Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How to be the team player everyone wants to work with

Episode Date: July 9, 2020

Sports teaches people how to be a team player, but it's a lesson that reaches beyond the field, whether it's school or work or family or any other group. Learn whathttps://www.tablegroup.com/books/ideal-team-player/ (The Ideal Team Player )looks like as https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/keith-simon/ (Keith) and https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/staff/patrick-miller/ (Patrick) discuss biblical concepts and Patrick Lencioni's book. Interested in more content like this? Scroll down for more resources and related episodes, including https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/podcasts/what-kind-of-leader-are-you-learning-to-follow-jesus-luke-22-7-38/ (What Kind of Leader Are You?) and how https://info.thecrossingchurch.com/faith-and-work (Faith and Work) fit together. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. To learn more, visit our https://www.thecrossingchurch.com/ (website) and follow us on https://www.facebook.com/TheCrossingCOMO (Facebook), https://www.instagram.com/thecrossingcomo/ (Instagram), and https://twitter.com/thecrossingcomo (Twitter) @TheCrossingCOMO.  Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. Patrick, one of the things I think churches get criticized for, and I think it's even a fair criticism, is that we often talk a lot about people's spiritual lives, but it seems to be divested or irrelevant to what they think of as real life. So we talk about how to read your Bible or we encourage people to come to worship services and there's this idea that be a nice person. But what does the Bible have to say about the rest of life? In other words, most of life, the vast majority of my life isn't found in attending a worship

service or reading my Bible or just being nice. So does the Bible have any practical, biblical wisdom that affects just ordinary relationships that speaks into my job, that gets outside of what you might think of as my leisure time. And what we're going to wrestle with today is how to apply some biblical wisdom into an area of our life that perhaps you haven't thought about much, and that is just being a team player. It could be a team player in a family or on a sports team or in a work environment. But what does it look like to be a Christian and be involved with a team? How do you work well with one another?

What kind of teammates do you want to find and what kind of teammate do you want to be? And this has a lot to say to Patrick and I because not that long ago, we had to start sharing an office. And so there caused us to have. Actually, technically you had to start sharing an office. I was already sharing an office with someone else. Okay, true. I had my own office and I was kind of used to it. But a variety of circumstances led me to say to Patrick, hey, you want to come in and start sharing this office together.

And so it's made us be a team player. you like being a team player patrick well from being honest sometimes yes sometimes no back in seminary one thing that they would make us do were group projects and if you ask the professors why are you making us do these group projects why can't we just do them by ourselves they would say because in real life you have to work with groups if you want to do your job well you're going to have to work with a team and by the way i think that's actually totally right there are very few people who do solitary jobs very very very you. Almost all of us are working on a team of people. And if you don't have the skill of working with a team, you're probably not going to be someone that someone wants to hire or after they hire you,

they will be regretting hiring you for the rest of your work life. But beyond that, I think that the Bible actually has a lot to say about how to be an ideal team player. When I was in seminary and I was in those group projects, I don't know that I was the ideal team player. I was the guy who would very quickly take over and say, you know what? You guys don't know how to do it. So I'm just when you do all of the work. Sounds familiar. Great team player. And when I did let them do the work, those were my lowest grades in seminary.

So if any of those guys are listening, thanks. No, at all seriousness, I think that being a team player is something that we should all value. They probably went to a public school. They probably didn't like me afterwards. Closer to the mark. But Keith, what about you? You like doing group projects? Unfortunately, I don't.

Why are we doing a podcast? I don't like we don't like it. Because we have learned a lot about it. Because one thing I've learned about being a part of a church team is that teams get a lot more done. Teams are better when they work together than when you are working as individuals. And yet, that's only true if you have the right kind of people with the right kind of attitude, the right kind of goals, the right kind of disposition. A lot of the reasons our businesses or our families or our teams don't accomplish more is because we don't work well together. And I think that the people dynamic causes a lot of organizations.

And again, this could be a family organization. It causes them to fall far short from what they could be. You're making me think of a book I read, and it said that I don't know anything about workhorses. So this could be totally wrong. But the book claims this was true. If you've got a workhorse that can pull a 500-pound load, it can obviously only pull 500 pounds. And if you yoke that workhorse to another workhorse that can pull 500-pound. pounds, you would expect that it could pull how many pounds, Keith?

A thousand. Wow, math. Ding, d'en. You'd expect that it could pull a thousand pounds. But actually, two workhorses that can only pull 500 pounds can pull 1,500 pounds. In other words, when you put them together, they are able to do more than they could do by themselves. And the point of the illustration in the book that I was reading was simply saying this, you

can do far more when you are working on an effective team than you can do on your own. And even when I think about people that I want to work with, I tend to to think, oh, I want really individually talented people. Well, as it turns out, you can have a really individually talented person, but if they can't work on a team of people, they're useless. I mean, they're not useless, but they can't pull nearly as much as two mediocre talented people could do together on a team if they were working effectively. Yeah, if you go back to your workhors, the horses have to be pointing the same direction. They have to cooperate. They have to be yoked together. And that is true in our human relationships. So, yes, teams can be effective, but,

only if they work well together and how many of us have been on a team with somebody who's super talented or super smart. And yet the team doesn't function well, kind of like your seminary teams. It didn't function well because I was on the front. Because you were so smart and took over. But we've all been around the talented person who doesn't bring out the best in the team. So what we want to do today is unpack some things that we've been learning from a book by Patrick Lenzioni called the ideal team player. Both of us have read it and thought, man, this is great, but we thought we could add some personal experience and some biblical perspective to it and think through, how does this book apply to us as Christians?

Yeah, so in his book, Patrick Lentioni says that the ideal team player has three character traits. And as I was reading these character traits, I was struck because I think that they are all biblical character traits. These are things that the Bible would want to cultivate inside of our hearts and lives. And these are the three traits. Humility, I think everybody he knows what humility is, hunger, which is his word for people who want to work hard, who want to better the business or the organization that they're a part of, and smarts. By which he doesn't mean intellectual smarts. He's talking about people smarts, people who are good with people. Now, that might sound really simple, and on their own, any of those three things

are really simple, and you probably know lots of people who have any one of those three things. But what he says is that when you put those three things together, you have a person who is great to work with on a team. And if you have a team full of people who are humble, hungry, and smart, that team can accomplish amazing things. And I will say from personal experience, when I have been on great teams of people characterized by these character traits, it is fun. It's fun to work together, but it's also amazing because you can accomplish so much. Yeah, and we've talked before on our podcast about how you can represent Christ in places outside of your church. And you can't just walk up and say, hey, I am a Christian. Let me tell you

about Jesus, or that'd be pretty weird and ineffective. But if you were the kind of person who was humble, hungry, and smart, if you were the kind of person who was fun to be with on a team because you were encouraging the team to be better, if you were maybe like Lencioni's book says, the ideal team player, then that would give you the platform, the credibility to talk about Christ when it is appropriate. So let's look through each of these character traits, humble, hungry, and smart. Let's go ahead and start with humble. Not the least of which because of the three character traits, it's a character trait which clearly the Bible again and again calls followers of Jesus to exhibit. 1 Peter 5.5 says this. God opposes the proud, but shows favor to the humble. Why would God do that?

Why would God oppose anyone? I think it's because God designed the world to work best when people are humble, when they're not about themselves all the time, when they are working for the sake of others. The world works better when people think that way. And so God wants us to be humble so that his world is flourishing and doing what it's designed to do, and he opposes those who are proud because they're destructive. They're making the world not work the way it's supposed to. They're causing problems in the world. And God's opposed to people who are causing hurt and problems as a result of their pride.

A great definition of humility is in the CS Lewis book, Mere Christianity, where he says that humility is not thinking less of yourself, but instead thinking of yourself. less. Now it's possible that you've heard that before, maybe even several times, but it's something that I could hear literally on the hour every day, and it would be helpful for me because my mind drifts toward thinking of myself, my agenda, my needs, my wants, my goals, my feelings. And that's just where I live, and probably you do too. And so it's good to start out with the idea that humility is just thinking less of yourself, putting others above yourself. not being concerned about your status or your rights or what you deserve,

being the kind of person who sees someone else do something well and is quick to publicly praise that person, quick to share credit, quick to minimize their contribution and maximize other people's contribution. But one of the things that Lensioni says in this book, specifically about a humble person when it comes to working on a team that I really liked, is that a humble person receives feedback well. A humble person takes critique or feedback and doesn't defend,

doesn't blame, doesn't deflect, doesn't give excuses, but instead says, okay, I want to hear that and own it and get better at it. They might even ask, hey, would you help me get better at that? That's a really important part of being a humble team player. I think a few other features of humility, someone who lacks ego, they're not overly concerned about their own status. They're quick to point out the contributions of others. They're slow to seek attention for themselves. They share credit for work that they've done and emphasize what the team has done over themselves. Those can be really hard things to do if you

are proud or you want everybody to see your accomplishments. And let's just be honest, it's probably worth saying with all of these virtues, no one is perfect. These are things that we are all working towards. Now, people may be more or less humble, and there are people who are simply not humble at all. So let's just ask this question. How can I evaluate? What are questions I can ask myself to see how I'm doing on humility? And I've taken all of these from Patrick Lencioni, so want to give him credit. You can find them on his website, but I think they're incredibly helpful. Here's a few questions. Do I compliment other people without hesitation? Do I easily admit to mistakes? Do I offer and accept apologies graciously? Do I readily acknowledge my own weaknesses? Will I take on lower-level

work, kind of the difficult work that no one wants to do, the tedious work, well, I do that for the good of the team. When I hear that one, I think of Jesus in Luke 22 when he says, I am among you as the servant. And so if Jesus was on your team, he would be the one who was picking up coffee or donuts for the team meeting. He would be the one who stayed around afterwards and make sure the room was put back together after the meeting. Jesus would always be looking out for other people. Who needs a little encouragement? Who needs help? How can I sacrifice my agenda to help this meeting or to help my teammate do better? I am among you as a servant. I hear that ring in my head and I think, gosh, I need to grow in humility and servitude. One last thought on humility, I found this helpful. A lack of confidence is not humility. So sometimes we might trick people into thinking that we're humble simply because we don't speak up, because we don't

share our part. But it's not because we're actually humble. It's not because we don't have big egos. It's just because we're too scared to talk. We're too scared to say our peace. And so on the one hand, we can't trick ourselves into thinking that we're humble. And we shouldn't be necessarily tricked by others just because they show a lack of confidence in thinking, oh, they don't have a big ego. They very well might. Yeah, a person can hold back in a meeting for the same reason that a person can dominate a meeting with their ideas. And that is that they're so self-concerned that they will either not say anything out of fear of embarrassment or say everything because they think they've always got the best idea. So let's move to hungry. And there's a lot of ways that you can define hungry.

But here's what I like to think of it as. And I'm sure I stole this from someone, but I can't remember who. And that is that the hungry person walks into work every day thinking, how can we make this better? Yeah, a hungry person is always looking for more things to do, more things to learn. I was actually just having a conversation with a guy this morning. He graduates from college with a degree in forestry and wildlife, then gets a master's in biology. And he goes to work for a company eventually that's doing stuff out in the natural world. I think they're coring, limestone, all different kinds of things.

Anyways, here's the interesting part. He realized he was in their health department. He realized that because they had thousands of people spread across states, there was no way for them to communicate health regulations to people in a way that they'd be able to hear. It take way too much time to go from place to place to place and talk to everyone. And so he thought, you know what? If we just made some videos, we could tell everybody everything that we need to know and we'll make him creative and funny and engaging. And so him, a guy without any video experience just starts doing it. He starts making these videos. And eventually that becomes his job. But what I love about what he did is he said, look, I want to make this organization better. It's not my job to make videos, but I want to add something here. And so he learned a new skill. He was self-motivated. He was diligent. He was always thinking about what's the next step. He was a hard worker. And that's what it means to be hungry. Yeah, I promise your boss or supervisor notices when you stay an extra 15 minutes to make sure a project's done instead of just leaving when you can. That your boss notices when you raise your hand and say, I'll take that responsibility. I'll give that a shot. That's part of being self-motivated. You don't have to have somebody else constantly pushing you, but you want to make the

organization better. You believe in it, and you're willing to make some sacrifices to make that happen. And the Bible has a lot to say about hunger, about work ethic. So Proverbs 6-6, go to the aunt, you sluggard, consider its ways and be wise. It has no commander, no overseer, or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. So what the Bible is telling us to do there is to look at the natural world and see the self-motivation that an ant doesn't need someone constantly reminding them, constantly pushing them, holding them accountable. An aunt takes the initiative to take care of itself, and that's what we are supposed to take into our life. That's the principle that applies. So if I ask your boss, tell me who your hard workers are

who will try to make things better and who will take on more responsibility for the good of the team. Not the good of themselves, the good of the team. Would your boss list you as one of those? That's really good. It's easy to think that the opposite of hungry is someone who's lazy. They don't do their jobs. And of course, that's not a hungry person. But you can be someone who does the minimum. You do your 40 hours a week. You do all the tasks that you're assigned. You do them sufficiently. But you never go above and beyond. You never feel a sense of ownership beyond your little sphere of work. You're not a bad worker, but you most certainly are not hungry. You're not like the aunt who it says has no ruler or commander or overseer. And yet it's working ahead and it's working. hard. So how do I know if I'm hungry? In other words, there were some test questions to know if I'm humble. Well, how do I know if I'm hungry? And one is to ask yourself, do I just do the minimum? Am I just trying to get done? Get this over with. Get to the weekend. Get to five o'clock. Another one you might ask yourself is, do I see my work as part of my faith? That when I do my job, I am bringing glory to Christ. I am serving and loving my neighbor. So I've got a good attitude about it. I'm

passionate about it. Do I feel a sense of personal responsibility for the team's success? In other words, I don't look and go, well, that's their problem, but it's our problem. And we want to do our job with excellence, and I'm going to do my part to help that happen. Am I willing to take on tedious task or tasks that nobody knows about or tasks that don't often get a lot of public praise over. Am I willing to do the small things that go unnoticed by everyone, but maybe God? Because a hungry person doesn't try to just do the minimum. A hungry person goes above and beyond to make the team succeed. Yeah, hungry people see work as a gift, not as a curse. And that's actually a biblical worldview. There are parts of all work that are cursed, and we all know that, but God gave work to us as a gift.

And so having hunger, wanting to work hard, wanting to do well for your organization, those are all good, godly things. Let's move on and let's talk about what it means to be smart. So again, when we say smart, we're not talking about intellectual intelligence. We're not talking about your IQ test. We're talking about people's smart, okay? So what's it mean to be smart? Well, when I think of smart people, I think of the person who has a natural intuition, a common sense about how people work. It's a person who can be in a room full of people and they just have a natural feel

for how people are feeling, how they're responding to what's happening. They've got a good read on people's emotions. Smart people understand their own emotions well, right? They're the person who, you've probably had a friend who said something and came across incredibly angry and frustrated and he went up afterwards and he said, why were you so angry? And they looked at you with this perfect look of innocence and said, I'm angry? I didn't know I was angry. That's someone who doesn't quite have good people smarts because they don't realize their own emotions and they don't realize how their emotions are coming across to other people. Likewise, smart people are people who know how to build bridges, who know how to, in the middle of a meeting, connect with people and work alongside each other,

and they understand the impact of their words and their actions on other people. Yeah, a person who's people smart realizes that not everybody's wired the same way they are. That's a mistake all of us are prone to make. In other words, I like a fast-moving, adaptable culture that makes decisions on the fly. So therefore, probably everybody likes that, right? Well, no. That's just the way I'm wired, but that doesn't mean that's the way everybody in the team is wired. So if you don't understand other people and where they're coming from, how they process information and strengths they bring to the table, you're likely to see their more careful approach as something that's getting in the way, something that's got to be overcome an obstacle, something to be

defeated instead of saying, no, they're bringing something really important to the team. But again, the only way you can know that is if you're people smart enough to know that everybody's got strengths and weaknesses and you can kind of understand how they're looking at things and what they add to the project, add to the team. Yeah, so in many ways, we're talking about empathy. We're talking about people who understand others and respond to others well. There's a description in the book of Proverbs about a wise person, and this is what it says. This is Proverbs 25.

It says the purposes of a person's heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out. If you're wise, you can, as it were, reach down into the waters of someone's heart, what they're feeling, what they're thinking, what they're experiencing, and draw it out, understand what it is. I think Jesus was an absolute master at this. If you read the Gospels, one of the most striking things about Jesus, I think it's what makes the Gospels or his character in the gospel so charismatic is that he's got an amazing intuition for people. He knows when's a great time to build the bridge with someone. He knows when people are being sincere. He also knows when people are being evil and they're trying to set traps. And he's

always responding accordingly, throwing the evil people off balance and throwing the people who maybe don't expect him to show them grace and kindness. He shows it to them and he builds bridges with him. He's able to reach down into their heart because he's got a great intuition for people. So how do I know if I'm people smart? Well, like Patrick alluded to earlier, the first step to understand where other people are coming from and what they're feeling is being in touch with your own emotions. Where are you coming from? So sometimes the place to start is just, do I know myself? Do I know why I'm frustrated? Why I'm angry? Why I'm worried? Why I'm scared. The more you understand yourself, the more you'll be able to understand other people. And then you can just say, can I show empathy with

other people on my team? Kind of get in the whole with them and see the world from their perspective and feel the world from their perspective. Am I interested in the lives of the people on my team? Am I an active listener or am I on my phone? Am I kind of staring at the window? Am I kind of halfway forming a response to my teammate? Am I thinking about what I'm going to do later that day? So an active, attentive listener. And then do I realize how my body language, how my facial expressions, how my words communicate to people, how they interpret. them. Not what you meant, but how they are heard. It's important what you meant. Yes, I don't mean to minimize that, but maybe even more important when you're working on a team is, how does this person

hear me? How do I come across? And then can I adjust to them depending on their work style, depending on where they are that day, depending on how they're feeling? Can I adjust to meet them where they are? Now, these three things, humble, hungry, and smart. Again, there's nothing super original about these ideas. We can go all the way back to words that were written in the Bible thousands of years ago, and these are values, character traits that God has always been trying to inculcate in his people. But what I like about what Patrick Lenzioni says is that what matters is the overlap of these three traits. You're the ideal team player if you are humble, hungry, and smart. It's not enough just to be one of those things. If you're only hungry, you're the hard worker,

you want to do what's best for the organization, but you're not humble, you're not smart, you're going to be a bulldozer. You're going to be the person who just pushes through their ideas. They don't care how it affects other people. They're usually about what they want because they're proud and not humble. If you're only smart, you're just a charmer. We've all met that person who is, at first, you like them a lot, they're easy to get along with, but really quickly you realize they are mostly only about themselves. They want to talk about themselves. They're about the things that they do in their life. And that's because they're not humble. And they're also not hungry. They will not work hard to do well for the team. Yeah, they're likable. But beyond that,

they're not much used to have around. And finally, if you're only humble, well, great, if you're going to have only one of any of these three things, have humility. Humility is a great thing to have, but you'll end up just being a pawn. And what ponds do is they're people who never add any value to their organization, but they're not hungry, they're not really hard workers. And because they're not smart, they're not great at engaging with people. These are maybe your classic wallflowers. And again, these people can exist and live in organizations for a long time. I've worked and had friends who've been a bit like this, they don't cause problems, but they also, again, they don't add much. And that's not a great witness for Jesus.

I thought one of the convicting things in the Lencioni book is, as he gets to the end, he says, let's do some self-evaluation. If you're to run yourself through the humble, hungry, smart paradigm, which are you strongest in and which are you weakest in? Of course, you can go further than that and unpack each of these and use the questions that we've asked that Lensioni has in the book and evaluate yourself piece by piece. But maybe just start here right now by saying if you had to rank yourself humble, hungry, smart, what order would they go in? And are you open to improving in those areas? Because I think the person who's open to growing, the person who sees themselves accurately, the person who's willing to ask for help, can really improve in all these

areas. So it's not you're born this way, it's you become this way. And learning to you're to follow Jesus will help you become the right kind of person, the right kind of teammate, the right kind of coworker. And the more you become that person, the more you contribute to the organization, the more you are loving God in your work, the more you're loving your neighbor as you do your job well, and the more opportunities that you're going to have to talk to people about Jesus. So I encourage you if you want to pick up this book, Ideal Team Player, Patrick Lenzioni, it was definitely worth to read. Thanks for listening.

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