Lead Team Meetings (Part 1) | Maximizing Your Lead Team Agenda
FIRST, START WITH A ROTATING STRATEGIC ITEM
Leadership meetings can be crucial to managing the week-to-week activities of the church, and therefore, it can seem difficult to make time for long-term thinking. However, as the senior leaders of the organization, it is important to find a way to do both.
By allocating leadership agenda time intentionally, you can assign time for strategic conversations and more immediate decisions and needs. Below is a potential framework for spending the first portion of the lead team meeting on one of four strategic topics. For each meeting, you can rotate the opening agenda item to the next topic. If you meet weekly, you will cover each of these topics once per month.
WEEK 1 | METRICS MANAGEMENT
Build a basic report so that you can review and discuss the metrics that give an overall picture of your organization. Examples include:
01 | Ministry Engagement to understand how the congregation is responding to discipleship activities.
Weekend experience attendance
Steps such as salvation and baptism
Kids and student ministries
Guest and volunteer assimilation
Volunteer and leader participation
Small group member and leader participation
02 | Staff Engagement to understand if our vision and culture are translating through the team.
Staff retention and engagement
Staff on-boarding and exit interview themes
03 | Operational Health to understand if we are managing our resources in alignment with our vision and according to our capacity.
Financial activity compared to budget and prior year
Stewardship development
Expense management
WEEK 2 | CALENDAR LOOK AHEAD
For the next year, plot the weekly, monthly, and annual time commitments of your organization in a calendar or other tool that you can regularly review together. Examples include sermon series, youth activities, camps, conferences, group semester launches and other events.
01 | Evaluate the weight of your calendar commitments, and take into consideration the work required for each activity or event.
02 | Look ahead one, three and six months to discuss at a high level the vision for each activity, the resources generally needed, and the departments that will lead the execution.
WEEK 3 | LEADER PIPELINE
One of the most important factors for healthy growth is having well-developed leaders ready to deploy. Take time to discuss your current and future talent needs, people who are being actively developed, opportunities to grow them in their leadership, and ways to celebrate leader development.
01 | Understand your current staff vacancies and needs, making sure the profiles of these roles are well defined so that candidates can be identified.
02 | Project hires expected in the future related to growth or new innovations, and discuss the skills, knowledge and abilities that will be required.
03 | Discuss the progress of staff member development, identifying new experiences and teaching content could help prepare them for future roles.
04 | Quantify volunteer leader needs in order to have healthy teams for weekends, events, and other ministries.
WEEK 4 | STRATEGIC GOALS
Outline your organizational priorities for the next 1-3 years (if you need help with this, click here to see our resource on planning), and check in monthly on how you are progressing. For each of your strategic goals, ask the person leading each initiative the following questions:
01 | What steps have you taken since we last discussed this goal?
02 | What are your next steps?
03 | How can we celebrate your progress (acknowledge a team member, etc)
04 | How can we help your team?
05 | What do we need to communicate about this work?
SECOND, SHIFT TO THE SHORT TERM
Use the remainder of your agenda to discuss more immediate needs, new topics that need consideration, and questions that need to be addressed. You will likely find that the short term items need less of your lead team meeting because you have managed your metrics, calendar, leader development and strategic priorities proactively.
Having trouble staying on task and on time in your meetings?
Stay tuned for part 2 of Lead Team Meetings | Effective Meeting Management.
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