How to Avoid Death by Meeting
Board meetings, staff meetings, budget meetings, strategy meetings, planning meetings, and meetings about meetings. Can you hear the sound of air being sucked out of the room? Why are meetings SO bad? The good news is you don’t need a meeting to identify the two basic problems.
First, meetings lack drama. Which means they are boring.
Second, most meetings are unfocused, meandering and seemingly endless, with little resolution or clarity.
Conflict Is Good For Meetings
The key to making meetings less boring lies in identifying and nurturing the natural level of conflict that should exist.
Put the most controversial issues on the table at the beginning of a meeting. By demanding that people wrestle with those issues until resolution has been achieved, leaders create compelling drama, and prevent their attendees from checking out.
Craft healthy rules of conflict engagement that all participants agree to and then hold each other accountable.
Start with:
Listen actively.
Focus on the problem. Separate people from the problem.
Disagree agreeably.
Analyze the conflict.
Clarity Is Good For Meetings
Make it clear to team members why the meeting is taking place and what is expected of them. Differentiate between different types of meetings. By creating context, leaders might have to have more meetings. Not necessarily more time in meetings, but more different types of meetings.
Patrick Lencioni, a teamwork, leadership and organizational health guru, identifies four distinct meetings:
The Daily Check-in
The Weekly Tactical
The Monthly Strategic
The Quarterly Off-site Review
The Daily Check-in is a schedule-oriented, administrative meeting that should last no more than five or 10 minutes. The purpose is simply to keep team members aligned and to provide a daily forum for activity updates and scheduling.
The Weekly Tactical is known as staff meeting. These should be approximately an hour in length, give or take 20 minutes, and should focus on the discussion and resolution of issues which effect near term objectives.
Take ten minutes to review one another's priorities, the team's overall scorecard, and then decide on what to discuss during the remainder of the meeting. Focus only on those issues that are truly relevant and critical.
The key to making these tactical meetings work is having the discipline to identify and postpone the discussion of more strategic topics.
The Monthly Strategic is the appropriate place for big topics, those that will have a long-term impact on the church. These issues require more time for brainstorming, debate, presentation of ideas and wrestling with one another in pursuit of optimal, long-term solutions. Include only one or two topics, and allow roughly two hours for each topic.
The Quarterly Off-Site Review is an opportunity to reassess the performance of the team, the church's strategy, morale, threats, opportunities, and decide on the next quarter’s one big objective. Set aside seven hours, including a healthy lunch and timely breaks.
Commitment to this meeting structure overcomes the most common objection: "How am I going to get my work done if I'm spending all of my time in meetings?"
As Lencioni says, “Meetings are what leaders do, and the solution to bad meetings is not the elimination of them, but rather the transformation of them into meaningful, engaging and relevant activities.”
Boredom adjourned.
Resource: Death By Meeting: A Leadership Fable About Solving The Most Painful Problem In Business, Patrick Lencioni, 2004
Bob Jones is the founder of REVwords.com, an author, blogger, and coach with 39 years of pastoral experience. Bob is also an Advance Coach with the ABNWT Resource Centre. You can connect with Bob here.