8 Marks of Leadership: How to Build a Healthy and Inspired Team

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Becoming a great leader is a process of lowering yourself to serve others, especially those that you are leading. It requires an ongoing time commitment to build relationships with your team. We must know them to discover their potential, as well as their weaknesses and strengths. Above all, to lead well, your heart must be to take good care of them. Great leaders lead by example. They love, care, serve, and appreciate those that are part of their team.

As a leader, you should not think as if you are leading something. Instead, you should think that you are serving someone.

How can you begin to lead in an area of life?

It is simple. Find a problem that you want to solve. But one thing you will immediately realize is the fact that you can not do it alone—you need others to do it with you. For this reason, you must build a team, so together you can bring the solution to the problem.

How does one build a healthy and inspired team?

Create the Atmosphere

First, remember, you only harvest the fruit of the seed that you plant. If you plant a grape seed, you will harvest grapes—not mangos!

If you are leading your team members with a good, loving, fun, and respectful attitude, they will learn to have the same attitude toward you and others.

In other words, a leader sets the atmosphere, whether positive or negative. It starts in the head and flows down to the whole body. Even those who have a hard time working with a team that is full of good characteristics will have no other option than to learn to apply these same qualities to their own life to remain part of the team.

As water reflects the face, a team should reflect their leader.

Set the Example

A great leader works hard. Their role is not only to give instructions for others to do their job correctly but find a workflow and structure where they can do it together. In the end, when the project or event is done, the team can say, “We did it! We accomplished it together!”

Leaders cannot have others do all the work, and at the end, get the credit for themselves by saying, “Look what I have done.”

Build Your Network

You must have an ethic of hard work. This is learned by seeing others succeed by their incredible effort—never giving up!

That is why it is extremely important for a leader to never stop learning, searching, and building relationships with other leaders. You should seek out those who are different than you to learn from them their wisdom, and even their mistakes. Great leaders do not isolate or disconnect from others that can offer valuable input, good advice, and applied guidance to leading others.

Communicate the Vision

Great leaders are excellent communicators and cast their vision loud and clear to their team. Communicating through regular scheduled meetings, emails, signage, and other methods is very important.

Most importantly, letting the team see the vision in their leader’s own actions is critical.  A great leader is alive and active in carrying out their vision to everyone around them.

For example, if you lead a ministry that encourages people to pray, your team should see and hear you praying all the time—because you love what you do!

Do not overlook that. Leaders must love their vision, their team, and what they do. If you have a business selling T-shirts, but you hate wearing them, chances are that you will not succeed in selling them.

Submit to Accountability

It is not what a leader says that makes others follow them, even though words are important. It is what a leader does and who they are—their reputation—that attracts others to follow them.

The character of a great leader behind closed doors is more important than their reputation in public life. They should be the same in public as they are in private with their team in displaying kindness, patience, goodness, love, and self-control.

Therefore, accountability is extremely important as a leader. It is hard for people to follow leaders who have a hard time submitting to someone above them. Leaders must have accountability to either a direct upline boss or a board of directors. No one can safely lead others if they refuse to allow others to speak into their life.

Lift Your Team Up

A great leader is a cheerleader. Their attitude is one of encouragement, finding ways to lift and build up their team members. They take the necessary time to think before acting, use wisdom with their choice of words, and practice self-control.

Leaders find a way to correct others without coming across as demeaning or disappointed with their team member. They try to talk with a friendlier tone, such as, “Can you do me a favor, next time do it this way.” Yes, it is received as correction, but equally as better direction for the next time the task must be performed.

Learn to Listen

A leader that is vulnerable, transparent, and very open with their team creates a safe place for them to know their leader’s strengths and weaknesses. This relatability makes it easy for everyone to be confident in sharing their ideas.

Stay Balanced

A  great leader is emotionally stable, not up and down with emotions and feelings. They make daily decisions that strengthen the mission to accomplish the vision.

Everyone is always leading something - a business, ministry, a group of friends, or a family. Whatever you are leading, if you want to be a great leader, you must put others—those who you are leading, above yourself.

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