Humility: It’s one of the greatest traits a leader can have. It’s also a pretty great thing for an organization to have, especially one like Church Community Builder that is seeking to learn from and build partnerships with churches like yours. That’s why one of our core values at Church Community Builder, one that stays at the center of each of our projects every day, is to always be teachable.
Here’s how that looks in our day-to-day interactions with our church partners and our colleagues:
- This is the biggest key to remaining teachable. We have to listen — to each other, to our church partners, to our business partners, to the marketplace around us. Forgetting to listen means we’ll eventually forget that others have the information we often need to hear most, and we’ll become deaf to their ideas for improvement.
- Pursue feedback and growth. We always want to get better. We know that those around us have the insights that can help us grow. It’s up to us to ask for them and then do something with that information. It’s easy to get comfortable, but comfort is often the enemy to growth. And we want to keep growing and improving with every interaction.
- Be responsive to instruction and correction. Correction can be tough to take, but the essence of being teachable is that you take it in with grace and humility.
- Accept responsibility without blame — the buck has to stop somewhere. When it comes to unmet expectations or miscommunications, we know that buck stops with us. We’ll accept the responsibility and not point fingers. We’ll certainly do our due diligence to figure out where the communication broke down, but we know it’s on us to do so.
We have to stay teachable if we’re going to keep delivering value to our church partners. Not to mention we have to stay teachable if we’re going to be any fun to work with — and we really do want to be fun to work with!
How do you encourage your teams to stay teachable?