Managing High Performance Multisite Creative Teams with Melody Workman

Thanks for joining us for the unSeminary podcast. We’re talking with Executive Creative Director Melody Workman from California-based Sandals Church – one of the fastest growing churches in the country for several years now.

It’s hard for churches everywhere to build high performance volunteer teams. Often our growth strategy for volunteer teams doesn’t match our growth strategy for church planting or campus expansion. Listen in as Melody shares about how to shift to a team-building mentality that will support growth at your church.

* Make the shift to building robust teams. // At first Sandals Church had a great growth strategy for planting campuses, but no growth strategy for building high performance volunteer teams. Melody began putting a lot of emphasis around the idea that when hiring someone they can’t simply be really skilled at their job, but they also need to be a strong team builder, or they probably won’t work out at the church.* Who knows what you know? // Great leaders always ask two questions: Who knows what I know, and who can do what I do? As church leaders we may falsely believe that if someone else is as skilled as we are that we are devalued. But the truth is that when we reproduce ourselves, we have increased our value. Now we’ve trained others to know what we know.* What do you value? // When it comes to what the church values, Melody tells her team that if they’re not vocal about it and it’s not visible, it’s not really a value. Team building needs to be front and center all the time if it’s something a church values. Talk about team building in your meetings and cast vision around it for your team. People are not drawn to tasks, they’re drawn to vision. Recognize that team building brings value to the volunteers involved, the campuses, and to the church. * Show the volunteers you appreciate them. // You’ll find that volunteers will care about the work that needs to be done when you care about them. Recruiting is only part of the job; build time in your calendar to express gratitude to your volunteers. Let them know that you couldn’t do everything you do without them, and that you wouldn’t want to.* Growing pains of a growing church. // Growing churches are going to have growing pains. For example, it can be hard for the central team to be aligned with the campuses. First, celebrate the fact that you are growing. Then establish wins. Melody worked with the executive team at Sandals Church to outline the Weekend Win: what is the win on that weekend regardless of what campus you are at? They also have weekend evaluations that come from the campuses to the central network staff every weekend. Supervisors from both areas review these evaluations.* Look for the little wins. // When recruiting team members, every leader brings different strengths to the table. Work with leaders at each campus to set sizable, reachable goals. Melody underscores that it’s important to celebrate before you evaluate so that you don’t deflate your team. Leaders at Sandals know they will be evaluated on team building, so Melody makes sure they are offered constant encouragement when they take steps toward this goal. Every step is celebrated. Without celebration, a team will become deflated by evaluations, and a deflated team will underperform every time. Celebrate the small things and it helps evaluations become less of a nemesis.* Building and Caring For Your Team. // Sandals works to train up leaders from within, and one of the ways they do this is through ROGO school, which stands for Real with Ourselves, God and Others. One of the ROGO resources Melody has developed is called Building and Caring For Your Team. Help leaders build and care for their teams by watching the video below, and <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://unseminary.com/wp-content/uploads/2021-ROGO-_-Leadership-_...