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Would you waste 17 hours at a meeting that delivered no deliverables, that had no expected outcomes and that didn’t give you the information you needed?  No?  I thought not.

Well, that’s about how many person hours are taken up in our monthly leadership meeting at church and we are determined not to have our volunteers give up their precious time on meetings that suck (thanks Michael Hyatt).

Some of our agenda items have clear outcomes as part of the written agenda and that’s good.  But its customary for each leader to report to the meeting about their areas of responsibility.  This makes sense, but all too often these reports can become irrelevant lists of things done with the comedic, if somewhat soporific, element that the rest of us can recite along with the reporter as we’ve heard it so often before!  OK I exaggerate just a little, but nobody really knows just why they’re reporting…

I’m strongly of the opinion that a good leader’s job is to ask the right questions and because the outcomes I want from a meeting may not be the be all and end all I felt that the team could solve this best.  So I asked the following questions at our last meeting.

1. What do you need to hear about from other leaders to make this meeting worthwhile? and
2. What you really feel you need to bring to the table? Something that will benefit your or others ministry areas.

I’m so excited about the ideas that came out and from now on the outcomes required from this “business as usual” part of the reporting will be:

1. Report it if you need help to solve a problem;
2. Report it if others can leverage off it;
3. If others around the table are affected by it, lets hear about it; and
4. Lets celebrate the wins.

And we decided that not every area needs to report each month as all leaders meet one on one with Raewyn and/or me between meetings and most “normal” stuff can be dealt with then.

This may not seem a lot to many of you, but if you’ve sat through interminable leadership meetings in the past you’ll know exactly where I’m coming from.

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