Leading a team is all about understanding the giftings of those we lead and then releasing them to “play” to their strengths, according to T J Addington in his book Leading from the Sandbox: How to Develop, Empower and Release High-Impact Ministry Teams. This does not means that team members need to be your best friends or that teams are “leadership by committee”, but it does mean that team members are committed to a common mission with common values, practices, commitments and alignment.
The “sandbox” is a four-sided tool for defining four aspects of a ministry philosophy:
- Mission: What the organisation seeks to accomplish
- Guiding Principles: How the organisation is committed to operating
- Central Ministry Focus: What needs to be done day in day out to accomplish the mission
- Preferred Culture: The ethos which is used to accomplish the mission, guiding principles and central ministry focus
I am not sure that I fully understand the analogy between a sandbox and the author’s tool for defining a ministry philosophy, but I found it interesting to compare the “sandbox” with a conventional strategic statement of organisational philosophy which includes a mission, vision, core values, goals and strategies. The author’s guiding principles seem to be similar to core values, but the central ministry focus and statement of preferred culture seem to be different. In most organisations, culture just happens and no attempt is made to define it. I can see considerable value in explicitly discussing and defining culture as a way of optimising the organisation’s environment and thereby improving both enjoyment and productivity.
Although this book is intended as a leadership manual for Christian teams, it is essentially a collection of secular leadership wisdom, and much of what is said can be applied to the leadership of any organisation. In my opinion the book is more likely to be useful for leaders of large organisations, although leaders in smaller teams and ministries will still benefit from reading it.