Five Benefits of a Standing Meeting

by: Sam Rainer III

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You can sit during these meetings if you like. Standing meetings are different than stand-up meetings. A standing meeting is one that repeats in a regular pattern and is an obligation for people to attend.

I have a standing meeting every Monday at 4:00 p.m. with my worship pastor. We discuss the previous Sunday’s services and also the upcoming Sunday services. On occasion, we’ll use the time slot to create worship strategies or examine something new.

Our church staff also meets regularly—every Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. for staff chapel. Then the ministry team meets from 9:30 a.m. until noon. The agenda is standing as well. For the most part, the same items are discussed every week. Our congregation has a monthly standing meeting for leaders on Sunday afternoons. All leaders, teams, and committees meet at the same time.

We’ve all been trapped in a blackhole meeting where time seems to stop and everything descends into nothingness. I’m guilty of leading such meetings, chasing rabbits and taking too long to land the plane. If done well, standing meetings can be of great benefit to church staff without wasting everyone’s time.

Standing meetings create a culture of candid communication. When everyone meets weekly and is expected to contribute, you give people permission to speak freely. When meetings are rarely called, they can feel formal, and some staff will be less inclined to talk.

Standing meetings prevent ministry silos. When staff communicate regularly and with a rhythm, fewer silos form. The team actually starts to function as a team when regular pathways of communication open. In fact, if your staff does not have standing meetings, then starting them will often reveal how bad your ministry silos are.

Standing meetings keep church staff focused on top priorities. These meetings act as weekly reminders of what is most important. Without them, good staff will create their own priorities. Without them, lazy staff find it much easier to hide.

Standing meetings spotlight items that need weekly attention. Some things need to be discussed every week or every month. Our team discusses worship services, guests, hospital and care updates, the next thirty days of events, and other items every Tuesday.

Standing meetings help with camaraderie and morale. I realize some people become more annoying the more you are with them. However, in most cases, when you are around people often, you tend to care more about them. Standing meetings can become great times of building and inspiring the team. If you lead these meetings, use the time predominantly for encouragement and only occasionally for admonishment.

These meetings don’t have to be long. They don’t have to be all-staff all the time. Some individual ministries may want standing meetings between them, such as students and children, or worship and technology, or assimilation and first impressions. If done well, standing meetings become beneficial and not boring.

> Read more from Sam.

Tags: Improving meetings, Meetings, Sam Rainer, effective meetings

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The ABCs of Avoiding Ineffective Meetings: Build Buffers That Increase Production

by: VRcurator

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Meetings are a powerful tool for organizations. Secretly, though, you enjoy those Dilbert comics that feature the pain and frustration of poorly run meetings. It seems as if Scott Adams, the brilliant author of Dilbert, was a part of your last meeting!

Let’s face it; meetings can be a real drag. We all hate doing them, but we also feel they are a necessary evil to ensure people work well together. For such a straightforward concept – essentially a group of people gathered to discuss an idea – we really do make a mess out of it sometimes.

While statistics vary widely on the amount of time spent in meetings, successful organizations know their teams spend so much time in meetings that turning meeting time into sustained results is a priority. Actions that make meetings successful require direction by the meeting leader before, during, and after the meeting.

Whether you are organizing meetings or simply attending them, you owe it to yourself to become more effective at this skill – especially if you are the team leader!

SOLUTION #2: Build buffers that increase production

THE QUICK SUMMARY

Doing the work and leading the work are very different things. When you make the transition from maker to manager, you give ownership of projects to your team even though you could do them yourself better and faster. You’re juggling expectations from your manager, who wants consistent, predictable output from an inherently unpredictable creative process. And you’re managing the pushback from your team of brilliant, headstrong, and possibly overqualified creatives.

Leading talented, creative people requires a different skill set than the one many management books offer. As a consultant to creative companies, Todd Henry knows firsthand what prevents creative leaders from guiding their teams to success, and in Herding Tigers he provides a bold new blueprint to help you be the leader your team needs. Learn to lead by influence instead of control. Discover how to create a stable culture that empowers your team to take bold creative risks. And learn how to fight to protect the time, energy, and resources they need to do their best work.

Full of stories and practical advice, Herding Tigers will give you the confidence and the skills to foster an environment where clients, management, and employees have a product they can be proud of and a process that works.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION

Do you feel like your meeting schedule is overwhelming, often containing back-to-back meetings? Even with those, do you often feel like you can’t get everything done? Here’s a simple but effective technique: block out time in your schedule without specifying what it’s for, so you have time to work on unexpected issues.

Avoid waiting until the last-minute to schedule a time buffer. The more time you wait, the less available time and/or wiggle room you’ll have to actually drop in that time into your calendar.

Get into the habit of adding a time buffer both to the beginning and end of meetings and appointments as soon as you schedule them. Physically schedule or write-in the buffer into your calendar so you can see it.

As leader, you are uniquely positioned to help the team avoid “meeting pinball,” just bouncing between meetings all day in reactive mode.

One strategy is to establish buffers between tasks or events that allow you ream to reset, consider what’s next, and catch its breath between commitments.

Rather than stacking commitments back to back, you are giving each commitment that you schedule the amount of time it needs and no more, and you’re ensuring that every commitment has a little breathing room blocked off around it so that there is margin for participants.

If you truly want the people on your team to bring their best thinking to a meeting, don’t chain meetings back to back, especially if they are about different projects. Give them five or ten minutes to recollect themselves between meetings, to check in with their other commitments if necessary, and to refocus on the next topic.

Who decided that meetings should be an hour by default? Consider changing the default meeting expectation for your team by making each meeting precisely as long as it needs to be to finish the conversation. Then, take a break for the appropriate amount of time needed to regroup and refocus before the next meeting.

Also consider building buffers at the beginning and end of the day. While there are some situations that require such meetings, limit them as much as you can. By doing so, you’ll allow your team members to settle in, prepare, and bring their full attention and energy to the matters at hand. Also, you’ll allow them to wrap up any important matters at the end of the day before going home so that they can be refreshed and ready to go the following morning.

Todd Henry, Herding Tigers

A NEXT STEP

Time buffers are not just “fluff,” they are extremely valuable units of time! They are what keep meetings from running into one another.

You could think of time buffers just like the spaces between words in a sentence. It’s the difference between reading: “Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow,” versus “Maryhadalittlelambitsfleecewaswhiteassnow.” The spaces help keep things properly separated.

Think about what value your time buffers could bring you and your team when it comes to meetings. Could your buffer bring you: peace of mind, a little less stress, or time for you to grab a snack and a drink of water?

Evaluate your current slate of recurring meetings and consider eliminating or adapting them to better your team’s time.

How can you better structure your current meeting schedule so that there is less wasted time and energy and more white space for your team to recollect and refocus on the work?

Are there any commitments or expectations that bookend your team’s day that need to be adjusted so that they have more margin around the edges of their schedule?

Once you have created buffer space around your meetings, have conversations with your team to help them take full advantage of it.

Excerpt taken from Remix 90-2.

Tags: Ineffective meetings, Meetings, Successful Meetings, Todd Henry

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5 Tips for Making Meetings Actually Work

by: Rich Birch

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Stop and think about how much of your time is spent in meeting in an average week at your church. Now, do some quick math to calculate that across your team. Wowsers! That’s a lot of time! (Bonus: Assign some monetary value to each of those hours.)

Clearly, you need to work on ensuring that your team is being a good steward of all that meeting time.

Although it can seem like a “plumbing” issue of how the church does its work, in many ways the meeting culture of your church could be a make-or-break aspect of what is either pushing your ministry forward or holding it back. As I’ve had the honor of being in the orbits of some fantastic churches over the years, I’ve noticed some healthy habits that those leadership teams live by to get the most out of their meetings. Rather than seeing meetings as a necessary evil of “doing church”, these teams are looking for ways to optimize their meeting culture towards performance that pushes them forward. Here are some healthy habits I’ve seen in churches that are making a difference today:

Use meetings to make decisions, not to disseminate information.

Meetings are disagreements to move the organization forward. Healthy teams use meetings as a place to come together to make decisions. More pointedly, leaders use meetings to make decisions. A good meeting should be built around ideas that need to be debated and discussed in the context of an impending decision. Meetings are not a place to simply pass out information or keep everyone informed. It’s a waste of your team’s time to use meetings as a place to ensure they are up to speed on what’s happening at the church.

Adults are basically “just in time” learners, so when you use a meeting to simply pass along information, they are almost hardwired to not pay attention because they can’t put the information into practice right away. However, you can turn this same dynamic on its head by using meetings to present a desired and debatable outcome that you’re going to discuss. People can’t help but lean in and want to participate when change is on the horizon based on this meeting. When there are consequences to meetings, people show up and are ready to jump in. If the meeting feels inconsequential, your team will disengage at best or maybe even resent the meeting.

3 Other Ways to Disseminate Information to Your Team Besides Calling a Meeting

• Voice Messages // You’d be amazed how much information you can pass in a 5 minute audio message recorded on your phone. It’s easy to record your voice and email it out to your team.
• “What to Expect” Documents // In just one page, you can outline a lot of information that people need to know about an upcoming event or activity at the church.
• Weekly Check in Email // Many churches have a standard report email that is generated every week with data that the entire team needs to know. Get your information to hijack on the back of that communication.

Ensure people come prepared to discuss.

No agenda? No meeting! If whoever is calling the meeting doesn’t have time to prepare the people attending the meeting for what is being discussed, it’s probably best not to meet. People don’t like surprises and it’s a bad use of people’s time to get their gut reaction to issues without them having time to prepare. If the decisions being made in the meeting are of such low consequence that people don’t need to think about them ahead of time, then they should be delegated to a team member to make the decision and inform the team later. The prep is both an agenda that outlines the decisions that will be made at the meeting and reading materials to help people as they process the decision.

5 Elements of a Compelling Agenda

• Decision: // What is the big decision that is being made at this meeting? This is the overall driver for why you are calling people together.
• Attendees // A clear list of who will be at the meeting. If people don’t know each other, a one-line bio is helpful.
• Please Read // A list of resources designed to bring the team up to speed on the issue at hand.
• What’s at Stake // Why is this such an important decision? A clear and compelling reason why this decision needs to be made at this time.
• Rules of Engagement // Some ground rules about how the team is going to go about “doing” the meeting.

Healthy teams work to avoid the feedback bubble.

Learning teams win. Churches that are making a difference in their communities are led by teams of people that are looking for ways to learn from other organizations and apply those lessons to their church. Stagnant churches keep to their own small tribe and shout into the echo chamber of their community. Healthy meetings seek to bring in data from a wide variety of sources to push to a better answer, not the answer that was assumed from the outset. Too many churches just run the same plays over and over and aren’t committed to bringing in outside voices to help them make better decisions. If you are looking for a way to improve your decision-making as a team, you need to bring in voices from other circles to help you make better decisions.

This is particularly important when we think about our ultimate mission as a church. Every church needs to find ways to leverage opportunities to reach people beyond their own church. In fact, the local church is the only organization in the world that exists not for its member but for people not yet connected to the church! As Colossians 4:5 says, “Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity.” The hard truth is the voice of the “insider” will always be louder than the “outsider” and so your church needs to find ways to include those voices at your decision-making table. If you only listen to those people who are already with your church, you will miss the opportunity to reach people who haven’t been reached yet!

3 Ways to Add Outside Voices to Your Decision-Making Process

• Data is Your Friend // Find hard numbers that talk about what is actually happening rather than just your opinion or hunches. There is no bad information, just information you don’t like.
• Invite People In // Who is attending the meetings at your church should be driven by the decisions being made, not by tradition or hierarchy. Pull in people who can speak first-hand about the decisions being made.
• Coaches // Growing churches bring in people who have been down the road they are looking at before. A day with a coach or consultant can help bring added clarity to the decisions you make as a team.

Capture action steps and assign responsibilities.

Take massive action. The reason you’ve called meetings at your church is to make decisions. Therefore, coming out of the meeting should be a series of decisions that need to be assigned to team members to follow up on. In fact, the very essence of what “happens” coming out of meetings is new and vibrant energy that has been released. If your meetings aren’t leading to people taking action, then you are just using your meetings to inform people of decisions that have already been made and you should stop meeting.

3 Vital Pieces Needed to Record Next Steps After a Meeting

• Owner // Who is the person responsible for the next step coming out of the meeting?
• Outcome // What was the decision that was made by the team?
• Due Date // When does the owner need to make sure the item is completed by?

As important as the agenda is the pre-reading material, someone from the meeting needs to follow up quickly with “action steps” that are going to be initiated because of the meeting. Ideally, those are recorded in the meeting and sent right away. Again, the meeting should be a tool to push the church forward, so now that decision has been made, the organization should move to take action on that decision!

Meetings should be an exciting event, not a total bore.

All meetings should be optional and exciting. If you are just getting together for the sake of getting together, stop it. Don’t force your people to sit through another meeting just for the sake of meeting. Cut your “repeating” meetings out or at least in half. As a team leader, you need to ensure that each meeting is exciting and engaging, not boring. If the meeting is putting people to sleep, then the team leader isn’t doing their job.

6 Ways to Make Your Church Team Meetings More Exciting

• Make Them Optional … really! // If people can choose not to come to the meeting and won’t suffer any retribution from the team leader, you’d be amazed how creative the team leader will get to make the meeting great.
• Add Food // Something almost magical happens when you add food to a meeting. Have a favorite exotic food? Add it to the start of your next regular meeting and see what happens. (Skip the donuts … it’s been overdone.)
• Standing Meeting // Okay … this might not be fun, but it is just effective. Take all the chairs out of the room that you meet in and have the meeting standing up. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you move through the agenda!
• Thank You Notes // Kick off your meeting with some gratitude! Hand out thank you cards to everyone on your team and have them share something that someone else on another team at the church did that was fantastic. After people share, have them write thank you notes to the people that they shared about!
• Get Rid of the Table // The physical space you meet in matters. Get rid of that big table that blocks everyone. Paint the walls a bright color. Making a physical change can switch people’s attitudes about your meetings. What if you themed the room something fun? Hawaiian Luau Theme? Christmas in July?
• Stick It Up! // In preparation for the meeting, put 3-4 pieces of poster board around the room with short sentences describing issues your church is facing. As people arrive for the meeting, give them a pile of post-it notes and a marker and ask them to jot down solutions for each issue and stick it up on the boards around the room. Take some time to discuss the ideas generated.

It is important to connect with your team relationally, but don’t do that poorly through something masquerading a meeting. Cut out some meetings and then use that freed up time to go do something fun with your team and actually connect!

Interest in learning more about meetings? Listen to Al.

If you are interested in diving deeper in great meeting culture, you need to follow Al Pittampalli and Modern Meeting Standard. He is a leader in thinking about how organizations do meetings well and is leading a revolution to get all kinds of organizations to improve them! Much of my thought has been shaped by Al on this front and I find myself coming back to him time and again when I’m faced with needing to retool our meeting culture one more time! I’m grateful for his leadership.

> Read more from Rich.

Tags: Meetings, Rich Birch, Staff Meetings, leading meetings

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4 “Must-Haves” for Weekly Staff Meetings

by: Sam Rainer III

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I’m weird. I like meetings. They are an opportunity to interact with people. Being an extrovert, I enjoy the collaboration of teamwork.

Not all meetings are created equal. Church staff meetings can wander into theological briars and get stuck. Discussions about facility requests can circle on a roundabout like Clark Griswold in London. Some church staff probably think the “lead” in lead pastor needs to change to “tangent” (I’m guilty!).

There are several approaches to staff meetings. Most church staff meet weekly to discuss short-term, operational items in a standing meeting with a set time. My staff meets every Tuesday from 9:30 a.m. until 10:30 a.m. to work through weekly items. The agenda is largely the same every week. Other types of meetings include strategy meetings with key leaders—sometimes called whiteboard sessions—which are more open-ended and focused on long-term goals. One-on-one meetings often cover individual goals. Ad hoc meetings might draw in a special team to accomplish a unique task.

In this post, I’m referring to the weekly operational staff meetings with a repeating, or standing, agenda. I suggest including the following four agenda items every week.

1. Prayer. Excluding prayer from ministry meetings is tantamount to driving a vehicle without ever replacing the oil. Eventually, you’re going to wear out. We ask the church to submit prayer requests weekly. We pray over all of them and sign a card sent to those requesting prayer. We want them to know we’ve prayed for them. We pray for each other. We pray for our community. We pray for the last. The first item on the agenda every week is prayer because it is the most important.
2. Scripture for the upcoming week. Not every church meeting needs to begin with a devotion. But your weekly staff meeting should include a discussion about the Scripture for the upcoming Sunday. My goal is to have a sermon draft by our Tuesday meeting. I then share with the staff the direction of my sermon. I seek their input and use the feedback to reshape my messages. There is no need to have a separate devotional time; simply use Sunday’s text.
3. Ministry stories from the previous week. You become what you celebrate. Every week, I encourage the staff to share ministry successes. Learning how God works in another person’s ministry area is an encouragement to everyone. It also helps us connect the dots between God’s work in the church. For example, a child accepting Christ may coincide with her grandmother’s decision to teach a Life Group and her father’s decision to join the worship team.
4. Thank you cards to write. Every week I ask the staff if I can write a note to someone. I also encourage them to write notes to people in their ministry areas. A hand-written note sent through the snail mail is a rarity. They stand out. They make a statement. Check out this previous post I wrote on the power of hand-written notes.

We spend about 5 to 15 minutes in prayer, about 10 minutes discussing the upcoming text, about 5 to 10 minutes sharing ministry stories, and less than 5 minutes discussing thank you cards. Most weeks, these agenda items take about 30 minutes, which leaves an additional 30 minutes for other items. The time spent on these four agenda items is worth it every week.

> Read more from Sam.

Tags: Meetings, Sam Rainer, Staff Meetings, staff leadership

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Why Your Meeting Should Have Been an Email

by: Eric Geiger

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Last week I gave indicators that your email should have been a meeting. There are times when a push for efficiency via email backfires and actually creates more work. In those times, a meeting would have been more effective and more efficient.

However… there are times when a meeting is really a waste of time. When you consider the value of time, an unnecessary meeting is poor stewardship. When you calculate the time of every person in a meeting, meetings are not small investments. Thus, an unnecessary meeting robs energy and time from something else much more important. Some meetings could have been an email. Here are three indicators:

1. Monologue on operational matters

If a meeting is someone giving a monologue on tactics, the meeting could be an email. There are times when a leader or team member gives overarching direction, shares vision, or clarifies mission and values. In those moments, a passionate monologue can be effective. But a meeting is not the best venue for a running commentary on operational matters.

2. Information without any action

If a meeting is one long FYI, the meeting should have been an email. If a meeting is information without action, an email is just as effective and exponentially more efficient. If people can leave a meeting without action steps, an email would have been better.

3. Being unengaged is acceptable

If it is acceptable for people to come to a meeting and passively stare through the presenter while also engaging on their devices, the meeting should have been an email. Clearly the meeting is seen as just something else on the calendar and not something people feel deserves their full attention and engagement. If the meeting is deemed to be truly valuable, people are expected to engage. If the meeting is not valuable, value people’s time enough to cancel it.

> Read more from Eric.

Tags: Eric Geiger, Meetings, emails

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Why Your Email Should Have Been a Meeting

by: Eric Geiger

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Some meetings could have been an email, but some emails should be meetings. There are times that people, in attempts to handle things efficiently, resort to an email when a meeting would have been more effective. Just because communication is efficient does not mean it has been effective. Sometimes a longing for efficiency can lead to ineffectiveness. Here are three indications an email should have been a meeting.

1. Endless replies

An email is great for sending information or giving tactical and operational direction. It is typically not the best venue for a strategic discussion with a group of people. If there is a seemingly never-ending stream of replies, a meeting would have been better. If you see 43 replies, there is usually more confusion and not everyone has weighed in.

2. Less clarity

If the topic being raised creates more questions than answers, a meeting would have been more effective. If after the long thread of emails there is actually less clarity on the direction, you should have called a meeting.

3. Tone is uncertain

If people are re-reading emails because the tone is uncertain, then surfacing the issue at a meeting would have been more effective. Face-to-face interaction allows for dialogue and enables people to communicate empathy non-verbally.

With emails that should have been meetings, the push for efficiency backfires and actually creates more work. People typically have to circle back to others in an attempt to offer clarity. Team members spend time ensuring their tone was not misread. A lot of side conversations occur, and then it all has to come up again—in a meeting. As much as meetings are lamented, sometimes an email should have been a meeting.

Connect with an Auxano Navigator to learn more about communicating with clarity.

> Read more from Eric.

Tags: Clarity in communication, Eric Geiger, Meetings, communication clarity, email, email vs meeting

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Your Team Can Either Meet or Work, But Not Both at the Same Time

by: Will Mancini

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Note: Starting in 2016, we will be routinely posting content from one of the most innovative content sources in the church world: SUMS Remix Book Summaries for church leaders.  SUMS Remix takes a practical problem in the church and looks at it with three solutions with each solution is taken from a different book. As a church leader you get to scan relevant books based on practical tools and solutions to real ministry problems, not just by the cover of the book. Each post will have the edition number which shows the year and what number it is in the overall sequence. (SUMS provides 26 editions per year, delivered every other week to your inbox). 

>>> You can purchase a subscription to SUMS Remix here >>>

So how can you transform every ministry meeting with one big idea? It starts with understanding that every organization and every team experiences drift to see meetings as the work, rather than as a support tool for the work.  Here is the way we unpacked it last year in SUMS Remix edition 1.8.

Solution #3: Design meetings for one purpose: to support decisions.

THE QUICK SUMMARY

How many times have you dreaded going to a meeting either because you viewed it as a waste of time or because you weren’t prepared?

Read This Before Our Next Meeting not only explains what’s wrong with “the meeting,” and meeting culture, but suggests how to make meetings more effective, efficient, and worthy of attending. It assesses when it’s necessary to skip the meeting and get right to work.

Read This Before Our Next Meeting is the call to action you (or your boss) need to create the organization that does the meaningful work it was created to do.

A SIMPLE SOLUTION

The profound tragedy of meetings is that everyone feels a benefit from calling a meeting but few of us benefit from attending.

Church leaders know in a real and visceral way that they have too many meetings, and too many of those meetings are bad! The resulting broken meeting culture is changing how teams focus, what they focus on, and most important, what decisions are made.

Ministry is a complex beast, and meetings can help tame the beast – but only meetings that insure intelligent decisions are made and to confirm that our teams are collaborating together in carrying out those decisions.

Church ministry teams don’t need standard, mediocre meetings that are all about making excuses and engaging in internal politics. It’s those types of meetings that keep leaders from doing the real ministry work they were called to do.

Traditional meetings are treated as just another form of communication. They’re just another item to be included in the same category as e-mail, memos, and phone calls. Meetings are too expensive and disruptive to justify using them for the most common types of communication, like making announcements, clarifying issues, or even gathering intelligence.

Seven Principles of the Modern Meeting

1. The Modern Meeting convenes to support a decision that has already been made. The Modern Meeting focuses on the only two activities worth convening for: conflict and coordination.

2. The Modern Meeting moves fast and ends on schedule. Traditional meetings seem to go on forever, with no end in sight. Strong deadlines force parties to resolve the hard decisions necessary for progress.

3. The Modern Meeting limits the number of attendees. If you have no strong opinion, have no interest in the outcome, and are not instrumental for any coordination that needs to take place, you aren’t needed in the meeting.

4. The Modern Meeting rejects the unprepared. The agenda should clearly state the problem, the alternatives, and the decision. It should outline exactly the sort of feedback requested, and it should end with a statement of what this meeting will deliver if it’s successful. Anything that’s not on the agenda doesn’t belong in the meeting.

5. The Modern Meeting produces committed action plans. These plans should include at least the following: 1) What actions are we committing to? 2) Who is responsible for each action? 3) When will these actions be completed?

6. The Modern Meeting refuses to be informational. Reading memos is mandatory. Teams must share complete thoughts that are actually worth reading and responding to – and everyone must read it all in advance.

7. The Modern Meeting works only alongside a culture of brainstorming. These sessions are dedicated to the creation of possibilities, a place where the imagination is allowed to run free and generate a plethora of ideas, from which innovation can be born.

Al Pittampalli, Read This Before Our Next Meeting

A NEXT STEP

Management genius Peter Drucker said that meetings were by definition a concession to deficient organization. Teams can either meet or work, but they can’t do both at the same time.

It’s time for your ministry team to do real work through a revised meeting structure by taking the following actions:

• Distribute the Seven Principles of the Modern Meeting listed above and ask your team members to review and reflect on them for the purpose of supporting the decision to establish a Modern Meeting process.
• Schedule a one-hour time in which each member of your team will prepare concerns and solutions to implementing the Modern Meeting process in ministry setting.
• Following this meeting, develop a set of action plans to implement the Modern Meeting process for a three-month trial period.
• Throughout the trial period, constantly reinforce progress and concerns via information shared among all team members.
• As a part of the trial, schedule weekly brainstorming sessions to help support the Modern Meeting process (see #7 above).
• At the conclusion of the trial period, decide and commit on following – or not following – the Modern Meeting process.

Taken from SUMS Remix Edition 1.8, March 2015

>>> You can purchase a subscription to SUMS Remix here >>>

Tags: Al Pittampalli, Meet, Meetings, Read This Before Our Next Meeting, SUMS Remix, Staff Meetings, Will Mancini

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Less Can Be More: How Ruthless Calendaring Will Make Your Work More Productive

by: Philip Nation

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Here are two words that you do not expect to read in a single phrase: “ruthless” and “calendaring.” But, I hope that by the end of this post, I will have made them make sense together for 2014.

Recently, I spent an hour with the managers and publishing team leaders in my area to discuss our schedules. By virtue of working in a company, meetings are necessary. At least that’s what we think most of the time. What I have found is that some of our meetings have a less than necessary reason for existence. In order to order my life better, here is some major planning for 2014. Here’s is why I plan to do it and what I hope to accomplish.

1. Curb the pop-in-the-office meetings. I am incredibly guilty of this behavior and it causes everyone in our company to have permission to do the same. I hope to stop just popping into other offices unannounced. My leaders are gracious and don’t act as if they mind it. But I think it makes for too many spur-of-the-moment decisions and just eats up time. A better schedule will help us be more intentional with our conversations.

2. Establish the major conversations. In my calendaring for the next year, I am establishing the major conversations that will take place each week and/or month with others. For my core leadership, we will meet each week. For a group of my peers where I lead a “matrix” meeting across our adult ministry work, we will meet once a month. Without a doubt, there will be emergencies that arise that will require a meeting, but a pre-planned conversation will help us know when the conversations can be most fruitful.

3. Schedule conversations. A great part of leadership is relationship. I don’t want my relationships with our team to feel contrived but I know that the vast majority of our interactions simply revolve around our assigned work. The only way for me to spend any personal time where we talk about life, faith, family, and the things we enjoy is to schedule those conversations. It will take the form of walking to a coffee shop, going to lunch, or a planned break from the up-tempo pace of our work life.

4. Show patience. When it comes to work, I can be a hard-charging personality. I don’t know that I have this natural inclination or if it is a learned behavior. I guess it does not matter… it is who I very likely am at work. By holding to my scheduled meetings and conversations, it will help me practice patience. Rather than giving in to the impulse to rush around and force conversations and decisions, I hope that my calendaring will allow me to settle down. At least a little bit.

5. Establish a reason for every meeting. My coworkers know that I hate two things about meetings: when they are long and when we leave without a reason for having met. By doing this planning ahead of time, I hope to also establish a reason for every meeting to occur. It means that each meeting will not only a reason but also a plan for discussion and/or delegation.

6. Own your calendar by refusing to let others own it. We all work off of Google Calendar where others can search for an open spot on your schedule and send an invitation. I’ve decided that just because I have “white space” does not give others permission to own it. It is okay to say “no” to a meeting or delay it to another time.

I will likely have a mixture of success and failure in all of these areas. I’ll let you know how it goes along the way.

So… what are you doing to make this year more productive in your work?

Read more from Philip here.

Tags: Meetings, Philip Nation, Staff Culture, calendaring, effectiveness

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Developing an Online and Offline Personal Communication Strategy

by: Timmy Brister

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I’ve been in a situation in life here lately where it has been necessary to develop a communication strategy online and offline. In the past, I have not given much thought to how I communicate with other people. Now leading a resourcing network for church planting, a missions collective for Haiti, and pastoring a church–I have come to really appreciate effective and thoughtful communication.  Here’s basically what I’m learning to do.

There are three levels of communication I have with people on a regular basis. The first level is the micro level. That’s the daily chatter and conversation about details, requests, etc. Typically, this level of communication does not need to be recorded or archived. Rather, it is communication for quick and immediate response in the rhythm of the workday. The second level is the mono level. That’s the one-on-one communication about actionable matters of various levels of significance. Typically, this kind of correspondence has requests that need to be filled, questions to be answered, plans to be executed, etc., and therefore archiving and retrieving such correspondence is helpful if not necessary. The third level is the multi level. That’s the communication with multiple people in the collaboration process. On this level, you are taking in feedback and interaction from several sources at one time in one setting.

These three levels are worked out through different platforms/formats whether offline and online.

For offline communication on a micro level, I rely on text messaging. At this level, communication does not warrant a phone call or lengthy communication. It is intended for immediate feedback. On a mono level offline, I rely on telephone calls. The difference between the two levels are significant, because if something requires a phone call to be addressed is attempted to be covered via text, a lot of time is wasted in the process. However, if you care constantly calling someone about something that can be addressed over a text, that can create a frustrating work experience. You have to make judgments between the two and have operating agreements with your team. On the multi level offline, there’s scheduled meetings. These are structured times of collaborating with multiple people with a set agenda (talking points).

For online communication on a micro level, I rely on instant messaging (via Gmail) and direct messaging (via Twitter). I almost always have at least 2-3 IM tabs at the bottom of my Gmail with ongoing chatter about little matters that need immediate attention (changes, scheduling, updates, etc.). My online mono level is email. Again, like offline communication, this can be problematic. I don’t want a cluttered up inbox of emails that could have been instant messages or group emails that so often are strung around with the infamous “reply all” option on matters I’m often tangentially involved in. Emails can be a horrible medium for collaborative communication, which leads to the multi level online, namely video conferencing. If I am meeting with more than one person online, then I use Skype, Google Hangout, ooVoo, or GoToMeeting to forward projects, plan events/trips, discuss initiatives, etc.

For some time, I had been operating like this without fully recognizing it. Now that I see it, it has become all the more clear in learning to communicate better using formats/platforms appropriate to the level of correspondence. In my case, I work in a highly decentralized environment where online communication is 65% and offline communication is 35%. It may be the opposite (or some other breakdown) for you. Either way, know where you communicate most often and how you proceed to do so in the future may prove very beneficial down the road.

Have you developed a communication strategy for online or offline? What have you found that works best for you and those you work with?

Read more from Timmy here.

Tags: Awareness, Meetings, Social Media, Timmy Brister

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How to Run Your Meetings Like Apple and Google

by: Sean Blanda

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Tags: Meetings, Sean Blanda, Structure

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