I’m trying something new with how I meet with my team each week. So far it’s been flowing pretty well and I wanted to share it with you in the hopes that it’ll be helpful in how you run your meetings. Here’s how a typical meeting looks right now:

Praise – We start off sharing how we’ve seen God working in our life and area of ministry. I love kicking off our meetings like this because it’s easy to get bogged down with what didn’t/isn’t working. The praise piece helps us to focus on where God is at and why we do what we do.

Prayer – Taking time to do life together by praying for and with each other is crucial in building a healthy spiritual environment for me and my team.

Scoreboard – I’ll talk about this more in a future post, but this is a 1 page document that summarizes the past week of ministry. It helps us to gauge if we’re “winning” as a team and helps us see what changes need to be made going forward.

The Loop - Everyone goes around and shares important updates about their ministry (leadership challenges and changes, programming issues, project updates, etc.).

Week Ahead – After our opening items we take time to discuss what’s going to happen between now and the next time we’re going to meet. We also spend time working on projects that are three to four months out. This helps us to keep our eye on the horizon and maintain a high quality of excellence in the day-to-day stuff.

Open Floor – Depending on how much time we have left I’ll open the floor for discussion on anything else that is on the team’s mind. Usually these are pretty quick discussions that only take a minute or two. If it’s anything longer than that we’ll set-up a time to talk about it later in the week or put it on next week’s agenda.

Right now we have these meetings every Tuesday morning at 11am for about an hour. On the first Tuesday of the month we’ll throw out the above agenda and talk about a book that we’re reading (right now we’re going through Outlive Your Life). Afterwards we’ll all go out to lunch just to hang out and have fun.

Here’s a few other resources that have helped me to make my meetings meaningful:

This short video I posted a few months ago
This series of posts by Michael Hyatt
This series of posts by Dan Scott
Death By Meeting by Patrick Lencioni
Chapter 18 in Leadership Gold by John Maxwell

So now I’d love to hear from you: What meeting horror stories have you lived through? What tips do you have about meetings? Feel free to post your comments below.

–Jeff