Respecting Each Role

Trying to keep the peace in a team can be a challenging task. There are a variety of opinions, backgrounds, visions and personalities that make up a team.

Getting each person to focus on the same goal while having different opinions on achieving that goal is almost impossible. Each teammate's diverse talents and skills add even another level of difference. These differences can be very frustrating, but what if we could change our mindset and see these differences as positive?

1 Corinthians reminds us that everyone has a different role in society, church and even our team. If each person had the same role, thoughts and talents, that wouldn’t help the overall function of the team. Think of a human body. The hand and the foot are vital but have very little in common, just as the heart and the brain are essential to the body's survival but serve entirely different roles. The brain shouldn’t desire to be the heart; the heart shouldn’t want to be the brain. They need to recognize that each one, though different, serves a purpose that the other cannot.

For a team to operate and reach its goals, you must think of the whole team as a human body. When you think about how valuable each role is to the body’s function, you can start to respect the differences that make it frustrating to work together. The respect that develops makes everyone see value in their role, no matter how differently they think.