Staff Meetings
When is the last time you heard anyone in your association say, “Oh boy, it’s time for staff meeting!” In fact, most people hate staff meetings, but for some reason we treat it like going to the dentist: we hate being there, but we know we’re better off in the long term by going.
It doesn’t have to be that way (at least for staff meetings). It is true that staff meetings serve a purpose in the long term. We need to be aware of what others in the organization are doing. We need to know how what we are doing connects to the organization’s strategy.
But staff meetings do not need to be painful and boring. In fact, with the pressures on association staff to do more with less, we really cannot afford to spend as many as two hours per week wasting time. We need new solutions that allow staff to communicate and act strategically, without boring them to tears.
For example, you can make staff meetings more engaging and focused by distinguishing between big-picture discussions of strategy from the more simple sharing of implementation details. Patrick Lencioni, in his book, Death by Meeting, recommends that “strategic meetings” occur only monthly, cover one or two topics, and require staff to do homework and intense preparation before they convene. In the weekly tactical staff meetings, however, the agenda is created mid-way through the meeting, based on issues identified in the initial go-round. By creating a clearer context for discussion, the meetings can actually be more engaging and productive.
There are also ways to leverage technology in solving this problem. What about creating an internal staff meeting blog? Individuals or department heads can post reports on what they are doing. Other staff can comment with questions and get responses to areas that are specifically relevant to them, skipping over the parts that are not as important. And people can do this on their own time during the week. This way when you do actually convene a meeting, people have more information when they start, and the conversation is more focused and effective.
Those are simply two ideas for changing the way you do staff meetings. You will have to experiment with alternatives. Try them out”â€at least for a month or two”â€and then evaluate their effectiveness as a staff. When people are genuinely excited about coming to the meetings, you will know you have it right.
I like the idea of having a staff blog, and we tried that as well to deal with the more mundane issues (actually, it was more of a wiki). But after some initial use, people forgot to go there, and it fell into disuse. I’m not sure how to get over this hump”â€any suggestions?
That’s a tough one. It certainly is possible that as an experiment, it simply shows you that wikis are not a good way to share information in your specific team (I have no idea if this is true, I am just reinforcing my point that you need to experiment). If people forget to use the online space, then I assume they show up at staff meetings and give the report on what they’re doing. If people are okay with that, then fine. There has to be enough “pain” in the way you’re doing it to get people to do it a new way. Whoever is running the meeting needs to reinforce its importance, model using the tool, and maybe even start putting information on it that people can ONLY get on that tool. That might start creating new habits.
[...] One thing that I know we will be doing with this book is expanding on it. Each of the posts that became the book is like the tip of the iceberg. I know I have already done some expanding. For example, in the book I wrote a piece about doing staff meetings differently. Since then, I took that post and expanded it into an article that was posted onto the Association Forum’s CEOnly section of their web site. The article is a bit longer and includes some quotes from the Executive Director of a membership organization who had made changes to the way she ran staff meetings. That Executive Director and I are now collaborating on a presentation for the upcoming Great Ideas Conference, where we will build on the concept more. [...]