How often do you sit in a team meeting at church and feel bored or like you are wasting your time?
The CrashCourse video below is 10 minutes of great tips and suggestions regarding team meetings. And it got me to thinking about all the teams one can find in a church, from the church-tech team to the door-greeter team, and there are all sorts of other places in the church where these tips could come in handy.
So in short: Be like the Avengers.
No, in all seriousness let me help to apply these main points in more of a church setting.
Firstly, meetings are held because of an end-goal whether that be something like getting ready for Vacation Bible School a.k.a. VBS, or something like a routine children’s church team meeting. And like the video above stated, the goal or goals, should be very clear to everyone on the team. For example, everyone on the children’s church team from the Sunday School teachers to those in charge of providing the snacks for the Sunday School teachers’ classes should know what the goals are. Just like the video stated, those goals should be SMART:
Specific
Measurable
Ambitious
Realistic
Timely
1. Only plan team meetings when absolutely necessary.
How many times do people have unnecessary team meetings? Too many.
With the praise and worship team and sound team excluded, there aren’t many teams that necessarily need to meet every week or even every three weeks.
Many church team meetings happen too frequently with little reason to do so. Sometimes they become a habit, while other times teams believe meetings will get things done, and this is true in theory.
Meetings can be purposeful, effective and productive. It’s easy to think that meetings will get things done, but that can only happen if they are being done correctly. (Click to Tweet)
Evaluating when your team meetings are necessary is a great first step to doing meetings the right way.
2. Managing work effectively will keep your meeting time low.
The other big problem with team meetings is that they are time-consuming and if there is little to show for all of them, then they become not only time-consuming but time-wasting.
Following some of the tips in the video above about getting organized and realizing what work should and could be done before or after meetings, will not only give the meetings meaning but also shorten the length of them, and help them to be more effective.
The shorter the meeting, the more people will be able to come to them.
3. Don’t brainstorm as a team.
This is one of the things that can make meetings long and in the end unnecessary; just because brainstorming is happening doesn’t mean it’s serving a purpose.
If every one of the team members can each brainstorm separately taking the time that they need to have clear, concise thoughts at the meeting then this can allow for more organized brainstorming, which is more productive.
This can then, in turn, give every person at the meeting a chance to share their well-thought-out ideas and make sure everyone is being heard.
What are some other things that you would add? Have you tried any of these things? Did they help?
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