Maintaining Team Unity by Focusing on the Vision

Great leaders know how to keep, protect, and maintain team unity. NDAB Creativity/Shutterstock

A good leader reinforces an organization, business, or ministry’s vision, mission, and values in order to maintain team unity.

This is the main course that unites a team. Everything else is just subjective ideas and opinions that could potentially cause discord. If all team members have the same purpose and love for the vision, it will be reflected by unity within the team. Great leaders know how to keep, protect, and maintain their team’s unity.

Focus on the Vision

The only reason your ministry, organization, or business exists is to solve a problem that you have discovered. The answer to that problem is defined in your vision statement. Once you can clearly articulate your vision, you must find others that share that vision. Together, this team is united to accomplish it.

A leader could lose focus, distract themselves, and start doing many different things—possibly even good things. But if these additional tasks and projects do not line up with the vision, then the whole team will get off track, become overwhelmed and worn out. This will eventually bring confusion and division into the team. It will begin to pull in different directions, led by different opinions and ideas.

It is extremely important for a leader to stay focused, reinforcing and emphasizing the vision whenever possible. As a leader, make sure that every member of your team knows, memorizes, recognizes, visualizes, understands, believes, loves, and agrees with your vision.

Do not assume that your team members know the vision. They might know their job description and perform their duties well, but ask them what the vision statement is, and you might be surprised by their answers—or non-answers.

It is vital to constantly communicate a clear explanation of the purpose for which the ministry, organization, or business exists. This can be accomplished with videos, songs, visual posts, letter heads, reminder emails, monthly meetings, daily conversations, and the like. These reminders will also encourage your team to keep focused on the vision.

Inevitably, your team will have diverse ideas, opinions, and disagreements on many different issues. If you allow these tense matters to come up constantly and take over in team discussions, they can create unhealthy relationships, sow division, cause resentment, offense, and brew a toxic environment.

Be a peace maker. That means supporting your team members’ ideas and opinions when they line up with the vision. Always encourage them to focus on what unites them, what they agree on and love: the vision.

You and your team must love what you do. Loving the vision will create a clean, peaceful and unified atmosphere even in a diverse place filled with different opinions. Knowing, understanding, and loving the vision will hold your team together.

Remember that your words and actions reflect the love you have for the vision. Let your team see that all you do, and all you say, is focused on the solution to the problem—the vision that drives your organization.

Focusing on the vision will help you to cultivate a bond of peace and a mutual flow of great ideas. More importantly, it will keep things real. It’s extremely important for your team to know why the ministry, organization, or business does what it does. What is the problem and how can they as a team fix it?

The vision is what brings a team together. Anything contrary to the vision will only separate or divide the team. Walking without vision, or with bad vision, is like walking in a dark tunnel blindfolded. Without vision, the team will perish!

Accomplish Your Mission

Great leaders are planners. They have the vision and develop plans and strategies to meet the goal. Good leaders know when, where, and how they will solve the problems they have discovered. They also know that without a team, the mission cannot be accomplished. It is a leader’s responsibility to raise up a team to help him or her do the work.

These leaders know the importance of investing money and time to train their teams well. They prepare, equip, and train each team member to understand the mission statement, goals, guidelines, policies, rules, regulations, and core values of the ministry, organization, or business.

It is vital that a leader communicates the vision to his or her team. A good leader knows that sending a team member without appropriate training and preparation to do the work alone, just to fill an empty spot, is a mistake. That decision will not only hurt the process, but it will hurt that team member by leaving a bad taste on that vital first experience on the job.

Just as leaders need their teams, teams also need their leaders. The trust should be mutual. A great leader has a servant’s heart, humbly putting team members first by caring for, loving, and serving them. This is what encourages the team to faithfully follow the instructions given them to do the work.

Good leaders are selfless. They care about and foster strong and healthy team relationships. They show compassion by gently caring about their teams’ needs and struggles. They know the importance of being honest, keeping their word, correcting from a place of love, showing gratitude, and public appreciation. They know how to share and receive ideas with open and clear communication, always striving to keep the harmony of the team united in thought and purpose.

These leaders do not keep records of wrongs or make decisions based on assumptions. Instead, they help their team to persevere, find their unique strengths and skills, and fulfill their potential.

Following rules and regulations to provide a safe and secure place of work for the team is extremely important for a great leader. It is equally important to provide the materials necessary to do the work. Lacking materials, feeling unsafe, insecure, and unprotected will slow down and limit team production. This can frustrate both the leader and the team, as well as clients or customers.

Be aware that suggestions, opinions, and sometimes “demands” from outsiders will come in. But if they do not line up with your vision, be very cautious. They can pull you away, get you off track, and ultimately distract you. Some people with endless ideas will try to make you do things their way—the way they think its best.

In reality, what they are trying to do—consciously or unconsciously—is fulfill their own visions by using your resources, time, and team members. They will take advantage of the hard work and time you put in, and the relationships you worked to nurture, to further their own dreams.

People have different visions, and each of us has a unique purpose in life. Even if they are well intentioned—and often they are not—there are people who will try to make your team accomplish the process their way. People like this might seek to fulfill their own personal visions by using your influence and the platform that you faithfully, sacrificially, and diligently built. Do not let them cloud the vision or criticize it.

Great leaders maintain, keep, and protect team unity by focusing on their vision. Stay intentional. Create a bond of peace with love, passion, and purpose to accomplish the mission.

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