Having once decided to leave the committee format and go with actions teams the first thing you must decide is how you will proceed. My recommendation would be - begin with you! In Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, Lord Polonius gives the following advice to his son: “This above all: to thine ownself be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” Good advice then and good advice now. Before any other member of the team can be chosen you have to take a long hard look at what your own strengths and weaknesses are. Think of it as performing a SWOT analysis on yourself. The more time you spend looking at your own shortcomings the easier it is to understand what kind of people you need to create a balanced team. Henry Ford used to say “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” That is the biggest single advantage of having the right team running the Lodge.
Every winning team regardless of whether it is a sports team or a management team needs specialists to handle every situation it will be called on to handle. Without these key players the only consistency the team can achieve is losing.
Some “needs” are fairly easy to identify. If you are the team leader and you are a person who tends to be detail oriented, you obviously need someone on your team who can conceptualize to balance out your own weakness. If you find that you have good ideas but have a hard time communicating them then you need someone on board who can, and so on.
A well-balanced team can adapt to any changing situation and adaptation is the secret of survival. Spend a few moments and read Brother Rudyard Kipling’s poem “if” it provides you with a blueprint of attributes needed by any winning team.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
It is a rare man indeed that possesses all these virtues but in every Lodge there are men who between them possess most of them.
Imagine how different a Lodge, Chapter or even a Grand Lodge could be if we all used this truly Masonic team building tool to build our officer corps. Men would be chosen, not because they are warm bodies who are willing to fill a chair when the annual elections roll around, or because they are willing to “go along, in order to get along” as is the case in many Grand Lodges, but because they possess a needed attribute for the officer team. The first team or rather the “A” team in every Lodge consists of the officers of that Lodge. Each one of them needs to go through this self-examination. After they have been completed the results of these examinations need to be put into a team SWOT analysis were the Strengths and weaknesses of each member of the team can be more readily seen by everyone on the team. Once the strengths and weaknesses are listed, it is much easier to see where the opportunities and threats lie and what, if anything, is needed to balance out the team.
Solutions can be found more readily when shortcomings are identified within the appointed positions. It is far easier to make substitutions to keep t the team balanced. However, anyone who has experienced a crisis of leadership in their elected officers knows the heartache that comes from having an imbalance at the top. It can affect the lodge for several years. By taking the time to properly structure and maintain the officer line-up as a balanced team from the beginning, these debilitating experiences can be drastically reduced.
Once the present line up of officers is set then each of the members of the team, from the Senior Warden down to the Junior Steward, needs to do a similar self-analysis to find the proper balance in “their team”. Once this habit becomes second nature in the Lodge it becomes the standard way of forming teams to address every Lodge need.
There is a reason why it is so hard for a championship team to repeat their performance each year. They become too impressed with their own past success they stop trying to improve and become complacent.
In Freemasonry, we have witnessed the same phenomenon take place time and time again. Lodges grow and flourish only to die out a few years later as the leadership retires or is shuffled off to the sidelines. Great programs are abandoned because there are no specialists around who know how to run them effectively. Yet if every Lodge, Chapter, Consistory, Valley or other Masonic body would practice self-examination in order to field winning teams each and every year we could rebuild our Lodges.
Fraternally,
Jack Buta