By Madge Obaseki
As a leader, one of your most significant God-given responsibilities is inspiring
others to "run with the vision" for your organisation. The acronym for T.E.A.M.
is ‘Together Everyone Achieves More,’ i.e., we can’t achieve success without
input from others. With that in mind, how do you inspire and motivate your
workers? Here are seven tips:
1. Do They Understand Your Mission, Objectives and Strategy? If they don’t know where you are going, how will they get there? Provide your mission and strategy, or they will devise their route! (Proverbs 29:18). Use various communication methods to share your Vision, Mission, and Goals. You can produce a short-written summary (Habakkuk 2:2). You should also share the plans at team meetings or retreats and discuss how individuals can contribute to achieving the mission and goals.
2. Build Your Workers Up Spiritually (Ephesians 4:12) Spiritual development is not something people think about generally in business. However, I believe this is key to building healthy relationships and Kingdom advancement. An effective way of engaging a different focus and attracting a more extensive age range is to have biblical studies that encourage discussions around real-life experiences.
3. Make Sure They Know What You Want Them To Do! Start by developing a Job Description for paid employees or a Role Description for unpaid volunteers. They should include conditions of service; what the duties are; what sort of person you need in the role and whom they report to. The format is particularly useful when you need to evaluate performance against agreed duties.
4. Provide Adequate Training and Development Whether volunteers or paid employees your team will need training and continuous development to ensure they contribute to the health of your organisation. Training is especially crucial for unpaid workers and might be seen as a non-financial motivator as they learn new skills. Their training and experience can also be added to a resume. The range of training and development may include classroom-style training, induction or soft skills
training; online courses; 1-1 mentoring or coaching or even reading and
reflecting in a group. What you choose depends on the training needs of the individual or whole teams, budget and time available.
5. Help Them Identify Their Gift
Start by speaking to individuals to find out their passions and interests.
Help them to determine what they see as their weakness. In a secular
sense, we refer to identifying gifts a skills audit.
6. Empower Your Team Luke 9 and Matthew 10 informs us that Jesus empowered his disciples by giving them power and authority. Leadership theorists Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s continuum theory also concluded that "to gain control is to give control." To maximize your organisation's potential, your team members need to feel confident enough to duplicate what you do and develop it further. Empowered team members will enable you to have a better overview and make informed decisions. By empowering your team, you will freer to take a more precise summary of given circumstances.
7. Build In Motivators As human beings, we are wired to expect some form of appreciation for what we do. The first step is to find genuine ways of saying thank you! I have organised worker of the month/year awards. What about having occasional social activities to build your team up and encourage cohesion? Finally, if you have not yet acquired a team of employees or volunteers, you will, and I believe these tips will be invaluable.
About Madge: Known for attention to detail and understanding complex challenges stopping organisational advancement, Madge's specialty is Training and Organisational development. She currently works with Charities, Ministries and SMEs in the UK and USA to facilitate development, sustainability and growth objectives. She is also the Co-Director of Grow The Church Now/Future Hope Legacy Ltd.