3 Leadership Habits That Look Good but Hurt Your Team

Introduction: The Hidden Traps of Well-Intentioned Leadership

As a pastor, intern, or ministry leader, your deepest desire is to build a healthy, effective, and thriving team. You invest countless hours into developing people, fostering a positive culture, and pursuing a mission that matters. You lead with the best of intentions, wanting to be a source of encouragement and support for those you serve alongside.

But what if some of the most common, well-intentioned leadership habits are the very things that undermine your team's potential and morale? It's a challenging thought, but leadership is full of paradoxes where our instincts can lead us astray. Some of our attempts to be kind, to maintain quality, or to reward success can have hidden, negative consequences that we never intended. This article is an exploration of a few surprising leadership "blind spots" that every leader needs to recognize in themselves to unlock their team's true capacity.

1. The Kindness That Creates a Culture of Incompetence

The first blind spot is one that caring, empathetic leaders are especially prone to: tolerating underperformance in the name of kindness. Leaders with good intentions often avoid difficult conversations to keep everyone happy and avoid conflict. The problem is that this avoidance leads to excusing laziness, overlooking missed deadlines, and ultimately lowering the standards for the entire team. This creates what celebrated leadership author John Maxwell calls a culture of “sanctioned incompetence,” where mediocrity becomes the accepted norm.

The cultural impact of this habit is profound. As leadership author Craig Groeschel notes:

“What you permit, you promote. Whatever you allow, you’re going to get more of it.”

In a ministry context, this behavior is devastating. To see if this blind spot is active on your team, watch for these three symptoms: Are you noticing a pattern of responsibility avoidance, where known issues go unaddressed? Do you apply accountability inconsistently, creating double standards for different team members? And most critically, are your high performers growing frustrated as they are forced to carry the weight for others? This demoralizes the very people you need most.

A truly loving leader, like Jesus, must be full of both grace and truth. Being loving means you care deeply about your people, but it also means you challenge them directly. The solution isn't to be less kind, but to understand that clarity is kindness. Direct, caring, developmental conversations are essential for the health of the individual and the team.

2. The Control That Kills Ownership and Growth

The second leadership blind spot is the tendency to hold on to control too tightly. A leader might do this to ensure quality, protect the ministry from mistakes, or simply because they believe they can do it better or faster. However, this habit has a crippling effect on the team. The key principle to understand is this: "What feels like control to them is interpreted as distrust to their teams."

When your team feels you don't trust them, they stop taking initiative. They stop thinking for themselves and wait to be told what to do. This is especially damaging in a church or ministry setting, where you need to empower emerging leaders—interns, volunteers, and junior staff—to grow. As Craig Groeschel's flight instructor once told him, "If I hold the controls, you’ll never learn to fly." By keeping control, you prevent your people from gaining the valuable experience they need to develop their skills and confidence.

It's critical to distinguish between delegating tasks and delegating authority. Delegating tasks creates followers who can execute instructions. Delegating authority builds new leaders who can think, innovate, and take ownership of results. As a practical step, adopt this rule of thumb: if someone on your team can do a task 70% to 80% as well as you can, give it to them and let them develop. This requires letting go and embracing imperfection for the sake of growth.

“You can have control or you can have growth, but you can’t have both.”

Many leaders fear empowering their team because they worry about what might happen if those they develop become great and then leave. But as Groeschel challenges, there's a far more dangerous question to consider: "What if you limit them and they stay?"

3. The Promotion That Sets Everyone Up for Failure

This final blind spot is perhaps the most deceptive because it often masquerades as a reward for excellence: promoting your best people into roles that ultimately cause them—and their teams—to fail. This is explained by a management concept known as the "Peter principle," which observes that employees are often promoted based on their success in a previous job until they reach a level where they are no longer competent because the new role requires a completely different skill set.

We see this constantly in ministry. A gifted musician with a heart for worship is promoted to "Worship Pastor" and is suddenly overwhelmed by administrative duties, volunteer scheduling, and budget management. A charismatic youth worker who is brilliant with students is promoted to a family ministries role and struggles to lead a team of staff. Their success as a practitioner doesn't automatically translate to success as a manager. Research confirms this; one study found that high-performing sales employees often perform poorly when promoted to sales managers.

This is a dangerous trap in ministry settings, where we often reward passion and talent in a specific area with leadership promotions that demand an entirely different set of abilities. This widespread issue was succinctly summarized in a corporate forum:

"Corporate America has not figured out that just because someone is doing extremely well in a non-managerial position, that does not automatically mean they will exceed in the management position of that role."

Conclusion: The Leader Is the Lid

These leadership blind spots—the "kindness" that allows mediocrity, the "control" that stifles growth, and the "reward" that sets people up to fail—are rarely born from malice. They come from good intentions. The challenge for every leader is to look inward and honestly assess whether these patterns exist in their own leadership. This isn't about judging others, but about taking responsibility for our own growth. As Craig Groeschel advises, "Your goal is to love people and make things better… If anything, you might want to point some fingers at yourself because we all have these problems."

Ultimately, these three traps reveal a fundamental leadership principle: the leader is the lid. Your organization cannot outgrow your personal blind spots. If you permit incompetence, stifle ownership, or misplace talent, you are setting the ceiling for your team's potential. As you reflect on your own team and leadership, ask yourself this question: Which of these well-intentioned habits might be silently limiting the potential of your ministry and the people you lead? Addressing these blind spots isn't easy, but the health of your team and the effectiveness of your mission depend on it.

Everyone wins when the leader gets better.

Note: This article was produced with the help of NotebookLM