Growth is not passive. It takes intentionality. Positive leaders give a push and a shove from time to time. Team members who are not stretched may never grow.

Here are four ways to keep your team growing by stretching them. Remember to keep your balance, though. Some members of your team can handle more pressure than others. Get a handle on their personalities and abilities before you begin.

1. Offer Consistent Constructive Criticism

This seems like an obvious one, but it is easy to overlook. Make constructive criticism a regular element of your leadership. Take an interest in your team members’ work. Offer praise for the things that are going well, but also help them find the gaps or cracks that need to be filled. Then offer constructive ways to improve.

When you do this consistently, it feels less like an employee evaluation or disciplinary procedure and more like leadership.

2. Provide Opportunities to Fail

This one definitely feels counterintuitive. Shouldn’t leaders set their team up for success? Of course. But success always requires learning how to fail well. That can only come by trial and error.

Give your team members chances to fail. That may mean giving them a seemingly impossible task and seeing how they handle it. Or assigning them a task outside their comfort zone.

Don’t allow complacency to creep in and set the tone.

The point is, no one really knows their limits until they push past them into failure. And often, an initial failure leads to improvement, growth and eventual success.

3. Reassign Them to a New Area

Give your team members a chance to try out new areas on a semi-regular basis. For instance, some churches have set up a rotation for the youth pastor, the worship pastor, and the children’s pastor to trade responsibilities for a short time period.

The benefits of this are twofold. First, stepping into a new role may help team members discover tools they’ve never used and abilities they didn’t know they had. Second, it creates unity when team members see things from another’s perspective. The whole team can grow by being stretched this way.

4. Teach Them to Stretch Themselves

Good leaders don’t just point the way; they teach others how to read the compass. Teach your team members how to stretch themselves regularly. One good way to do this is by journaling. Regularly recording your successes and failures will reveal patterns of growth and stagnation, as well as ways to get out of ruts and gain momentum.

Also, challenge team members to set strong personal goals for themselves. Rather than placing new responsibilities on their plates, have staffers come up with ways to push past their personal boundaries. You may find that they are willing to push harder and further when they’re the ones doing the stretching.

These are just a few ways to stretch your team. No matter what you do, make sure you don’t allow complacency to creep in and set the tone. Teams that stretch will grow.