8 Ways to Lead Good Meetings
The mere mention of meetings produces eyerolls and elevated pulse rates among many pastors and church leaders. “The only good staff meeting is a canceled staff meeting,” “That staff meeting could have been an email,” and other laments echo through the halls of our churches on Mondays. I get it. There’s little worse than bogging down a workday with unnecessary or poorly planned meetings. It can be eye opening to consider how much money our churches spend for us to waste time if you look around the room and do the math on the paid man hours represented in unproductive meetings. Even if attendees aren’t paid by the church, the poor stewardship of time and leadership capital is worth our consideration.
I don’t think you can get away from the need for meetings, but you can certainly make some simple moves to help your meetings be more productive and efficient. But before I make a few suggestions, why do we need meetings in the first place?
WHY DO WE NEED MEETINGS?
For the meeting haters among us, remember, God made us to be relational people. Great ministry can be derailed by poor staff relationships! Meetings can be opportunities to check on staff and the elder team’s wellbeing, to pray with and for one another, to encourage and support good work, and to maintain healthy personal relationships with your team. I concede that you can do a great deal of nuts and bolts work using digital tools, but if the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that there’s a human cost to remote work.
In a culture that’s suspicious of leadership, meetings can also serve to provide helpful accountability to our teams. It’s much easier to notice that a staff member or fellow pastor isn’t doing well when you’re in the room and engaging with them personally. Don’t miss the chance to check on them when they seem out of sorts or distant. At best, this personal contact is an opportunity to help them by bearing burdens and to share the love of Christ. At worst, it’s a way to find out about potentially disqualifying issues way earlier, which allows your team to protect the congregation and to walk with the staff member through repentance and restoration.
Assuming you agree that meetings are important, let’s consider 8 ways to have solid meetings, especially with our church staff.
1. BE A PREPARED LEADER
If you’re the one calling the party, there are some good rules of thumb to follow. When it comes to regular meetings—like a weekly staff meeting—make sure it happens at the same time, in the same place every week. If you’re calling an extra meeting, whenever possible, give advance notice to everyone of the meeting time, place, and desired outcome. Send out an agenda ahead of time so that meeting attendees can prepare useful contributions to projects and issues that need to be addressed. Our elder team has found it helpful to make a first pass through the material to be covered electronically ahead of the meeting. That way the basic questions can be answered before we gather, so when we are face-to face we can focus on the tougher aspects of decisions and assignments that need to be made.
Be sure that your meeting space is tidy and welcoming and that all technology resources you need are on hand and ready to go. Don’t make your team sit around for 5-10 minutes while you figure out how to cast your screen to a monitor. Have all of that work done before they arrive so that you can maximize the shared time.
2. BE A PREPARED ATTENDEE
If you’ve been invited to a meeting, ask in advance how you can best contribute to the conversation. Showing up to a meeting where you have no idea why you’re there or what’s expected is frustrating for you. Showing up to a meeting where you had every opportunity to contribute but you couldn’t because you were unprepared is frustrating for everyone.
Take the time to read the agenda and form initial thoughts if one is provided ahead of time. Often much of the agenda won’t directly apply to your area of ministry, but your knowledge and experience in ministry can still add value to their projects and plans. Look for ways to contribute in every meeting. God wired you in a particular way to notice and emphasize things that others might overlook. Your thoughtful engagement will benefit the ministry as a whole.
3. STAY ON TRACK
When you can’t keep the team on track, you waste time and leadership capital that could have been spent more effectively. Make sure that you are stewarding the financial and human resources entrusted to you well! The best way to do this is by having a plan and executing that plan in the meeting.
The keys to keeping a meeting on track are threefold. First, have a desired outcome that is clear to everyone at the outset of the meeting. For weekly staff meetings, you might want to see some staff development and clear action items for everyone for the upcoming week. Next, provide an agenda that aligns with your desired outcome. That might seem obvious, but if you’ve experienced many staff meetings, you know the agenda can get bloated. Most of us will reuse agendas to save work from week to week, and that’s a great time saver. Commit to reviewing it monthly and trim the fat. Finally, set clear expectations so that everyone can kill rabbits to keep the conversation on track. If everyone knows where the meeting is heading, then you can, collectively, hold one another accountable to executing that plan.
4. LIMIT D ISTRACTIONS
You’ve probably been in a meeting where some or all of the participants are looking at screens and only a few people are engaged with the topic being discussed at a time. When you’re regularly repeating yourself in meetings, when there’s low buy in and follow through with meetings, it could be due to distracted participants.
Consider printing an agenda for your meetings and asking people to refrain from using technology in ways that don’t directly contribute to the meeting. If what you’re meeting to discuss is not important enough to request this of your participants, it’s time to revamp the agenda. Many times, meeting participants are not just doodling on the side, but they get off track when something comes up in the meeting and they try to run it down right then. Consider keeping clear assignments throughout the meeting and encouraging people to wait until the meeting is over to start executing.
5. MAKE IT ACTIONABLE
Your meetings should result in clear outcomes for the church. It’s wonderful to review Sunday services, think about kids ministry check-in and check-out procedures, and dream about the future. But it’s a waste of time if you don’t put any of that mental work into motion. Generally, every participant should leave a meeting clear on something they can do to meaningfully contribute to the work. If you have meeting participants who are not regularly contributing, it might be time to either examine how you can lead them to make a solid contribution or take them off the roster for that meeting. Consider taking 5 minutes at the end of the meeting to review what you’ve covered and make sure that everyone is clear on what they need to do next.
6. PROVIDE ACCOUNTABILITY
Accountability goes hand in hand with actionable meetings. If everyone leaves with a clear assignment(s) for the week, but none of those assignments are followed up on at the next meeting, your success rate is going to be low. It can be as simple as setting aside 5 minutes in a meeting to check on assignments from the last meeting. If staff are struggling to complete assignments you have a few options. You can carry them over to the next week, assign additional resources to the task, or reassign the task to someone else. You don’t want to embarrass staff members who don’t follow through, but you also don’t want to create a culture of passivity.
7. GIVE EVERYONE SPACE TO SPEAK
If you’re going to invite, or require, someone to be in a staff meeting, give them space to speak into what’s happening. Even let the interns speak into what’s going on. It’s a safe space for them to voice opinions, ask questions, and get feedback that will help them to be better staffers somewhere in the future. You might want to help various staff members think through how best to use their voice in these meetings, but it’s not wise to have a bunch of people sit quietly in a meeting while only a few people do the work.
We make it a habit to check in with each member of the meeting at the end so that they can ask questions, share information or make requests of the team before we adjourn. Our staff have commented how they appreciate feeling like it’s safe to chime in on anything we’re working on together.
8. END ON A HIGH NOTE
People tend to remember how meetings end more than anything else about them. If you make it a habit to end with clarity on assignments and a sense of having made progress on last week’s plans, most people leave feeling like the meeting was worthwhile. You might spend some time in prayer together, talking about things you’re all grateful for, or any number of things that you find bring life and joy to your team.
If you give some time and attention to your staff meetings, you can get the most out of the time together. And, if you lead meetings well you’ll notice that people will shift from resenting meetings to actually looking forward to them.