Anyone who has ever worked at a company, been on a team or served in a church has had experience with morale. Morale is a collective mindset of positivity. When morale is high, the group thinks that great things can happen. But when morale is low, it can feel as if the energy and excitement have been sucked out of the room.
When my wife and I arrived at the first church we pastored, morale was pretty low. The 11 people left in the congregation were defeated and discouraged. Fresh out of Bible college, we didn’t know what we didn’t know, and so we jumped in with excitement and energy. We painted and started new ministries, and before long, things began to turn around. The church started to grow, and the whole mood of the congregation changed.
Morale is fluid.
Two things can influence morale more than anything — circumstances and leadership.
The morale of a football team improves when the team begins to win. The ball begins to bounce their way, and the belief begins to build that the team can win any game. The confidence that comes from a culture of winning becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We have to admit that — more often than not — our circumstances impact our attitudes. We can aspire, to paraphrase Steven Covey, to “take our own weather with us.” And yet, there is no getting around the fact that a series of rainy days can eventually put us in a bad mood.
Morale improves when we switch things up. Change — sometimes simply for the sake of change — can be a morale booster.
Recently, my wife decided our family had gotten into a rut. Our routine was boring, and the way we were interacting with each other had gotten stale. Morale was low. She decided we needed two things — a vacation and to rearrange the furniture. She changed our circumstances, and all of a sudden, the mood around our house significantly improved.
The other major influencer of morale is leadership. Even more than being able to improve morale, leaders can absolutely kill it. Lack of communication. Unfair treatment of team members. Micromanagement. Not providing the resources needed to succeed. The things that destroy morale read like a list of what not to do as a leader.
A leader who doesn’t know she has a morale problem on her hands is a leader in trouble.
I once worked for a company that only focused on failure. Team leaders would be brought together weekly, not to celebrate the accomplished successes, but to publicly explain why some metric hadn’t been met. A person could be greatly succeeding in 90 percent of their job, but only the other 10 percent would be discussed. Not surprisingly, morale was low and turnover was high.
Leadership — be it in a business, church, family or in any group — is complicated and not for the faint of heart. Leaders have many tasks to juggle, and to be successful leaders, will rely on the graciousness of the people they lead.
But leaders must push themselves to keep the pulse of their communities. They can’t be oblivious to the way people feel about what is happening. Leaders also need to experiment with ways to improve morale, realizing that lecturing people about having a better attitude probably isn’t going to cut it.
Jesus was a great leader.
As he neared his own arrest and crucifixion, Jesus was well aware of how his disciples felt. Rather than just worrying about what was going to happen to him in the coming hours, Jesus knew that his closest friends were already feeling the stress and that it would only grow when he was betrayed and killed.
In John’s Gospel, we’re told that Jesus served his disciples, demonstrating to them that they were loved. Leaders need to love people. Kind, compassionate, serving leaders are more likely to have teams with high morale than selfish, self-serving leaders.
Jesus also talked at length with his disciples, answering their questions and understanding their fears. He said reassuring things like, “Let not your hearts be troubled” and “In this world you’ll have trouble, but take courage for I have overcome the world.”
The morale of his team mattered. The morale of all of our teams matters.
Robb Ryerse is one of the pastors of Vintage Fellowship in Fayetteville and the author of “Fundamorphosis: How I Left Fundamentalism But Didn’t Lose My Faith” (Civitas Press, 2012). You can reach him at [email protected].