There is something dysfunctional about most church boards, councils or governing committees, and to those trapped in the current systems it often seems that not much can be done about it. But Larry Osborne in his book Sticky Teams offers a number of great insights into how a church board or a church staff can be coalesced into a great team, with the individual members working in unity for common goals rather than fighting each other for scarce resources.
The author defines unity in the context of a church leadership team as including doctrinal unity, respect and friendship, and philosophical unity. This means that someone who is a good Christian but who does not subscribe to your philosophy of ministry will not be a good candidate for your board. It also means that you need to apply effort and resources into training and growing your leadership team.
The ideas presented in the book include ways of reducing board conflict, recognising changing team dynamics as a team grows, the need to play more to your strengths than to your weaknesses, the importance of clarifying the roles of pastor, staff and board, making room at the top for young leaders, providing adequate training to the board, how to get board, staff and congregational alignment, handling change, talking about money and salaries, and how to act when things go wrong.
This is probably the best book on church leadership team management that I have read. While acknowledging that there is no single right way to run a church, it provides plenty of creative ideas for overcoming many different intractable-seeming obstacles, and the discussion questions at the end make it suitable for church leadership teams to work their way through.