International Christian school leaders, how effective are you at leading meetings?

Photo by Marcel Eberle on Unsplash

Leaders, think of 1 meeting you regularly lead. Just 1 meeting—like for the leadership team or for the staff. Got 1 meeting in mind? OK. 

Keeping that meeting in mind, rate the following 11 statements, using the following scale:
Strongly Agree • Agree • Disagree • Strongly Disagree

1. You don’t routinely hear, “I’m really looking forward to our meeting!”
2. Meeting participants see your meeting as an interruption to their work (instead of a key place where they get work done).
3. You don’t use a documented plan for each meeting.
4. You use the meeting to share information (instead of to get genuine interaction).
5. In your meeting, you focus on getting the job done (and not also on getting participants flourishing).
6. Participants in your meeting can’t readily recall the meeting norms. 
7. Compared to when they arrive, participants in your meeting feel similarly or less energized when they leave (instead of feeling more energized).
8. You don’t routinely seek and receive feedback on how effectively you lead your meeting.
9. Your annual evaluation doesn’t address how effective you are as a meeting leader.
10. You don’t have a documented action plan for improving how you lead meetings.
11. You don’t do professional development on how to lead really great meetings.

Note: From my perspective, the more “Strongly Disagree” ratings you have, the better.

Photo by Mapbox on Unsplash

Keeping in mind your ratings for those 11 statements, assess your leadership of that meeting. Be brutally accurate and use following scale:

• Poor
• OK
• Good
• Great (meaning, you should be leading workshops on how to lead great meetings).

Note: Meeting leaders tend to rate their meeting leadership higher than participants do. How might participants in your meeting rate your meeting leadership? Be brutally accurate.

Regardless of how you rated your leadership, there’s always room for improvement! So, what can you do to get better at leading that meeting? What comes to mind for me includes:

• Taking action to improve the rating of 1 item from the assessment, for example, “#6 Participants in your team meetings can’t recall the meeting norms.”
• Collaboratively developing a Get Flourishing Meeting Framework.
• Reading Death by Meeting, Glad We Met, or The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance.

Source

Here are some blog posts related to meetings:

• Leaders, what can you do to ensure your meetings consistently help participants flourish?
• How do you feel about meetings?
• What’s your motive for leading?
• International Christian leaders, what are meetings like at your school?

Bottom line: Take action to become an even better meeting leader! Be the meeting leader people think of when asked, “Who led the best meetings you ever attended?“

Get flourishing!

Michael