May
18
2011

Team Killers: Mind Reading

An article by Matt Comments

A few weeks back we started talking about the things that will kill a church leadership team. We first spoke about the idea of over-functioning, and how that can be disastrous. Today I want to talk a little bit about the idea of mind reading or, to put it in more biblical terms, the idea of bearing false witness against a teammate.

Why is this so harmful to your team? Two weeks ago I was at a conference where someone asked “how can we get our Senior Pastor to understand how important this is to our church?” My first thought, without hesitation, was “you can’t, quit now.” Now, I have been told that I can be a little cantankerous and a touch snarky, but I think this advice is good. Once a relationship becomes an us versus them, adversarial, engagement that must be won, you have an issue. In this case the mind reading assumption is that the Senior Pastor hates what the conference goer would like to implement, and because it is so important to the spread of the gospel he must hate the idea of spreading the gospel as well. If the gospel doesn’t get spread, what will become of the children? He must hate children too!

While I might be overstating my point a little bit, this is a good example of how mind reading works. We make assumption after assumption about a persons thoughts and values in order to justify a comment that we may not fully understand. When this happens, we are faced with a choice: get to the bottom of the other person’s thought process, or allow the relationship to blow up.

Several years go I was part of a team where a great deal of mind reading was going on. I was accused silently in the mind of a person of something that I did not do as the result of a misunderstood comment by another. This caused years of misunderstanding and hurt feelings, both on my part, and on the part of the accuser. The relational difficulties caused by this misunderstanding allowed me to do some mind reading of my own, and while I would love to say that I dealt with it in a healthy way, I admit that I just kept my mouth shut. The tragedy of this entire situation is that a team was ruined and ministry was not done because of things left unsaid. I can not help but believe that the Holy Spirit was grieved by this whole situation.

So, how do we keep from allowing mind reading from killing a church leadership team? There are a few ways to combat this team killer, but the basis of them all are clear, open, honest dialog between two people. In the church today we do a very poor job of having tough conversations. Until we learn to have the guts that it takes to confront another brother (or sister) in love, we are doomed to have unhealthy interpersonal relationships. With this in mind, let’s look at a few practices that we can engage in that will help limit the amount of mind reading our team will do:

The benefit of the doubt. In any staff interaction it is incumbent upon us to give our teammate the benefit of the doubt. We are on the same team, we are all working to expand God’s Kingdom. The minute we are unable to extend someone the benefit of the doubt you have a bigger issue that needs to be dealt with immediately.
Ask your teammate about their thought process. Taking the time to look one another in the eye and communicate your thoughts will not only speak to your fears, but it will help prevent you from looking at that person as the “other.”
Listen. So often those of us in church leadership are quick to cast vision, or share our thoughts, or tell everyone else what to do. What we often do not do is listen to others. Getting into the habit of being truly present in conversations, not being distracted by cell phones, twitter, or forming our response to the person currently sharing will cut down significantly on the amount of things that we take offense to.

How have YOU seen mind reading kill a team?
How do YOU combat mind reading in your teams?