are for as an organization, but if you are fighting for something, that implies you are also fighting against something.

Your people need to know what they are fighting against. If you don’t define their enemy, they will.

There are a few things the church and its leaders need to be openly in conflict with at all times: Christians not acting like Jesus, anti-Christian teachings, and at the very base of it all, the gospel not being shared with more people.

We see just how quick we need to be to address these things in writings of the apostles John, Paul, and especially in the life of Jesus.

They were careful how they approached it, but they embraced conflict and stood up against the worldly tendencies seeping into the church.

We need to do the same.

As church leaders, we have to be ready to have:

Hard conversations with our members about the sin in their lives.

Hard conversations with those outside the church saying things like, “We all follow the same God right?”

Hard conversations about the importance of reaching more people with the gospel.

Your people need to know what they are fighting against. If you don’t define their enemy, they will.Click To Tweet

2. Conflict grows young leaders

People don’t grow until the pain associated with not growing is greater than the effort it will take to grow.

Read that again. (This is based on one of my favorite of Carey’s quotes.)

When I first started working for Carey, I had a ton of growth I needed to undergo in a short amount of time.

He knew that I would likely need to experience pain to grow, and he had to find a way to lead me into that.

As my boss and coach, he used strategic bits of manufactured pain and conflict so that I would become the leader I needed to be. I go into detail about what exactly he said in this post.

Because Carey cared about my development, he allowed me to undergo some short-term pain so I could experience growth that would benefit me the rest of my life.

As a leader, if you love your people and want to see them grow, you should do the same.

If you want 3 examples of good ways to coach your young leaders through pain, read this post.

People don’t grow until the pain associated with not growing is greater than the effort it will take to grow.Click To Tweet

3. Conflict lets you have the awkward conversations you’ve been avoiding

Imagine you have a volunteer that needs some coaching. Maybe they shake guests’ hands for just a little too long, or they don’t actually address first-time guests when they are greeting, or maybe they carry an odor that is a bit discomforting to anyone they serve coffee to.

You want to say something to them, but they are working for free so you don’t want to offend them and have them leave the church or stop volunteering, so you just don’t risk it.

This is a massive mistake.

What if you had a close friend with a similar issue?

Should you embrace the moment of conflict and tell them what they are doing wrong? Of course!

You would be a terrible friend if you didn’t tell them.

You are doing the same thing when you don’t call out your volunteers.

If you love your volunteers and the people they are serving, you will hold them accountable to doing their best. The only way to do that is to have hard conversations when necessary.

Obviously, be careful how you go about it, but if you are willing to have these conversations early, your volunteers will thank you and will stick around.

If you don’t do this, mediocrity takes over your organization, high capacity volunteers will stop volunteering, and first-time guests won’t come back.

Carey writes a bit more about keeping high capacity volunteers here. 

If you love your volunteers and the people they are serving, you will hold them accountable for doing their best.Click To Tweet

4. Conflict can remove the tension from your team

If you don’t address building tension in your organization, eventually it will address you, and it won’t be pretty.

If you don’t address building tension in your organization, eventually it will address you, and it won’t be pretty. Click To Tweet

No matter how healthy your organization is, staff members get hurt, and tensions grow.

It happens to you, too. One person questions your authority or gossips about you, and you are silently angry and bitter for the rest of the day.

Many leaders, including myself, push through the pain and act like it isn’t affecting them. But it is.

We tell ourselves that staying quiet is the strong thing to do.

But just pushing through and not dealing with pain from coworkers doesn’t result in a stronger leader or organization.

So what should we do?

When someone hurts us, go to them ASAP. Have a hard conversation. Don’t run from the hurt. Jesus didn’t, Paul didn’t, and neither should we.

When you set the tone for your team of embracing healthy conflict and requiring them to do the same, you create a culture where your team chooses the small pain in the moment rather than the catastrophic pain down the road.

Your decision to embrace conflict will change the entire trajectory of your staff and organization.

If you don’t already practice this, this is a change you need to make.

When someone hurts us, go to them ASAP. Have a hard conversation. Don’t run from the hurt. Jesus didn’t, Paul didn’t, and neither should we. Click To Tweet

Want 7 hard conversations to get you started?

Getting a stuck church growing or helping a church that’s reaching new people grow even further can seem daunting.

It doesn’t have to be.

Whether you’re a church that isn’t growing, has plateaued, or whether you wish your church was growing faster than it is, I’d love to help you break through. That’s why I created the Church Growth Masterclass.

The Church Growth Masterclass is everything I wish I knew about church growth when I got into ministry more than 20 years ago.

Naturally, I can’t make a church grow. You can’t make a church grow. Only God can do that.

But I believe you can position your church to grow.

You can knock down the barriers that keep you from growing. You can eliminate the things that keep your church from growing and implement some strategies that will help you reach far more people. That’s what I’d love to help you do in the Church Growth Masterclass.

In the Church Growth Masterclass I’ll show you:

The 10 reasons your church isn’t growing
Why even committed church-goers aren’t attending as often as before
How to tell if your church leaders are getting burned out
The 5 keys to your church better impacting millennials.
What to do when a church wants to grow … but not change
5 essentials for church growth
5 disruptive church trends to watch—and how to respond
How to increase church attendance by increasing engagement.

The Masterclass includes a complete set of videos that you can play with your team, board or staff, PDF workbooks that will help you tackle the issues you’re facing, and bonus materials that will help you navigate the most pressing issues facing churches that want to reach their cities today.

You can learn more and gain instant access to the course today.

What about you?

Do you have people on your team that dislike conflict? How can you help them?

I would love for you to leave a comment below, and share this post with them!

The post 4 ways conflict can help your church (and people) GROW appeared first on CareyNieuwhof.com.

Source: 4 ways conflict can help your church (and people) GROW

The post 4 ways conflict can help your church (and people) GROW appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Healthy Growing Churches: Conflict in and amongst our teams is inevitable. Each member of the team is human after all, and as much as we hate to admit it, we don’t always walk perfectly in alignment with the Spirit like we wish we could. Also, each member of your team is passionate and gifted in different areas, and while their contribution to a specific project may be significant, sometimes those passions and giftings clash with others’ or even our own leadership.

Let me tell you a little about my leadership journey to help us put some things into perspective. First of all, I have been in some leadership ministry role in church since I was a teenager. For the majority of that time, I was a worship leader. In October of 2010, I became the Worship Arts Pastor at a local church in Upstate, SC. I was in my twenties and full of energy and zeal, which is excellent! Don’t lose that!

Unfortunately, however, I inherited a dysfunctional team. During the first five years of ministry there, I felt like all I did was pick up broken pieces and try to put them back together. It was suffocating and creatively stifling. If you’ve been there or you are now, you know exactly what I am talking about. You have God-given, God-sized dreams and goals, but there’s this constant pounding up against what seems to be a brick wall. And no matter how hard you try, you can’t find a breakthrough. Here are some things I learned during parts of this season and some things that I am still working out today.

There are warning signs. Don’t gloss over them.

So many of our ministers in local churches today fall into the category of the shepherd, teacher, or shepherd-teacher. While these roles are critical for a vibrant church, other roles are important too, like the apostle, prophet, and evangelist (Ephesians 4). My experience in the local church has been one where the shepherd and the teacher ruled and, unfortunately, issues and major warning signs of the dysfunctional got swept under the rug or glossed over. As Christian brothers and sisters, we have to have relationships with those whom we serve that are deep enough to call these things out! It is imperative.

There is a right and a wrong way to deal with conflict, and there are books written to that end that you can study. But the point is that a problem is not just going to go away. It would be like saying a deep, infected wound would heal on its own. No, the way a deep wound heals (without treatment) is that a scab forms over the top of it, but infection and a lot of gross stuff festers underneath. No matter what, that junk is going to come back up to the surface. You either deal with an issue now, or you deal with a much greater one later. In the case of an infected wound, we could be talking about an amputation here. So think about that analogy in light of your teams.

So what are the warning signs for which you should be on the lookout?

1. Disengagement

Is there someone on your team who use to share incredible vision and ideas that now seems preoccupied in meetings or team activities? Is there someone on your team that used to seem excited about the mission and vision of your church, but now appears disinterested and maybe a bit jaded? If you’re the lead/senior pastor at your church, take a look at your youth, children’s, and worship pastors. Are their teams engaged? And are you engaged with them?

2. Discipleship or lack thereof

Do you have members of your team mentoring and discipling other members of your team? Are there conversations going on outside the parameters of the team, church, or ministry? Who are you, as the leader, discipling? Are you setting the example? Do the people on your team seem to generally like each other, even if they don’t always agree on a particular strategy?

Those are just two of the warning signs. It’s likely that you’ve experienced others. Gossip, backbiting, quarrels, and discord – all of these are warning signs, but I believe that all stem from either disengagement or lack of discipleship.

YOU are the key to leading a functional team.

One of the critical elements in determining if your team is dysfunctional is YOU. It is so essential for you, as the leader, to acknowledge your role in the dysfunction of your team. Is there someone on your team with whom you clash? Are you disengaged or disinterested with the team you have either built or inherited? Have you become jaded and unhealthy in your relationship with Jesus? Are you being discipled, and are you making disciples?

Now that you know and understand that your team is dysfunctional and you’ve acknowledged your part in the dysfunction, it’s time to make a plan. This is where the hard work comes in, especially for those who may not be natural relational leaders.

Leading teams effectively requires some range of vulnerability and transparency, regardless of your personal leadership style. In general, you’ll find that more people will follow your mission and vision if they believe and know you actually care about them. This is especially true of Millennials and Xennials, perhaps less true with baby boomers and such.

Whether you like it or not, those who are actually already beginning to take the reigns of the Church or will be leading the church in just a few years are of the millennial generation. I personally think this is a great thing, and I believe there is a lot of hope for the Church because God has uniquely gifted this generation with different gifts and abilities, just like He has with all generations before this one. Every generation has had its particular calling, and when we work across generational lines, we see an essential glimpse of heaven. We begin to see the body of Christ in motion.

An important point to remember is that we all lead people out of who we are. So here you may think, “Well, I’m a strong-willed, unemotional person who just wants to get the job done. That’s who I am. That’s how I’m going to lead.” But there’s a caveat to the statement just mentioned: “We lead out of who we are, but we must lead who we have” (Greg Wiens). The “who” that you lead may need something different from you, and it is important to know this about your team members.

Tools to Utilize

If you’re uncertain about who the people are on your team, there are several tools you can utilize.

Go to our website and have your team members take the FREE Spiritual Gifts Assessment.
Head on over to Healthy Growing Leaders’ site, take and give the DISC Assessment to all of your team members. This will provide you with powerful insight into what makes your team members click – how they need to be led.
Give your team members the Love Languages test. If you want to be a servant leader, this is vital.

During my time as Worship Arts Pastor, I would give all of my volunteers in the band and production these three assessments. I found that some of my team members driven by gifts or words of affirmation, so one of the most perfect ways to encourage and motivate these team members was a hand-written note of encouragement. For some of my other team members, a $5 gift card to Starbucks when they’d really outdone themselves would really speak to them. Many of my millennial team members needed quality time, so a 30 min coffee break was a nice treat to them. Some liked to be acknowledged publicly; some privately. The important thing was that I knew these things about my team.

It all comes down to a desire to be connected, so stay tuned for Part 2 of this blog next week where we’ll talk more about that connection. Also, be sure to check out all the other posts in this series.

The post Leadership Development: Leading Through Conflict – Part 1 appeared first on Healthy Growing Churches.

Source: Leadership Development: Leading Through Conflict – Part 1

The post Leadership Development: Leading Through Conflict – Part 1 appeared first on Passion for Planting.