Lencioni always spins an engaging tale to draw readers into accepting his sage business advice, even if it defies the status quo. In “Death by Meeting” he meters out a tale of a company in trouble and slow reveal the heart of the desease: bad meetings. Clearly I’m over simplifying, but if you think Patrick can’t possibly make a story about business meetings interesting, you’ve underestimated him (in my opinion). He kept me interested through the entire novela. I do recommend this book to anyone who is at a management level where they decide which meetings should happen and are responsible for what those meetings look like.
Patrick Lencioni would advise a large company’s top level executives to have the following meetings:
1. 5 minute daily updates: This is where each executive shares what priorities his day will be consumed by to his peers. Each person gets 5 minutes, so the meeting lasts less than 30 minutes.
2. Weekly Tactical Meeting (lasts upto an hour)
Starts with short lighting round with each executive listing their top 2,3 priorities followed by a progress review on the top 4-6 metrics, then a real-time agenda is set based on what the team leader (CEO) and team feel are the most important topics to discuss.
3. The Monthly and Ad-hoc strategic meetings
These will run for about 2 hours per issue (yes, you read that right). They are planed so that the correct and necessary information is available. They involve open ended debate and use a parking lot to avoid distractions. Everyone’s job is to stir active debate, not avoiding conflicting thought, but stoking it with with common goal of arriving at the best outcome.
4. The Quarterly Offsite
This should avoid typical boondoggle location (maybe best held just down the road) and should focus on the key issues the business is facing. Lencioni’s list includes: A. A comprehensive strategy review B. A (executive staff) team review C. A personnel review and D. A. competitive and industry review.
So there is an inadequate review, but how am I going to use it an an inner-city / urban church with a few staff members and a couple hundred congregation members?
1. Continue my focus on weekly one-on-one meeting with nearly all of the staff. This is sufficient for now for keeping the organisation in step with priorities and maintaining relationships.
2. Monthly focus meetings.
2a. On the first tuesday of the month we have our “all-staff meeting”. This allows us to have our part-time and volunteer staff members join us and share with us what they have been upto and what they hope for and need from the full-time staff to succeed.
2b and c. On the second and third Tuesdays we have our AM services and PM service focus meeting respectively. This allows our specific situation (one morning congregation and one evening congregation) to each have their day in court. We ask questions that specifically deal with their interests and think in those meetings about them alone.
2.d. I currently use the fourth Tuesday of the month to have an update meeting with our founding pastor. This is my opportunity to make sure the church direction is inline with his expectations and hopes.
2e. The fifth Tuesday only happens quarterly, and it’s my wildcard, open to use as I need.
3. Weekly people issues meeting: Every week for 30 minutes the core pastors meeting to discuss what needs are going on in our congregation. From prayer to visitation, from discipline to assimilation, we discuss how to best serve our people, every week.
4. I’m considering (but haven’t started) a semi-annual offsite. This would include (at this point):
4a. Vision building: This would be time discussing and planning specific implementation details of our vision statement. We have plenty of holes that need strategic thought to fill and this time might allow us to consider what big, hairy goal we are going to tackle in the next six months.
4b. Grading ourselves and prioritizing wins and loses. This might be as direct as we can be at this point in terms of evaluationl
4c. Volunteer Review: Two purposes, to understand the breadth of our volunteer-run ministry and understand how we can encourage and develop them.
4d. Church review (aka. industry review) and best practices. How can we learn from the broader Church context? How can we leverage others’ learning and expertise for the advancement of what God has called us to?
In summary, Patrick Lencioni’s “Death by Meeting” was helpful to me as his other books have been. I’ve rethought my meeting structure and decided that meeting quality is critical in organizational health. I’ve been challenged to re-think how we run our meetings.
