Allow your team to be Mischievous

There’s a great short post on the Signal vs. Noise blog this week about creating a culture of trust with your teams.

A lot of companies seek to control employees. They have handbooks and policies. They monitor emails. They make rules about what’s allowed and what’s forbidden.

But “control” is a tricky thing. The tighter the reins, the more you create an environment of distrust. An us vs. them mentality takes hold. And that’s when people start trying to game the system.

read the rest of the post…

One thing that has been a continual learning process for me over the years has been to give up control to my teams. I generally know how I want to do things and I’ve always kept a tight reign on my teams to make sure things fall in line.

This type of control generally leads to

• me over-working myself
• my teams feeling un-empowered to serve
• a stifling of creativity

Over the last two years, I’ve been working to give up control to allow room for others to lead and for others to serve in freedom. I’ve been working to widen the boundaries and allow people to be mischievous. What I’ve gotten is

• teams that are more committed
• teams that do better work
• teams that feel empowered to be creative
• I also end up not feeling like I have to do everything.

It’s a win/win.

Even though I’m still the lone staff member over IT, Communications, Media and the Web and I have more teams that I’m responsible for, we’re actually producing more outcomes and I’m not feeling as stretched thin with church work as I used to.