[Download Staff Meeting
Iberio Ralda
Over time, I realized that not everybody looked forward to staff meetings as much as I did. And, as I interacted with leaders from other churches, I figured out that some folks actually dreaded church staff meetings.
One of the most important roles of a senior pastor is to cultivate a healthy culture. However, this is easily overlooked and underappreciated in light of all the other responsibilities a pastor has to preach, shepherd, counsel, train leaders, and provide oversight for the church.
Culture is more caught than taught (though it can be taught), which is why it requires many shared experiences to cultivate. A church staff meeting, therefore, is a perfect environment to intentionally cultivate a healthy culture.
Despite the fact that most church staff jobs are pretty ordinary, there is an extraordinary opportunity that church staff enjoy compared to most other workplaces: intentional moments of spiritual reflection and direction.
One key to creating great staff meetings is to arrange your meetings according to the needs of that particular moment and group. Each of these meetings requires different kinds of attention, energy, creativity, and thinking.
Rather than being highly tactical, these meetings are usually vision and heart-oriented to keep these hard-working leaders connected to the bigger purpose. Most tactical work, updates, and decisions must be communicated through email, phone calls, or individual conversations.
The shift from Golfing Buddies to Basketball is one of the more challenging moves because it involves loss for some people. What once was everyone in the same room for everything is now some people in the room for everything and other people in the room if needed.
To help me capture all of the things I want to be sure to cover with my team, I made a little checklist for myself to use when preparing for my staff, and thought it might be useful if anyone else is dealing with the same thing. I've been focusing on improving the waterfall portion of my weekly staff, and realized that there were a lot of things I was missing. So many little pieces of information come at me from so many different sources, I needed to broaden my perspective rather than just trying to synthesize what I've heard come down from above.
I came across this the other day and used this list to prepare for my weekly staff meeting today. I finally felt that I had all the information I need to talk about. I can see this making my portion of the staff meeting more effective. Thanks for sharing.
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Actually i'm managing infrastructure section in IT department and my team are technical support, system eng, network eng. And i'm having one-on-ones meeting with them, so do you think i should have Bi weekly team meeting and if so what we have discussed.
The reason why we have weekly O3s with each of our directs is to build a relationship between the two of us. The weekly staff meeting serves a similar purpose -- to let the team build internal relationships, so they can work better.
That being said, I've tried weekly staff meetings, in the Manager Tools style, a couple of times with different teams, and I've never been satisfied with what they've accomplished. Perhaps it's just my lack of experience running them, but they very quickly devolve into lifeless recitations of tasks completed, no questions are asked, and everyone quietly files out of the room at the end. The whole thing feels grey and lifeless, and they just die out.
One of the one-on-one podcasts discussed the importance of once a week for the meetings. A point that seemed to make a lot of sense is that people tend to live their lives in three- to five-day windows. Meeting once a week helps run a thread through all those windows.
The podcasts also talked a lot about fighting through the awkwardness. The trick is to get the direct talking about things they want to talk about without the manager steering the conversation in any way.
I like the idea of asking "What am I proud of," etc. I found myself chuckling at the "What I don't know that I wish I did." I have a direct who gave me a great presentation once about how a person's world of knowledge is split up into categories, three I believe. "What you know you know," "What you know you don't know," and "What you don't know you don't know," complete with pie charts and graphs. These are some strange but oddly interesting discussions.
The direct's time spent talking about whatever they want to talk about reminds me of an excercise we present to new writers we're evaluating for possible employment. We have an exercise we call the "Write Something" assignment (my thought in creating it was, 'you say you're a writer...write something'). The only instructions we give are you have two hours and there are absolutely no expectations of subject or scope, and your best advice is to have fun with it. "Go."
It's like a verbal Rorshach test. We obviously find out whether they can write, but also time management, work under pressure, how they respond to a blank canvas. I spring this on the directs periodically for a change of pace, and everyone enjoys reading whatever comes out of their co-workers' heads. I think hitting someone with "What I'm proud of" is a similar vein.
Anyway, if the directs don't seem to be opening up, I'd suggest perhaps gently prodding them a bit, explaining why you're doing the meetings, and asking them if they have any advice on how to make them more productive.
I had a similar experience with weekly staffing meetings becoming dry and boring - with the exception of the 'special topic' presentations. In the beginning I gave most of the special topics - usually focusing on strategy, process improvements, etc. This was ok - but I didn't want the meetings to be about 'me' and the communication was very one-way.
When we started the Coaching phase of the Trinity I noticed a trend from O3s that many of my directs wanted to or needed to improve their presentation skills - and they all had topics and experiences that they were passionate about that the rest the group didn't know about. From technical how-to's to customer management to project spotlights.
So we started having team members give the special topic of their choice each week, and I would take coaching notes on how they did (there is a cast for that). This completed changed the meeting - we look forward to the meeting each week, we had a waiting list of team members and topics, and in many cases the staff meeting presentations were given to the wider company.
So we started having team members give the special topic of their choice each week, and I would take coaching notes on how they did (there is a cast for that). This completely changed the meeting - we look forward to the meeting each week, we had a waiting list of team members and topics, and in many cases the staff meeting presentations were given to the wider company.
Companies that are regularly top-down in their decision-making with minimal input from employees are not maximizing the odds that they will flourish. The same principle applies to staff meetings. As a leader in your company, you should prepare an agenda that should be distributed at least one day before the meeting so employees can think about how they can make a contribution to the discussion. You should also plan an agenda that includes announcements and presentations by at least a few employees, not just you. Remember, staff meetings are about the STAFF, not you.
This semiannual meeting, held in the spring and fall, focuses on topics relevant to staff in administrative roles across the Institute. We will continue to hold the Administrative Staff Meeting as a webcast to accommodate the large audience. The agenda and webcast link are shared in advance of each meeting. Questions? Send us an email.
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