Absence of trust

What?

Following in the theme of previous blogs, I will continue to write about experiences faced working with a team in the ministry Young Life, at Eastern Montgomery High School. Two weeks ago we added two new members to our team, Tasha and Casey, both Freshmen at Virginia Tech. It has been pretty smooth sailing so far, with no major conflicts among any of us. However I have noticed, that we do not trust them to complete any tasks. This may be to ease them into the unit as a team, but even among praying about different subjects and carpooling together, both seem to be forgotten when it comes to pretty much every decision that needs to be made. There is a large absence of trust among the group as a collective whole and nothing has been done to change it.

So What?

During the next few weeks, we will be sharing our personal histories with one another, and going on a hike/meal at Homeplace as a team. I believe that these exercises will grow trust between us, and make it so we can work as an effective unit. We also have started carpooling as often as possible to the school as a full team, in order to get an hour of driving to talk and become friends. Casey and Tasha are quick on their way to becoming integral members of the team, and not "newbies" or "freshmen" as we sometimes refer them as (in a loving way).

Now What?

Now that we are moving past the mistrust of teammates, we can begin to work together to make Young Life club as great as possible, and we will have better ideas with more people working on them together. I have included pictures of Casey and Tasha both, to give you a face to the names. Casey is the boy, and Tasha is the girl.

Eastern Montgomery Young Life

What?

There are many facets to leading young life with my team at Eastern Montgomery High School. The three c's of young life are contact work, campaigners and club. Contact work is the work done at the high school, or in the community. Just hanging out with high schoolers, meeting new people, and being a role model in the school. Campaigners is the weekly bible study at someone's home in Shawsville, where high schoolers meet together to learn about the Bible. Club is the huge group event every week, aimed at high schoolers who don't attend church and don't know anything about Christianity. It's organized chaos for one hour in the community room of the library every Monday at 7. At the end of the hour, myself or one of my teammates gives a talk about importance of Jesus Christ. My first club talk was first semester of this year, and afterwards the team met together at my house for "club critique" where we go over what worked at club at what didn't, and give constructive criticism to the speaker. Unfortunately, my talk needed a lot of constructive criticism, something I didn't take kindly to.

So what?

In Group Dynamics for Teams by Daniel Levi, he talks about the need for team performance evaluations on page 276. "Performance evaluations are valuable for providing feedback to employees, motivating them, and supporting training and development..." These are all great reasons for team feedback. I realize that now, though I didn't while I was being the one criticized. However, my next club talk went even better than my first, due to me working through the problems I encountered and fixing them during my talk.

Now what?

I look forward to club critiques after clubs where I speak. I know that during these times I get useful information for bettering my performance on stage. Though club is only a small facet of what Young Life is about, it is very important that we work hard on club talks and do them excellently. Therefore, team feedback is a valuable asset in bettering our work at Eastern Montgomery High School. For more information on Eastern Montgomery Young Life go to http://sites.younglife.org/sites/EasternMontgomery/default.aspx