VITAL Teams
A simple grid for assessing and building strong teams.
The Birth of the VITAL Framework
Several years ago, towards the end of the Covid lockdowns, while training one of our missionary cohorts, it became clear that although the disciple-making skills of our missionaries had substantially improved, their team leadership skills had regressed significantly due to inactivity.
Through those Covid years, almost all of our energy went into empowering and encouraging discipleship and life in community. There was a simplicity in that season that allowed us to focus on doing one thing really well. However, as the lockdowns eased, the need for coordinating and assembling competent teams and infrastructure became a priority again.
We needed to quickly redevelop the atrophied team leadership muscles and rebuild the associated teams. To do this, we created a 5-part grid system to help our leaders think through the different facets of their leadership and teams. We called this system VITAL, an acronym for the five areas to assess their leadership: Vision, Invitation, Training, Accountability, and Logistics.
We identified each of these areas as a basic requirement for a healthy team. If any one of them was lacking, there were clear, actionable steps to improve the team’s functioning. Notably, even in very healthy teams, there is always at least one standout area for improvement.
How the VITAL Framework Works
Vision – Defining the Why
The ability to articulate the why of the team and how that team contributes to the overall why.
Lack of existential clarity is one of the underlying reasons teams languish. It’s obvious that teams need a clear purpose, but it is the connection between their purpose and the bigger picture that really fuels effectiveness.
In our context, every team must be able to articulate how their purpose connects to and furthers the overall vision of our church: to see people come to know Jesus on university campuses through disciple-making. This also shows the importance of a clear overarching vision, as it becomes the key mechanism to test and evaluate how the many teams in our church fit together.
Invitation – Recruiting and Onboarding
The ability to recruit and onboard new team members.
If there’s one thing every church knows, announcements are a poor recruitment strategy. Yet it is often the only one a team has, leaving them in a state of perpetual “team poverty.”
As a principle, in-person invitations to join a team are always more effective than broadcast announcements. Invitations from new team members can be particularly effective too. (Interestingly, the same principle applies in evangelism.)
To develop effective invitation habits, every team member needs to know they are part of the recruitment strategy.
Training – Equipping for Success
The ability to equip team members for success.
Training has been a perennial Achilles’ heel. There is nothing more frustrating than joining a team with a great vision, only to discover you’re given no instruction once you get there. Expectation-setting, demonstrating skills, and enabling others to reproduce them are essential.
We lean on the tried-and-true strategy of life-on-life discipleship principles, pairing new team members with more experienced ones wherever possible. Of course, this can sometimes result in the blind leading the blind.
Nevertheless, by continually revisiting and evaluating training materials and their actual usefulness, we can ensure training remains effective.
Accountability – Meeting Expectations
The ability to enable people to meet expectations.
I’ve written extensively on the importance of accountability within discipleship and teams, including a previous post here. This “A” in VITAL is where we train people on the principles of setting expectations and maintaining accountability.
The “chasm of confusion”, when behaviour is routinely allowed to drift from expectations, is one of the simplest yet most important leadership challenges to address. Teams require not just clear expectations, but also accountability to those expectations.
Logistics – Staying Organized
The ability to administrate and execute the team’s objectives.
Every team, no matter how big or small, needs some basic infrastructure and rhythms to succeed. This includes effective team meetings, clear communication channels, scheduling, and so forth.
A great team that is disorganized will often struggle to retain great team members or sustain itself over the long term.
Aha Moments
Every year, we train our upcoming leaders in this system, and it is always one of our most dynamic sessions, full of questions and “aha” moments. Every leader has strengths, weaknesses, and natural inclinations. This grid provides language and a framework for easily assessing growth points in their leadership.
I cover this whole subject in much greater detail in the later sections of the book Everyone Sent. Check it out if you’re interested in learning more.
Note: There will be no new post on Monday, August 18, as we are coming off a very full weekend with all of our missionaries together for training, followed by our key leadership training day on Sunday, August 17th. Please be praying for us!