Five Tips to Building a Successful Worship Team

Building a team might be the most difficult job of any worship leader. It requires a significant amount of time, energy, and heart. It requires vulnerability. It requires sacrifice. It requires dying to your own desires for the best of the team. But when a team is built, and when that team begins to function in unity, they become an unstoppable force.

Ministry is better as a team. Ministry is more powerful on a team. In fact, there is nothing that honors the Holy Spirit more than when His people act in unity.

Unity is the work of the Spirit. Teamwork is the work of the Spirit. Yet, even though empowered by the Holy Spirit, teamwork is hard work.

Every leader will have a unique perspective of their desired team composition. Personally, I prefer a team that is cross generational, including people with different levels of giftedness and personalities, whose strengths counter my weaknesses. Some people will prefer their teams to be comprised of members who are exact replicas of themselves. Regardless of your preference, the following five tips can be used to help you develop a united team who create an environment the allows the Holy Spirit to move freely.

1. Building a team starts with self-awareness.
Certainly, self-awareness seems an odd place to begin, but every successful leader must first be self-aware. Take time to discover your strengths and your weakness. Based on your needs and strengths, anticipate your reactions to situations. Know what increases your frustration and then prepare yourself to be frustrated. Before you can ever be your true, authentic self with your team, you must first be authentic with yourself.

Truly knowing yourself will prepare you to control your emotions when the need arises. And believe me, it will arise. The reality is, perfect harmony is a rare gift, and the leader of the team must always be in control of their emotions so they can be guided by logic. Very often, musicians are emotional people, and more than likely, your nature reaction will be one based on your team's emotions. Own it, prepare for it, and be ready to deal with it when it happens.

2. Be committed for the long haul.
Team building requires time. Lots and lots and lots of time. It takes time to build the trust required for teamwork. It takes time to build relationships. It takes time to know a person's heart. Plan for longevity.

I have a hard truth to tell you: if you're not willing to invest time into building a team through empowerment, your leadership would be most successful as a leader-manager. In future posts we can discuss these models further. For quick reference, see this diagram.

3. Articulate clear goals, expectations, and objectives.
Clearly communicating goals, expectations, and objectives provides safety for your team. It gives marching orders and empowers team members to reach the goal. Often, creative types have a tendency to need clearly defined objectives. Further, very often they have a strong tendency to expect perfection from themselves. While perfection is an impossibility, their striving does not end. They will push themselves to the limit always aiming for an impossible goal.

However, when you provide a goal that is attainable, it empowers them to succeed. When your team members feel successful, you have provided them with an achievement they were unable to reach on their own. That success with endear them to you while preparing them to obtain a new, more complicated, objective.

4. Spend intention time with your team on and off the platform.
Much can be said about the importance of fun, praying together, sitting in service together, practicing together, but I tend to believe that the teams I have led became the closest when we shared meals together. There is something deeply spiritual about sharing a meal. There's a bond that's formed. And sure, there's a lot of fun and praying and learning gained around a table too.

Shauna Niequist has written several books about community and the power of the table. In the introduction of her book Bread & Wine she write,

[The Table is] not, actually, strictly, about food for me. It's about what happens when we come together, slow down, open our homes, look into one another's faces, listen to one another's stories. It happens when we leave the office and get a sitter and skip our workouts every so often to celebrate a birthday or an accomplishment or a wedding or a birth, when we break out the normal clockwork of daily life...on a cold, gray Wednesday for no other reason than the fact that the faces we love are gathered around the table. It happens when we enter the joy and the sorrow of the people we love, and we join together at the table to feed one another and be fed, and while it's not strictly about food, it doesn't happen without it. Food is the starting point, the common ground, the thing to hold and to handle, the currency we offer to one another.

I don't think I could illustrate any more perfectly the importance of the table when learning to love people and become a team. Good job, Shauna.

5. Each team member must develop a deep rooted commitment to each other.

On a team, there will always be disagreements and misunderstandings. We are all human. We all have opinions. We are all unique by God's design. But when we are serving on a team together, we have to develop mutual trust in our fellow team members.

This is a requirement for success. And it honors God.

This attitude of humility is rare, but just as James wrote, "God gives grace to the humble," and we give grace to each other. We often forget, at the foot of the cross we are all equal. There is not one person better than any other, including you, Worship Leader.

I hope you feel inspired to love teamwork as much as I do. Yes, building a team requires a lot of work. But the end result is so worth the time, the energy, and the sacrifice. I wish I could say that I've always practiced these tips, but that would be a lie. These tips I learned through life. I failed often, but I learned, asked my team for forgiveness, and went on.

And then I failed again. And I asked forgiveness. And then we went on.

And if I can do it, you can too.

Encounter Worship believes in you and in your gifts. We know God has great plans for your life and He desires to use you to be an instrument for His glory.