This assessment was built to help a pastor and his team consider how their parish already embodies the characteristics of Collaborative Leadership and to identify potential areas of growth.

It is most useful when the pastor and at least 5 parish leaders take it. We recommend that this be a pastor and his leadership team. If you do not have a leadership team, potential parish leaders include other clergy, parish/finance council members, parish/school staff, ministry leaders, volunteers with influence, or anyone the Holy Spirit places on your heart.

1. Send this Assessment link to all chosen leaders. We recommend you give them a deadline by which to take the assessment.
2. Schedule a 1.5 hour follow-up meeting to discuss the results.
3. Take a look at the Discussion Guide, and plan your meeting.
4. Print a copy of the assessment results and discussion guide for each team member and bring them to the meeting.
   1. Results can be found here. (Choose your parish from the dropdown box at the top left.)
   2. If you pastor multiple parishes and it is likely that your leaders identified themselves as from different parishes, then contact Andy Dejka for your combined results.

Great team meetings are fun and energizing. They lead to better decisions, and team members are more likely to be committed to and feel accountable for the success of those decisions.

One of the best resources we have found is Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni. While the book is short and easy to digest here’s a four page handout summary as well. As this resource was built for the secular corporate world, parish teams will also want to add a team retreat to their meeting schedule. Additionally, team retreats can be combined with the quarterly off-site described in the book.

Another addition to the meetings described is team prayer. In Christifideles Laici, Pope St. John Paul II tells us, “Communion with Jesus, which gives rise to the communion of Christians among themselves, is an indispensable condition for bearing fruit.” We have seen intentional time spent in prayer at the beginning of each meeting lead to increased trust among team members as well as a more confident discernment of God’s will. While the form of prayer your team adopts can vary, we recommend that you strive to embody the principles laid out in the article Principles of Team Prayer.

Helping your key leaders grow takes regular contact and time. You can provide support for them in several ways:

As a team: Every team goes through recognizable stages as it develops. Read about these stages in The Stages of Group Development, and then take the article to your team. Ask, “What stage is the team in?” and try out the action that we recommend teams take in order to move into the next stage.

As a manager: Good leaders very often need a great manager to help them thrive and develop their ministries. Great managers capitalize on the individual strengths of their leaders by investing personally in each of them. To understand this concept more, and to hear some tips on how to invest in your leaders as a manager, check out The One Thing the Best Team Builders Do.

As individuals: Another way to invest personally in each of your leaders is to choose 1-3 key leaders that you would like to see grow over the next year. Establish a recurring meeting time to talk about their ministry and to share the leadership skills that you are learning.