Making meetings work
Reviewing your meetings
MEETINGS! For many people the idea of a church business meeting brings about a fair amount of despair. They are often not happy occasions: they can be dull, bad tempered or just plain frustrating. Some waste time with trivial business, others are filled with trivial discussion on legitimate items. They often involve a great deal of people-time for surprisingly little output.
But good meetings, when they take place, can be a real joy with a sense of purpose, of working together and with positive outcomes. Official gatherings of a Church Council, Kirk Session, Diaconate, Select Vestry, Trustees, Finance Team, or whatever should be positive, effective, Christ-centred, enjoyable occasions. It’s worth studying the subject and seeking to make church business meetings work well. The idea of this series is to move beyond the basics to think about some new ways of creating effective business gatherings.
In this fifth article I give some practical ideas for how to review how your meetings go and so improve them. If you want to have better meetings you can do much by learning from your present ones. You may well find that it is more instructive to learn from what you are doing now than reading books (or too many articles like this one for that matter!) that cannot relate directly to your business and your people. There are all sorts of ways in which you can review your group or your meetings, ranging from formal appraisals to quick checks, from whole group involvement to one person on their own. Here are five possible ideas:
1. The life of the group 2. Each meeting 3. One item of business 4. Chairing performance 5. One feature of your meetings.
In all these cases you are seeking to improve the way you run your meetings so that the group becomes more effective in achieving its purpose.
In each of the cases apart from No. 2, you may want to make this a special exercise (even a special meeting!), or a session just for a small executive sub-group, or the chair with an appraiser.
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1: Review the life of the group
You may want the whole group to do this at one of their meetings or at a special meeting or, if that is too awkward, it may be better done by an executive sub-group such as a Standing Committee. It is obviously something you don’t need to do too often.
It will be helpful to have the challenge of an external facilitator. If you don’t you will need to think carefully as to who leads the session. If you do this yourselves you need to ensure you don’t sidestep uncomfortable issues or let one or two members dominate. It would be a pity if the exercise simply copied the short-comings of the group as a whole.
This will only be really helpful if you have settled on what the purposes of this group and its meetings are and whether you are trying to form the group into a team (see earlier item in this MEN series). Without foundations like these you have no criteria to enable you to review at all.
In this and all the sample questions that follow, the idea is to use the questions as a discussion framework. But you might instead want to have a multiple choice pro forma so that people tick one option for each question and then have space for reasons or comments. That enables everyone to have an equal say into the process but then needs someone to analyse the findings – and it can over-formalise the whole exercise.
1. To what extent are we fulfilling our agreed group purpose and are we all aware of what this is?
2. What changes do we need to make either in
JOHN Truscott continues his series on what may for you be new ideas to ensure that church business meetings are effective. This will be relevant for Ministers, office-holders, and all members of councils and planning groups. The previous articles have covered the idea of an agenda for a whole year, balancing out the tenses of past, present and future, playing like a team, and keeping numbers small. In this fifth article John recommends the concept of reviewing your meetings and learning from this.
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