Eight Team Building Lessons from Jesus

By today’s standards, Jesus may not be the first person you would pick as an example of a great team leader. He wasn’t on Facebook sharing links to leadership articles. He didn’t have an organizational chart. He often did things that didn’t make sense to His followers. But take a look at what we can learn from Him.

He consulted His own leader. Jesus spent a lot of time with His Father. In fact, it was after an extended time in the wilderness that Jesus then picked his team. I imagine that God gave Him some wisdom about who to select and why.

He kept His team small. Although Jesus interacted with a lot of people along the journey of His ministry (at times speaking to very large groups), His core group of disciples consisted of only 12 people, and His closet buddies numbered three. This demonstrates that you can only really effectively invest deeply in a limited number of people at one time. Relationships that are deep and effective take time, and you can't spread yourself wide and deep all at once. You may be an influential leader with a ton of Facebook friends or Twitter followers, and that's okay. But you have to know what you are capable of in terms of teaching and mentoring, and limit your close contacts to those with whom you can effectively interact long term. If your organization is getting big, you probably need to consider bringing on other team leaders.

He didn't choose the best and brightest. This really goes against conventional wisdom, but rather than hold an in-depth series of interviews, Jesus chose men that He knew could become devoted followers despite their personality quirks and foibles. That's not to say these men didn't have intellect and talents, but they certainly had hang ups...doubt, pride, fear. Jesus didn't let that stop Him from choosing them. He saw into their hearts. I’m not saying an interview process isn’t important, but if all we see in candidates is their skill, abilities and past successes, we can miss what they are truly like, how they will fit in the culture, and whether or not they will be loyal.

He taught along the way. We don't see Jesus doing an intensive "discipleship training" weekend retreat with the disciples before they started hanging out with Him. He didn't send them away to seminars. For His small group, He picked people with a certain kind of heart and then poured into them on a daily basis. It was more of a process of mentoring as they “did life" together. He taught the disciples as they fished, as they came across those in need, as they dealt with each other.

He helped them with their skills. Remember when Jesus recommended the fishermen to change where they were throwing the nets? He was interested in what they did for a living and helping them do it better.

He asked questions. Questions like "Who do you say that I am?" drew the disciples into discussion. Jesus knew the best approaches to learning.

He experienced a failure. In the world's eyes, anyway, the choice of including Judas on the team was a massive fail. But instead, this incident shows the love and mercy of God. Since even the Son of God had someone close to him who made the choice to reject Him, He understands that pain when it happens to you.

He had a succession plan. Jesus knew He would not physically be with these men on earth forever. He trained them and encouraged them about going out on their own and left a legacy called the Holy Spirit so He would never truly be gone from them. A good team leader knows he/she will not be here forever and that development of other leaders is a top goal.

How about you? Do any of these examples from Jesus' teambuilding resonate with you?