Learn the secrets to building and maintaining a healthy, productive, and unified ministry team that sticks together for the long haul. Serving as a church leader can be a tough calling. Whatever your role, odds are you've known your share of the frustration and disillusionment that comes with turf battles, conflicting vision, and marathon meetings. You may have asked yourself, "How did it get this way?" With twenty years of front-line ministry experience, Larry Osborne understands congregations (as baffling as they can sometimes be) and he know how the best-intentioned teams can become disrupted and disunified. With this book, he aims to shore up the foundation of a healthy team--what does a unified and thriving church leadership look like and how can it be achieved? Sticky Teams is divided into three main sections, dealing with key aspects of what it takes to develop long-term, efficient harmony: Landmines and Roadblocks exposes the organizational structures, policies, and traditions that can unintentionally sabotage even the best of teams. You'll discover strategies for managing conflicts and getting around obstacles. Equipped for Ministry explores what it takes to get everyone on the same page and headed in the same direction. Chapters deal with practical tips for board, staff, and congregational alignment. Communication examines what it takes to keep everyone on the same page, with a special emphasis on some especially dicey areas and issues of ministry, such as conversations about money. Whatever your situation; from start-up phase, to mid-sized, to megachurch, Osborne has been there. As the pastor of North Coast Church, he's walked his board, staff, and congregation through the process of becoming more genuinely unified, and, because of that, better able to carry out God's design for his church. With warm encouragement and insight, he shares expertise that most pastors and leadership teams learn only from long experience: how to invest the time to create church harmony and how to lead so that unity is maintained long-term.

Proposes that leaders often get distracted by focusing on tasks and neglect their responsibilities of keeping their staff engaged and motivated.

Offers skills and information designed to enhance your success in groups and teams. You'll learn how to facilitate positive group and team experiences and how, in truly successful teams, every member also takes on the roles of facilitator, contributor, participant, and leader. Just as important, you'll discover how diversity contributes to quality teamwork. The authors give you the tools you need to appreciate different points of view and understand how factors such as gender and culture influence every group dynamic.

Testing the Limits of Teams provides the framework for implementing self-managed work teams in a health care setting and is the perfect companion and follow-up to Becker-Reems' Self-Managed Work Teams in Health Care Organizations (AHA Press, 1994). This completely new book illustrates that through shared work and responsibility, employees and managers at all levels can devise, operate, and evaluate new systems for fulfilling organizational goals. The authors address and explain the opportunities and pitfalls along the road to self-management success and offer numerous cases and examples from teams throughout the health care industry.

Smart School Teams is for teachers, administrators, parents, and anyone who is involved in addressing the challenges of school improvement through teams and teamwork. This skill-teaching book focuses on interpersonal communication, trust and collegiality, consensus building, conflict management, problem analysis, decision making, resistance to change, and collaborative leadership, and includes practical suggestions for adapting and applying useful knowledge and strategies in school team settings.

These games for preschoolers and elementary school children are designed to build teamwork, increase sensitivity toward others, and increase Bible knowledge.