Effective Teams

Healthy Leaders | Issue 47

Apr 18, 2025

Welcome to Issue 47 of Healthy Leaders. In this issue, we get into the nitty-gritty of organizing an effective team.

Hello friends,

Welcome back to our ongoing conversation on healthy Christian leadership and leader development.1

A healthy team is going to consist of members who have strong leadership tendencies as well as those with strong managerial characteristics. A team with both orientations is going to be stronger together, as long as we pay attention to a few key practical considerations.

Here’s Malcolm with more:

In our last issue of Healthy Leaders, we discussed the various roles accomplished by the healthy manager. In view of helping you determine your own orientation as manager, leader, or some combination of the two, here are some vital skills managers should possess.2

The range of skills that a manager requires can be summed up in three categories: conceptual skills, people skills and technical skills. All managers must possess skills in each of these important areas to function effectively, although the degree may vary.

Conceptual Skills

Conceptual skills involve your cognitive ability to see the organization as a whole and the relationships among its parts. As opposed to technical thinking, this is strategic thinking. These skills involve your ability to take the broad, long-term view.

Managers who don’t develop their conceptual skills will be severely limited in what they can accomplish. Many of the responsibilities of top managers, such as decision making, resource allocation, and innovation, require a broad view.

Here are a few questions you can use to evaluate how strong your conceptual skills are:

When you have a number of tasks to do, can you set priorities and organize the work around the deadlines?
When you are deciding on a particular course of action (such as which languages to study, job to take, special projects to be involved in), do you typically consider the long-term (three years or more) implications of what you choose to do?
When you have a project or assignment to accomplish, do you get into the details rather than the “big picture” issues?
When you are learning something new, do you relate what you are learning to other concepts you have learned elsewhere?
Do you have long-term visions for your ministry, family and other activities? Do you think about these visions carefully and frequently?
Does talking about ideas and concepts get you really passionate and excited?

People Skills

People skills are the manager’s ability to work with and through other people and to work effectively as a group member. These skills are demonstrated in the way you relate to others, including your ability to encourage, facilitate, coordinate, lead, communicate and resolve conflicts.

If you’re a manager with good people skills, you probably allow others to express themselves without fear of rejection or ridicule, and encourage their active participation in the task at hand. Basically, you like other people and are liked by them. These skills are particularly helpful in multicultural situations.

Effective managers are cheerleaders, facilitators, coaches and nurturers. They build through people. Strong people skills enable managers to unleash others’ energy and potential, and help them grow as future managers and leaders.

Take a moment to evaluate the strength of your people skills:

Would most people describe you as being a good listener?
When you have a serious disagreement with someone, do you hang in there and talk it out until it is completely resolved?
Do you try to include others in activities or when there are discussions?
When someone makes a mistake, do you immediately want to correct the person and let him know the proper answer or approach?
When you are working on a group project and someone isn’t doing his or her fair share of the work, are you more likely to complain to your friends rather than confronting the individual?
Do projects interest you more than people?

Technical Skills

Finally, your technical skill is your understanding of and proficiency in the performance of specific tasks. Such skills include mastery of the methods, techniques and equipment involved in your specific functions, including specialized knowledge, analytical ability and the competent use of tools and techniques to solve problems within that area.

Technical skills are especially important at lower organizational levels. Many managers rise to their first management position by having excellent technical skills. However, technical skills become less important than people and conceptual skills as one’s organizational responsibility increases.

Here are a few questions to consider regarding your technical skills:

Do you prefer to learn technical or practical things rather than those things involving concepts and ideas?
Would you rather sit in front of your computer than spend a lot of time with people?
Do you try to be efficient with your time when talking with someone, rather than worry about the other person’s needs, so that you can get on with your real work?
When solving problems, would you rather analyze some information than meet with a group of people?

We’ve been going through issues related to leaders and managers for the last four issues, but in our next series we’ll get into the glorious ins-and-outs of building leaders — and we’re not joking that building leaders is glorious. God works in awesome ways in individuals, families, churches and organizations when we devote ourselves to a culture of building leaders.

Join us next time for more!

What about you?

Leaders & Managers Self Evaluation

137KB ∙ PDF file

Download

We’ve shared our leader/manager evaluation multiple times now, but here it is again. What were your results?

But even more important than determining our own individual orientations as leaders, managers, or leader-managers — we need to ask ourselves this question:

What will you do now?

We’d love to hear your answers in the comments.

Until next time, we’re with you!

— Chris

Healthy Leaders