Developing a Healthy Staff Culture: Getting Started

The first step to developing a healthy staff culture is to understand what it really means. There is a difference between leadership development and leadership training, though in my experience the two often are muddled together.

1. Leadership training places emphasis on learning.

We attend conferences, read books, blogs, and tweets from leaders we respect, all in the hope of gleaning valuable nuggets of knowledge that we can then apply in our own work environments . . . which is great . . . in theory. If we applied every valuable lesson learned we’d be successful leaders with effective work teams. But how much of what we absorb actually gets put into practice?

2. Leadership development focuses first on the application.

Most of us are exposed to ideas and principles that, if applied, could greatly impact our leadership and our organization’s success. The problem is we get home from a conference or finish the last chapter of the book and never quite get around to applying those ideas and principles.

As a leader, your role is to create application opportunities for your staff. It is in these opportunities that you will see the greatest impact of your leadership.

3. Consider your work team today. How are you investing in them? What opportunities are you providing for them to develop their leadership skills?

Jesus understood the powerful impact of leadership development. In Luke 9, Scripture gives us a foolproof strategy for investing in our staffs:

When Jesus had called the Twelve together,.

The process begins with Jesus identifying the 12 disciples. He did not randomly choose these 12 men. He was intentional—each chosen for a particular reason. In order to build a healthy staff culture, you must be intentional about who joins the team. Who are you currently investing in? Are you providing more leadership opportunities for them to grow and apply what they are learning?  This is the genius of what Jesus did.  He developed his team WHILE they were doing ministry.  You can too.

More tomorrow.

1 comment

Take a look at some of the responses we've had to this article.