Meetings - Information or decisions
Most people say they attend too many meetings. That may or may not be true, it depends on the type, and what for, of the meetings. A lot of people conduct and are forced to participate in lousy meetings. But effective and efficient meetings are a necessary and important part of a church or business leader’s life. Here are my thoughts about meetings.
I highly recommend that anyone who aspires to be a leader take a course and become skillful at facilitating meetings. I believe that most complaints about meetings stem from poor facilitation skills rather than from subject matter.
Often decision making meetings are called without adequate opportunity for people to think through the topic and determine their point of view. Try to communicate the information and objective ahead of time and only have the meeting to decide something.
Don’t underestimate the benefit of processing some types of information together. In some cases it is necessary for active explanation and exploration of ideas to form an opinion. In fact it is one of the important ways that we learn.
Turn off the cell phone. Tell people not to call you during your regularly scheduled meetings. If they can’t make a decision without you during that time, Then don’t go to the meeting, you are obviously too important to what’s going on to leave and attend a meeting.
One thing that bugs me the most is side conversations in meetings. They are a bigger distraction than you might think and are rude to the speaker. They send the message that what you are talking about is more important than what the main speaker is saying.
The connect time before and after meetings is an important bonus for networking and feedback.
