“On joining the staff of St James Church, Method Teaming gave me insight into exactly how each and every staff member ‘ticks’. I understood nuances that would normally take me months or even years to discover. This drastically compressed my getting to know the team from months to hours. Astonishing progress!” Ben Topham, Associate Rector, St James Church.
St James Church is one of the larger Anglican churches in the South East of the UK. It has a salaried full-time and part-time staff of over 30 and a far larger volunteer force of more than 200. As well as traditional teaching it provides a wide range of support services to the entire community in the area. St James Church is using a unique teaming methodology, Method Teaming, to ensure people are fully engaged with their work and projects are completed to the highest quality. All this is done by aligning the right people to the right tasks at the right time.
The Challenge
St James workforce is highly committed and professional. But despite the best intentions of so many people to get involved and achieve a worthwhile outcome, all too frequently the impetus is lost. Sometimes projects drift or become diluted and other times the hoped-for results may never materialise at all.
The leadership of St James believed that a major reason for the patchy performance was a failure to understand the true nature of the talents available to it. Many of the church’s leaders are themselves former business executives. They believed much of their decision making was unconsciously emulating the commercial sector where employee engagement is known to be shockingly low (70% of employees not engaged or actively disengaged according to Gallup). The church believed it should be setting an example. Could a new parable of the talents be written that would be a light to non-profits everywhere?
The Solution
The rector of St James, Martin Williams, was keen to align the job roles of all his workforce – staff and volunteers alike – with their deep-seated natural talents, not just their learned skills. The church’s staff members were therefore trained in the use of Method Teaming©. They were also profiled and their Intellects mapped by the scientific instruments offered by the methodology.
Method Teaming has also guided them on how to recruit new staff to lead the various church teams and to ensure the right people are hired precisely for the vacant roles. Tangible results have come rapidly.
For example, St James relies heavily on building relationships at all levels in the community. At church events, it was decided to purposely deploy those people who naturally build relationships so as to ensure people on the fringe were fully aware of what was going on and were drawn in. At the same time, the organization and management of events is handed to people who Method Teaming had showed are great at getting things correctly finished.
The Outcome
- Communication and collaboration has progressed as people better understand each other and leverage each other’s natural strengths and talents for the greater good.
- Job descriptions now better reflect the talent required for the roles.
- Throughout the interview process, Method Teaming helps the leadership to seek out and identify the right talent.
- Rapid Team Assimilation – a new assistant rector was briefed on his new team using Method Teaming. Afterwards he said, “I feel I know everyone really well. Now, I’ve just got to meet them.”
- When recruiting volunteers the church uses Method Teaming’s ‘By-Intellect Recognition’ insight to identify primary Intellects and talents. This ensures people are more engaged and better suited to complete their roles and projects.
