4 Tips for a Healthier Worship Team Culture

Speaker 1 Here are four tips to improve your worship team’s culture. I’ve led in churches from 100 all the way up to 10,000 in size, and I’ve learned a few key principles that will help any size church build a healthier, happier, high functioning worship team. If you are sick of dealing with drama, bad behaviour, uncommitted volunteers, maybe you don’t have enough volunteers, these four tips will help. And I’m also going to give you some free resources along the way as I share the tips. Tip number one is to develop a team expectations document. As the leader, you are the one to set the tone and the expectations for what is required of every new team member. If you don’t set expectations, you have nothing to hold people accountable to. So you need to develop a document that lays out at least four categories of expectations. Number one, spiritual/lifestyle expectations. We expect that you’re not getting drunk on the weekends. We expect that you’re not living with your girlfriend. We expect that you are attending church regularly and that you’re in the scripture’s spiritual lifestyle. Second one is musical standards, and I’m going to give you a tip about this in a second.

Speaker 1 It’s important you define the standards for every position on your team, but you need to lay out clear musical standards for every position. Number three, you need to give expectations for time commitment. This ministry requires nine hours of practise time and rehearsal time and service time every week. Can you commit to that? So lay out the clear expectations of time commitment. And then lastly, cultural expectations, behavioural expectations in how they operate within the team. And I’ll cover that more in point number two. Regarding the musical standards or the musical expectations, it’s important that you clearly really lay out for every single instrument what a new team member needs to be able to do to join the team. For example, if you are a singer, you must sing harmony. You have to tell people what they have to be able to do, and that’s going to allow you to bring the right people on the team and preemptively keep the wrong people off the team because they’re going to read that list and say, Oh, crap, I can’t do these things. I’m probably not ready for this team. So set the standard musically, and if you want, I will give you my free expectations document that we give out at our church, and you can take it tweak it for your church.

Speaker 1 You can grab it below by entering your email. I’ll send it to you, and then you can use it right away to begin setting clear expectations for your team. And that is the first point. The second tip for improving your worship team is to define your team’s values. You as a leader, need to say, these are the behaviours and attitudes that we value as a team. These things are important to us. Values are the actions and attitudes that your team agrees to celebrate and champion. Values call your team higher. They give your your team a higher picture for what they are aiming at. Maybe your team doesn’t hit those values today, but that is what you want them to be tomorrow or in the future. And if you don’t have team values yet, I have a simple exercise for you. You’re going to take several days this week to prayerfully ask God what words he wants to describe your team. And every team is going to be different, so you really need to get alone with the Lord and ask him, Lord, what words do you want to describe my team? I want to give you a few tips about how to define your values Number one, you need to use single words.

Speaker 1 For example, you don’t want your value to be a super long sentence, and then you have 10 of those long sentences. No one’s going to remember them. At my church, we chose, We are worshippers, we are servants, we are committed, And so simple single words that people can remember. And you want to use only three to seven, maximum seven words, because if it’s more than that, people won’t remember them. These are things that you can put on your wall in your green room. You can give them out in your onboarding documents. But simple single words, and you want to use identity-based words because who we are affects how we behave. Identity shapes behaviour. So we are worshippers, it informs how we behave. We are servants, it informs how we behave. We are humble, that changes how we act. And so we need to use identity-based words. So that is your second tip, is get alone this week with the Lord and ask the Lord, what are my team’s values? And then you’re going to begin communicating those to your team. All right, tip number three is to create a clear onboarding process for new volunteers.

Speaker 1 You want to have a clear system that you’ve set up that you walk people through to bring them onto your team and press them into the ideal team member even before they start serving. So let me give you a four-step onboarding process that I found works in any size church. Again, I’ve led in churches from 100 all the way up to 10,000. And so I’ve boiled down the most important aspects of an onboarding process. So here are four parts of your onboarding process. And if you need help with this, we have a whole course. I’ll tell you about that at the end. Okay, the first thing you want to do to onboard a new team member is to talk through the values and expectations. Those two documents you’ve created in those first two steps, you’re going to give that to a brand new team member when they audition, and you’re going to read through every single line on those things and make sure they clearly understand what’s expected and the type of behaviour that you expect out of them. The second thing you’re going to do is you’re going to send them some online training.

Speaker 1 You can either create these training resources or you can find resources and put them into a Google document. But you’re basically going to create a Google Doc something shareable for every single position on your team. So electric guitar, bass, drums, vocals. And you’re going to find good training videos, whether they’re from worship ministry training or elsewhere on the Internet. And you’re going to put them in a Google Doc and you’re going to say, Hey, go home and watch these seven videos about how I want you to approach your electric guitar. Once they’ve watched those five videos, you’re going to have them move into step three of your onboarding, which is in-person training. Now, in-person training sounds scary, but it’s not. You’re simply going to schedule them to come in during rehearsal and shadow the position that they’re going to be stepping into. So if they’re going to be playing bass, they’re going to stand next to the bass player. They’re going to wear in your monitors. If you have in your monitors, they’re going to listen to the click track. They’re going to watch the bass player’s hands. They’re going to listen to when the bass player is doing their bass runs.

Speaker 1 They’re going to ask the bass their questions in between songs, they’re going to shadow the bass player. You’re going to schedule them multiple weeks in a row to be with the team and to shadow the position that they’re going to be stepping into. And you’re going to be giving them thoughts, insights, feedback, asking them if they have questions, asking them if they’re comfortable, and you’re going to be observing how they interact with the team, because this is as much about culture as it is about training. You want them to learn what is appropriate behaviour on the team, how our team behaves, how our team interacts, how we talk to each other. You want them to absorb that culture by osmosis. And that’s why in-person training/shadowing is a critical step to good onboarding. That’s the third step. And then the final step is you’re going to schedule them to play, and you’re going to give them feedback. Always give feedback. You are a coach and you are a guide, and you’re going to tell them. I’m going to give 60 days to 90 days of a lot of feedback. Every time you play, I’m going to tell you what you’re doing well and what I want you to work on.

Speaker 1 And that is a healthy and good onboarding process. Now, I go through the onboarding process in a lot more detail in my new Team Building course, which I will tell you about at the end of this video. Video, but it’s a brand new course to help you build a healthy, happy, high functioning team. So check that out at the end of this video. But the fourth and final tip is that you need not just to create good culture, but you need to protect your culture. The first three tips are about creating great culture, but But this tip is about protecting your culture. You have cultivated this beautiful, healthy garden of growing and thriving things, which is exactly what God’s called us to, but you also have to pull the weeds. You are not allowed to let weeds grow in your team. If you tolerate bad behaviour, other team members will think it’s okay to adopt it, too. I always say that culture is created by what you celebrate and what you tolerate. If you celebrate the good, then you will have good. But if you tolerate bad behaviour, you will have bad. And so you do not want to be tolerant of bad behaviour.

Speaker 1 You don’t have to be mean when you confront people. And I know we’re all scared of having hard conversations. You can be kind and clear and loving and say, Hey, we don’t do that here. Hey, on this team, we’ve agreed to these values. That is not a part of what we allow on our team. And so you need to lovingly confront and correct bad behaviour. And if you’re really bad of that and you hate that, I have a free guide for you about how to have hard conversations for your worship ministry, and you can grab that below. This is so important that we do this because ministry is all about discipleship development and growth. God wants you to have a healthy team where people are thriving and flourishing and growing. And if you are a leader who is struggling with an unhealthy team, or you just know that you could do better at team building and being intentional, I want to tell you about our brand new Team Building course. It will help you build a healthy, happy, high functioning worship team. If you struggle with uncommitted volunteers, bad behaviour, bad attitudes, or maybe not enough volunteers, you don’t know how to recruit and train new volunteers, this course will teach you exactly how to build a healthy, excellent team that is a joy to lead.

Speaker 1 You’ll learn how to craft compelling vision statement, define your team’s shared values, develop and protect your team’s culture, find and recruit qualified volunteers, develop an effective audition process, properly onboard new team members, create training and development pathways within your church to develop people, have those corrective conversations, build spiritual maturity in your team, improve musical excellence in your volunteers, and even transition people off the worship team, plus a lot more. We also have three bonuses for you. Audition template packet, completely done for you. Team onboarding documents, completely done for you. And team building activities, 15 pre-planned team building activities to increase trust and cohesion on your team. So grab it if it sounds interesting to you. It’s on sale for 50% off right now, and that sale ends on Friday evening. So don’t wait, don’t delay. Grab the team building course while it’s 50% off right now. I will see you inside the course. Otherwise, I’ll see you in the next helpful video. Subscribe, like this video, and check out all those links below. God bless you..