Craig Groeschel, senior pastor of LifeChurch.tv, did a series of posts last week on “Running Effective Meetings”. If you’re part of a church and have been involved in running meetings, admit it, you’ve probably run sucky meetings.
Have a read of the following posts and suck less:
#1 Meetings – Work to keep your meetings small and communication from meetings large.
#2 Setting the Tone for Effective Meetings:
- Assign a start time and honor it
- Ask your team to refrain from emailing, texting, or taking calls during the meeting.
- Set an agenda.
- Make the agenda visible.
- Decide what topics you’re communicating and which needs decisions.
#3 Tips for Running the Effective Meeting
- Keep the discussion moving.
- Encourage participation.
- Compliment ideas and contributions.
- Press for a decision.
- Create an action plan.
- Set deadlines.
- Plan your communication.
- Summarize the decisions made and the action plan.
#4 Half the Meetings, Twice the Productivity
Got any tips to add?
I personally like set length meeting with a solid cut off point.
Our church meetings are like this. Mikey does an awesome job in keeping them cranking.
On the other hand I HATE are meetings at College they drag on for 2 or more hours each week and involve people gossiping about others and blur the line between “hanging out” and business… grrrr
Blogged on this a while back.
http://www.thefountainside.com/2007/08/15/church-staff-meetings/
@mike – good points. from what i’ve read from mikey, sounds like he’d be great with running meetings.
@sam – thanks for the reminder of you earlier post – i like the idea of regularly booking a table in a cafe sam.
I once worked in a school and a church at the same time.
Now, school teachers are pretty bad in meetings: they talk and talk and talk. They are inefficient almost on principle.
But they understand the value of time.
The meetings at the church were unbelievably wasteful of time. It was like entering another time zone, or crossing an invisible border into another world. We prated on for 3 hours for no discernible gain.
If you want more ideas, have a look at ‘death by meeting’. It’s worth a read!
Short, written as a story and the guy has an interesting take on the topic.
Ditto to Lencioni’s ‘Death by Meeting’!!!! It has revolutionised our church staff meetings at Jannali! Fantastic stuff.
@michael – i know what you mean about teachers. having worked as a teacher, many teachers in a meeting are just plain rude! likewise church meetings… it wasn’t uncommon to go for 4 hours!!!
@reuben + AndrewB – thanks for the tip. it’s not #1 on my to read list, but it still makes it on. thanks.
Thanks for the post dude. Good stuff.
@Michael. At first I thought you said, “We prayed for 3 hours for no discernible gain” !!
no worries mikey.
@ben… haha!
Meetings in the eu at Uni can certainly benefit from some of these ideas!
make sure you pass it on!