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Staff Meeting Reality
Here are five suggestions to make your next staff meeting more productive and worthwhile.
If I listed the major components of church life, the list would include worship, Word, fellowship, and staff meetings. Staff meetings? While staff meetings are often the weakest link in the church’s quest for survival, they do play an essential role if one wants to win the "Who Wants To Be a Successful Pastor?" sweepstakes.
According to the Barna Research Group, there are more than one-quarter million pastors. Four out of 10 churches have two or more full-time, paid ministry staff (excluding administrative support staff), and the numbers are growing. Where there are two or more pastors, the senior pastor needs a regularly scheduled staff meeting.
While regular staff meetings can at times be contentious, they can also be great tools to improve communication, offer training, and solve problems. This article offers suggestions to help make staff meetings more productive and worthwhile.
Who should attend?
Ask: Who needs to be at the staff meeting? and, Who would benefit by attending? I require each pastoral staff member plus other key members of the leadership team, including the office manager, chief custodian, and financial secretary, to attend.
Nonclergy attend only a portion of the meeting. The custodian does not need to sit in on a discussion of pastoral care issues. But he or she should be present when an upcoming wedding is being discussed.
What should be discussed?
Many staff meetings are conducted with little forethought about content. This wastes time and leads to increased tension and frustration. According to Leadership, almost half of today’s pastors say they are working too hard, working an average of 55 hours a week. The last thing a busy shepherd wants is another waste-of-time, do-nothing meeting.
Every meeting should have a written agenda to keep the meeting focused. This also communicates the leader’s expectations. Some of the recurring items on my staff agenda include:
- corporate prayer.
- the week at a glance.
- mentoring time.
- accountability questions. (see sidebar "Are You Holding Your Staff Accountable?")
- a preview of next Sunday’s services.
- reports from each staff member on his or her area of responsibility.
As a compass is to a sailor, so a well-thought-out agenda is an invaluable tool in guiding the meeting along a predetermined course with a minimal amount of drift.
Each item on the document should merit the necessary time required to discuss it. One of the most important items is the weekly mentoring session. I share for 30 minutes on a key thought from Scripture, a leadership principle, or some relevant issue from the news. This provides continuing education for those who serve with me. A number of profitable ministry ideas have been birthed during these times. After the Columbine High tragedy, my staff and I discussed disaster preparedness. We have since had a Sunday morning fire drill (during Sunday School). We are making sure a number of workers are skilled in CPR, plus we have appointed one of the pastors as the Pastor of Disaster.
Staff meetings are not the place to discipline employees or solve personal grievances. Pastors must guard the agenda to make sure private issues remain private. It is easy to slide into the quagmire of negativism. Discipline must be exercised.
Someone once noted these three steps for an effective meeting: plan, do, and review.
When should the meeting take place?
The time of day for staff meetings is important. Most people concentrate and perform at their best in the morning. By afternoon, especially shortly after lunch, the body is much more predisposed to a nap than a meeting. The ability to work at one’s best is lost. Under such circumstances, a meeting is unlikely to be productive and achieve its goals. I devote 9:15 a.m. to noon each Tuesday for staff meeting.
It is also important to have a set time for the meeting to end. Some experts recommend that staff meetings should not run past an hour. The agenda should have adjourn written somewhere on it.
Where should the meeting be held?
Another consideration is the environment. Is it conducive to a meeting? Important considerations include comfortable seating, proper temperature settings, sufficient lighting, and immediate access to a whiteboard, VCR, an overhead projector, and a computer with PowerPoint. While the room should be large enough to ward off anyone’s claustrophobia, it should also be small enough to provide privacy.
Why have a meeting in the first place?
Meetings can be costly. Every year billions of dollars are spent on employee-training programs. The wages for workers who attend, the expense of office work that is not done while employees are attending the seminar, the cost of any materials used in the seminar, and the expense of snacks and/or beverages can add up.
The pastor who has regular staff meetings should have a predetermined end in mind before placing the event on the master calendar. That end should justify the means. I recommend the following 10 goals for a staff meeting:
- Professional.
- Orderly: Everything in its place; a place for everything.
- Inclusive: Each and every person should be made to feel like an essential part of the team. "We" instead of "I."
- Visionary.
- Continued accountability.
- Enhanced and clarified flow of communication.
- Conflict management: Proactive problem solving keeps problems from getting beyond solving.
- Creative climate for ideas and spiritual strategies.
- Established win-win situation for church leadership.
- Christ glorified.
Staff meetings should be a normal, productive component of church life. This is true of both the small and large church. The communication developed through staff meetings can lead to increased efficiency, sustained growth, and a greater understanding of church business. Including staff in the decisionmaking process can foster a sense of ownership or partnership. It can also alleviate the fear factor as well as the big brother complex that sometimes exists between the senior pastor and those who serve Jesus with him or her.
—Michael D. Jackson, senior pastor, New Life Assembly of God, Janesville, Wisconsin
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