The Church Staff Meeting Blueprint | Ep 35

If you want to grow your leadership, build a more aligned staff culture, and create systems that help your church scale without chaos, learn more about the Ready Set Grow Mastermind: https://www.readysetgrowchurch.com/mastermind

Most church staff meetings aren’t intentionally designed.

They become catch-all conversations that drain energy, waste time, and create more confusion instead of clarity.

In this episode, Mark, Scott, and Hunter break down a practical blueprint for building staff meetings that actually move your church forward. They unpack how healthy meetings create alignment, accountability, leadership development, and stronger team culture—without becoming endless discussions that frustrate everyone in the room.

This conversation covers how to structure meetings with clear purpose, how to keep teams focused on what matters most, and why the right meeting rhythm can completely change the health of your organization.

Inside:

• Why most church staff meetings fail
• The difference between leading and facilitating a meeting
• How to create accountability without micromanaging
• The “Start, Stop, Scale” framework for improving Sundays
• Why team check-ins build healthier culture
• How great meetings reinforce vision and execution

Healthy churches are built through healthy leadership systems.

Transcript

Why most staff meetings feel ineffective

SPEAKER_03 0:11

Hello my friends and welcome to the Ready Step Grow Podcast. I am your host, Mark Brewer, and I've got my friends Scott and Hunter Wilson. One of the things that we've recognized is a super big time waster in churches is ineffective meetings. And there's a meeting that really all of us have, and it's called a staff meeting.

SPEAKER_02 0:29

Yeah. No matter what size of church, you know, you're you're gonna have some kind of staff meeting, whether it's volunteers or paid or whatever. And this talk about the coaching call. We just had the coaching call and we asked, hey guys, how if you're, you know, how would you rate your staff meeting red, yellow, green, red being this is bad, everybody hates it, you know, yellow, it's good sometimes.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

The red was like, if there's any way this meeting can be skipped, I would be so happy, right?

SPEAKER_02 0:56

And it may not be the pastor, but it may be other people saying that. But these we were asking lead pastors. And and what was funny is the majority of them gave it a yellow or a red. There weren't a whole lot of greens, which means that they're saying, I'm hearing feedback that maybe we could be more effective in the meeting. I just don't know how to do it. Because let's be honest, growing up, I only had one pastor, that was my dad, and I was on his staff from 17 till I was 30. And so the only staff meeting experience I knew is what I had from him. And so I knew sometimes, like, this is so frustrating because I'm having to sit here for 30 minutes while he's talking to somebody he's frustrated with at the work. Okay, let's talk about the youth. And he'd hit mine. Okay, thank you.

SPEAKER_03 1:40

I could actually go three or four hours.

SPEAKER_02 1:42

Yeah. And you'd sit there just going, like, golly, this is terrible. Yeah. And yeah, even the time he wanted to teach us Spanish because we needed to be able to connect with people in the community. So that became a component of the staff meeting.

SPEAKER_03 1:55

But he was doing he was doing what had been modeled, yes, and we were recognizing uh, there may be a different way to build out a staff meeting.

SPEAKER_02 2:03

Yeah, and so those guys were going, I don't know that it's the most effective. Could you and we said, okay, let's talk about it.

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Yeah, I think uh what happens is kind of like what you guys are saying is most meetings

The problem with “catch-all” meetings

SPEAKER_00 2:13

aren't designed with intentionality. They're executed from what was modeled to them. Yeah. And what was modeled to them is an all-staff meeting is a catch-all for anything I want to have happen. Well, as a lead pastor. And the catch-all can be we're doing Spanish. We are talking about every department's projects I want them to start this week. I saw something on Sunday I didn't like. It could be evaluation, it could be uh kickoff meetings to projects, it could be Spanish. What I think it was what you were saying. Y'all lost me there. See, y'all learned some Spanish. I didn't know. I don't even know if I said it.

SPEAKER_03 2:47

I don't know if we learned it, but yes. Anyway, yeah, so it becomes a catch-up. It's a giant bucket that doesn't have specificity. There's not a plan, there's not a strategy.

SPEAKER_00 2:55

Yeah. So what we teach with any meeting that you do, but especially the all-staff meeting, because ever that's something that we want to have happen uh on a weekly basis.

SPEAKER_03 3:03

Let me make sure I'm clear on this, because sometimes I think people get a little they may misunderstand all staff. When you're saying all staff, you're saying whoever the whoever the department leaders are, whether it's uh you know, whether it's paid or not paid, but these are kind of the department leaders, pastors, not necessarily all the administrative personnel, all the finance people, if you have a larger church.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

Yeah, I think when it comes to uh staff, we really mean team. And team is there's a lot of meetings to team, even dream team, right? In dream team, I'm really talking about I'm separating the people that show up on Sundays to hold open the doors. I'm not talking about those people. I'm talking about God has called our church to accomplish a vision that we want to see happen this year. Who's working behind the scenes, even if they're in real estate and they're volunteering as our youth pastor right now? It's behind the scenes people that are working during the week to make the vision happen come to reality. Whether they're paid or they're volunteer, they're on the team. And so this meeting is where we want to get into alignment as an organization. So what we teach our pastors that we work with, the clients that we work with, is every meeting should have a purpose to it. Any repeating meeting needs to have a clear purpose. Okay. And that purpose is the first place to start when it comes to the all-staff

Defining the purpose of your staff meeting

SPEAKER_00 4:22

meeting. What I like to have is the purpose. And again, this is going to be subjective to whatever you want the purpose to be, because the elements or the agenda to the meeting are really the Lego blocks that you're building up to accomplish the purpose of whatever you want the purpose to be. Right. So inside of this, I like to say that the purpose of this meeting, of the all-staff meeting, is to align the team around what matters most. And then also drive execution forward together. So what this means is I want to align the team of the vision and remind everybody. A lot of people don't need to hear new things that need to be reminded of what matters most. Yes. Right. And then drive execution forward together is really about holding people accountable. So this is my uh catch, my organizational meeting catch to make sure that what we said we were gonna do is actually getting worked on. Right. So that I don't have to have hallway conversations to micromanage people and be like, so how's that thing going? How's that project? Anytime I'm worried about it, I can do a check-in once a week during this meeting to make sure that we're moving things forward. Yep.

SPEAKER_02 5:28

Okay, I can buy for buy into that's the purpose of my staff meeting. I got it. I want to align everybody, drive it forward, have the accountability. I know what's going on. Do it.

SPEAKER_00 5:37

So the elements, if you're gonna build Lego blocks, it's gonna feel like art, but is built like Legos, is these are the elements that I would want included if I'm trying to accomplish that agenda. And we can talk about this as long as you want to. Is um I would start with a P3, and then I would end with the team check-in, and then everything else in the middle can kind of go in whatever order you want to go in. So when we're talking about P3, we're talking about prayer. Yeah, so I'll start with that in a second. But in inside of this, this agenda all adds up to uh it's it's roughly like a 62-minute meeting, but you can balloon this up or balloon this down to whatever you want. Okay. So if you want a 90-minute meeting, you can balloon some of these sections up. If you want it to be a 30-minute meeting, you can balloon them down.

SPEAKER_03 6:21

So the great thing about this is you have all of these components, it's somewhat of a buffet. Yeah. You want to have a couple that are that are always there, but then it's a menu that you can add in and you can also determine the portion of what you're adding in.

SPEAKER_00 6:37

Uh of time. And so in this, what I like to do and what I teach in any repeating meeting. So, first of all, the repeating meeting needs to have a clear purpose because how do I know if a meeting's good if I don't know what we're trying to accomplish? Right. The second portion is we want to have uh repeating headers in the agenda. So the headers stay the same, but the bullet points change every week. Let me show you what I mean. So inside of this, we'll always do announcements. The header stays the same, but what those announcements are this week, the four announcements, could change every week. We're always gonna do a team teaching, but the team teaching is gonna change every week. We're always gonna look at the mission metrics, but it changes every week. Okay, see what I'm saying? Yeah, it needs to have an agenda where the headings stay the same, but the bullet points change every week. So let's go inside of this. And and dad, I want to cue you up in this, is we start with 10

What P3 prayer looks like in practice

SPEAKER_00 7:28

minutes on the P3. Can you explain that?

SPEAKER_02 7:30

Yeah, so it's praying in the spirit, praying with uh understanding, and then praying in agreement. And what we're talking about when we're saying that is that we're praying, and and we have whole courses on this, I've got a book on this, all of that. But when we're saying pray in the spirit, if you're charismatic or that type of deal, then it could be praying in tongues or doing this, but it could just be that you're praying in the spirit, just saying, okay, God, I'm really praying that we want to hear from you. Then you're listening, and that's where you're praying with understanding. You're receiving from the Lord what is he saying, and then there's going to come a time that, hey, what what did you hear from the Lord? At any what did you guys hear? And somebody's writing it down, and then we read that back and we come into agreement with it. Yep, and it's a pretty powerful deal that's a good idea.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

Yeah, we could definitely do a whole episode on the P3 stuff, but basically what we're wanting to do is not just more than in the agenda. Yes, we're not trying to open the agenda in prayer and just be like, God bless this time. Amen. All right, here's the bullet points. It's basically we want to carve out time to hear from God and document what we feel like the Lord is impressing on our hearts and sharing it as a collective, as a team.

SPEAKER_02 8:36

Two things that are happening here is we're reminding ourselves by this practice that we are not the head of the church. He's the head of the church. And so we're listening to what he is saying. Secondly, it's that we're not doing this individually, we're doing it corporately. We all hear from the Lord and we're bringing it together to go full.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

And I would say this is a portion to remind ourselves of we want to stay in the pocket. Yes. Can you talk about that? Like stay in the sweet spot. Like we don't exist where God's like, God bless our plans, bless our We're not trying to get it where, hey, here's my vision.

SPEAKER_02 9:06

So now we're praying, begging God to get on our team. Yes. No, we're his team. Uh, you know, I don't uh I God doesn't exist to help me accomplish what I want. I exist to accomplish what he wants. And so when I hear from him, we're listening to him, then when we come into agreement with that and move forward, then we already know it's blessed, it's empowered. And so we want to stay right in that will of God.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

Stay in the pocket. Stay in the pocket. So we start with P3, we do that every single week. Then we move to the staff values. So we talked about staff values before. Staff is just anybody that's on the team. We just talked about that. And so, what I want to do is remind ourselves of the behavior that we need to accomplish the vision. What are the characteristics necessary for our team to accomplish the vision? So the staff values is something that aren't what the church, what we believe or what we care about. So, like, think about like uh a sports team saying, like, look, guys, this is what is most important. We gotta uh lock things down on defense right now. Like, we cannot get sloppy in the ball, you know, like what are the characteristics? What are the things we need to focus on right now? So, like some of the values that are important to us right now is man, we gotta be as simple as possible. We gotta be as automated as possible. We just launched a new product for us where we could have a hundred people sign up in a weekend, and it it can't be a manual process to get them onboarded. It has to be automated where people can.

SPEAKER_03 10:39

Well, what I like that you've done a lot of times in our meetings together, we all know these, but we make sure that they show up in written form in the agenda. Yeah. Okay. And then I like how a lot of times you'll say, Hey, Mark, what's what's one of our staff values? And I'll say, Hey, be as simple as possible. But you'll ask for an explanation or an example that we're doing.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

Yeah. So I would just go around in a circle during our staff meeting. So again, it's only five minutes. I'm not looking for long. I would either do one of two things. One is me as a leader, I'm gonna read through as like, hey guys, you remember in this season, we need to be as simple as possible, as automated as possible, as relational as possible. We need to be storytellers, we need to be data driven, you know? Yeah. And I would say, uh, you know what was awesome this week? Mark just did a great example of simple as possible when he made this decision in this meeting. So I'm gonna try to call out people.

SPEAKER_02 11:31

What gets celebrated gets done. And so you're honoring people, but that's also saying, oh, that's how we win around here.

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Yeah. So I think a great representation of that was Mark in this meeting. I love how you blah, blah, blah. That's such a great representation of simple as possible. Okay. That's one hand, but I think that can get a little Charlie Brown uh teacher type of thing. And and so inside of that, what I want to do is I want you to say it with your words, what you think this means. So they'll be like, uh, so we go around this circle. Mark, I'll start with you. Emily, let's go to you next. Laura, we'll go to you next and set read it out and say, why is that important to us right now in this season?

SPEAKER_01 12:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

So staff values, super important. We talked about it for five minutes on this podcast, but

The leadership development role of meetings

SPEAKER_00 12:15

it usually only takes five minutes. It's a reminder of what are the characteristics. Now we go to the team teaching. And the team teaching's here for the leadership development. Can you talk about this? Because I thought it was something that was really important for you to for people to hear dad's heart.

SPEAKER_03 12:29

Yeah, because uh you have always been, it's really it's we're living in this reality. You have always had a foot in the local ministry of what God was asking us to do as a local church, and a foot in the global ministry of what God was asking you to do as a visionary leader in pouring into other pastors and leaders. So that meant that we had to set up a system that could accommodate that. You're being out, you're being here, you're being out. Part of that was we needed to make sure that on that all-staff meeting, which was likely the most important meeting that we would have every single week, you were always there, and we had a spot where you could share your heart. You could share what God had been speaking to you, you could share something that you had been seeing in the scripture to connect heart to heart because most of the management, day-to-day stuff I was doing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:20

So I think what's important on this is that I missed this for a season in the church where I thought, hey, I can delegate to you not only the management, but uh to even kind of the visionary part and where maybe I don't even have to come, you know, at times or whatever. You weren't trying to slip it off. Well, it was also it was a confidence, but it was also a type of deal like I felt like it was empowering you to do that. And yet what happened is there was a vision drift, not because you weren't in the vision, it's just you're trying to say what's in my heart, and really it needs to be that the visionary part needs to come from me. I can't delegate the vision casting.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Yeah. And I think inside of this, this is not a team teaching to add new ideas mid-cycle. No. This is a place to reinforce with metaphor, with uh story, with uh a teaching that is doubling down on what we're committing to for this.

SPEAKER_02 14:18

But it it may be, it may even just be like, how can I help you grow spiritually, relationally, in your personhood, in your family? How can I help you be a better leader? How can I help you with the way you're thinking? All of these, it's it's about helping them. Yeah. And it could, if it's talking about vision stuff, then it's about the vision of what we're doing.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Well, we've already committed to, just don't make this a place to where you're uh whiplashing people mid-cycle. Yeah. All right, so the team teaching is 10 minutes. Again, we're going through a visual on the iPad. We're gonna try to talk it through, but if you want to look at this, you can watch this episode on YouTube as well. Okay, next up is every week we are gonna review

The “Start, Stop, Scale” Sunday review process

SPEAKER_00 14:55

the past Sunday, and we call this the Start, Stop, and Scale. So, Start, Stop, and Scale is looking at um our friends at Intentional Churches who are awesome, Bart and Doug, um, they're amazing. They have this tool called the 15 links, which is basically from the one's perspective, like the one in the 99, the lost person's perspective, when they're encountering your church for the first time, they're walking through an experience beyond the service. Yeah. So it's like, hey, how'd that go for the lost person? They're not just thinking about the message, they're not just thinking about the worship, they're thinking about the entirety of the experience, right? So this could be from the parking lot all the way to that time they pick up their kids and they're pulling out of the parking lot. And are they getting stuck in like five o'clock traffic, getting out of your parking lot and it takes them an hour? Um, inside of this, we want to look at the whole totality of the experience. And we want to start thinking about how can we make every Sunday better? Yep. That's what I think this really is how can we make every Sunday better? So start, stop, and scale really stand for what are the things that we're not doing that we should start doing. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 16:00

What I love about this too, though, uh Hunter, you talked about this. You can shrink or balloon this as needed, but right now you've got 10 minutes set up there. This is not a place to go fix everything and all the history of human.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

This is your growth plan, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:16

This is a this is a thing to we've got a short window here to surface some things that are top of mind on start-stop scale. And we need to recognize there are parameters here. This isn't an unlimited discussion, and I would think that we would have to be careful to protect that.

SPEAKER_00 16:31

Yeah, I think so. I think this is a place to capture, and uh, and a lot of times you're just gonna add these ideas to the ideas list uh that we're gonna bring up at the uh in the cooldown for the planning for the next slide.

SPEAKER_02 16:42

Because I get start is hey, I see we we need to probably do something here because this is a problem, we need to fix this. Stop or stop.

SPEAKER_00 16:48

Stop is twofold because these are things that we're doing that we should stop completely or we should trim back on. So we shouldn't do as frequently as big as a time, talent, and treasure spent on this. Yeah, we should do less of or complete it completely or eliminate it completely. Scale is thinking about what are the things that are going right that we should amplify. So, what are the things that people love? What are the things that are going right? What are the things that are working? Um, we shouldn't just try to fix the little potholes, we should double down on the areas that are actually going well.

SPEAKER_02 17:24

Yeah, like when y'all say, Man, you preach really good. Could you go longer?

SPEAKER_03 17:28

Kinda. Yeah. So I think the idea here is amplifying the things that are going well, but also the scale embraces this idea of uh we have an assumption that we're going to grow in the number of people that we're ministering to, the number of rooms that are gonna be open, the number of buildings and services. And so if this thing's going well, how can we continue to scale it for the next season? Yeah, as it grows.

SPEAKER_00 17:53

So, in this, I think one of the best ways to do this is please don't come to this portion of the meeting with um, I'm gonna remember all the things that happened on Sunday, right? What we teach all of our clients is that you need to have uh, you could do it on a pen and paper, you could do it on your Apple notes, you could do it on whatever you want to write things down with, is you have these 15 links in your folder in a in a notes app, right? And you are writing down during the Sunday experience as you go, you're not gonna remember when you think about like, oh man, the people are waiting like 25 minutes and showing up like 30 minutes late to service because our coffee shop line is so long. You're not gonna remember that stuff, right? The little details of like, oh, that volunteer did something really weird. We need to talk to them about that. Yeah, like all that kind of stuff. Write it down as you go and then you bring it to the meeting. So you're not coming out with like, hmm, let me think about things I need to start, stop, and scale. You're coming ready.

SPEAKER_03 18:55

Yeah, you've already created uh your list. All right, what's next?

SPEAKER_00 18:58

All right, 10 minutes doesn't mean that we wrote because we wrote it down, doesn't mean that we're greenlighting it and saying go. We're just capturing it so we can always be thinking about how we can make Sunday better. Next up is our mission metrics. The mission metrics is basically saying, what is the mission

Using mission metrics to track growth

SPEAKER_00 19:14

that we're pursuing this year? What are our annual goals that we're pursuing? And what metrics are those? What metrics are the mission for this year, right? So we might have like five things that we want to see like a 26% increase in. I say 26 because we try to teach our churches that we want to help you double in three years. If you want to double a metric, so like you're at a church of 200 and you want to get to 400 in three years, you want to grow by 26% year over year for three years, and then you'll hit double. So, what are the metrics that we're pursuing in this season and how are we doing on this red, yellow, or green? Are we on track? Are we behind? Are we totally off? And this again is not a time to fix it. It's just a time to realize where we're at. So we're checking the trend lines of red, yellow, or green. Is this on track or off-track?

SPEAKER_02 20:03

What are some mission metric that we might be doing a church might be doing?

SPEAKER_00 20:08

So I think you could do uh salvations, you could do baptisms. A lot of people are looking at we want to double the baptisms in three years. Like, great, I think that's awesome. Uh uh total weekend attendance, first-time guest.

SPEAKER_04 20:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:23

Um, it could be a number of things um inside of this, but those are some common ones that we see people want to attend. And what I think you really are looking for here is what is the uh first domino that if we focus on this, it has a ripple effect in multiple areas.

SPEAKER_03 20:38

Those are decision-making metrics where if that thing's green, what would be a good thing? A lot of other things are gonna be out there.

SPEAKER_02 20:44

It could be like growth track. Like we know if we can get them to growth track, we're our our chances of them staying in the church is more. So you you want to choose those things. Like for us, it was like baptism a year later. 80% of the people who got baptized in our church were still

The “Going, Going, Gone” follow-up system

SPEAKER_02 20:59

in the church a year later.

SPEAKER_00 21:00

Yep. Okay, next up is the going, going, gone list. So this is really uh getting a data report that we are querying, querying, we're doing a query. We're doing a query from our database. Yes. And basically it is a filtered search to say what are the list of people that have been gone for more than six weeks, right? And they are, are they going? They're going. Okay, they're gone. We don't want to make sure that we find out a history lesson of like, hey, you know, Bill and Susan haven't been here six months.

SPEAKER_02 21:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:30

It's like, what are you talking about?

SPEAKER_02 21:32

Right? And then people leave and then they tell people, I've been gone six months, they haven't even called, they haven't done anything, they don't even know.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

So what we look for in this going, go and gone list is in the ways that people make themselves known in our organization. So this could be like they check in kids. They're kids. This could be that they check in because they're serving and they're volunteering with us. This could be that they check in and make themselves known by uh an offering and they A gift, right? Signed up for an event. This could be an event that they signed up for. Uh, this could some people even do this during small groups that they give a tendency report from a small group. Um, it is any way that they have make themselves known. And so what you're doing in this query search is basically saying, so this could be like planning sitter. We used to use Fellowship One back in the day. Um, there's a lot of ways to do this. I think The Rock does this as well. Um, all these different views are basically saying if somebody hasn't we're doing a filtered search for saying if this person right here hasn't done one of these things in six weeks. In six weeks, they come on this that name is gonna show up on this list. We're gonna print that out and we're gonna bring it to the all-staff meeting.

SPEAKER_03 22:42

Yeah, just real simply, what we would do is just go through the list of names, and oftentimes we would find, hey, no, I just talked with Bob last week. He's good. We went and had breakfast, and and so it helps us.

SPEAKER_00 22:53

Wait, wait, wait. Bob's not out of this. He um he volunteered with me on Sunday. It's like, oh, I guess he forgot to check in. Yeah. It's like, okay, cool. So they're here.

SPEAKER_03 23:01

It was a it was a proving document to help us illustrate that we were pastoring well instead of just living under the illusion that everything is okay. And so we said, hey, we're gonna know who the sheep are, where the sheep are, and what the sheep need at all times as good pastors do.

SPEAKER_00 23:17

So going, going, gone isn't a time, it's a time to assign assignments to people that are most closely related to that person, meaning like I have friendship with them, I know them, they volunteer with me, whatever, and we're gonna check in with them. But I'd love for you guys to talk about like when you are doing a check-in follow-up with them, is it like, so why haven't you done one of these things?

SPEAKER_02 23:37

Like so that's what I was saying is the first thing we're doing is we got the list together. Okay. Now we're going through the list and said, hey, no, I think everything's good here. But even if it is good that they were there, they haven't been giving, and that may be a change of pattern, or there's so there may be something financial going on, whatever. I'm not talking about just the giving, it could be they lost their job or whatever. So here's the way that I always talk we talked about it like Hunter, they're in your small group, or Hunter, you know them, or whatever, or Mark, you do, and they'll you we'll we'll kind of go take it. Now, not everybody is that way because some people may be more like none of us really know them well like that. So then we would make those assignments.

SPEAKER_00 24:15

Yeah, but we would always with our connections team, it's the default that they are gonna follow up with everybody on the list. But if we have relationships, if somebody has a relationship, the best way to follow up with the person that's closely a more natural relation uh connection.

SPEAKER_02 24:30

But when we're following up, I d I I'd never wanted anybody to call and say, hey, it seems like you've really disengaged. No, I noticed you hadn't been checking in anymore. Why aren't you tithing anymore? I mean, it's not that. It's not check-in like we're checking up on you. We're checking in to say, can we serve you? So it's basically going, hey man, I was just thinking about you. How are you doing? Yeah, how's things going, man? Just wanted to see how you're doing, thinking about you today, praying for you. Yeah, and I would pray with you if you're gonna be able to do that.

SPEAKER_03 24:55

If I had people on my list, this is just how I had to deal with it in my heart. I would take that name and I would spend some minutes praying.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Yep.

SPEAKER_03 25:03

I'd just be praying. Oftentimes God would give me a scripture verse or he might give me a word of encouragement. Yep. So then when I'm calling that person, I'm saying, hey Bob, man, this is this is Mark Brewer. And he, especially if I didn't know him that well, but I knew them and they knew me. Hey, I just want you to know sometimes we're just praying for people in our church this morning. I was praying for you, and I thought, I need to just not pray for Bob, I need to give him a call. How are things? And then we'd start a conversation and it often immediately being a good idea.

SPEAKER_00 25:30

I think the two best things you need is I wouldn't write a script that you're reading, but I would have two things ready uh for somebody is what's your opening line, basically, and what's your reason for calling. Yeah. If you can have those nailed down, everything else becomes relational. Sure.

SPEAKER_01 25:46

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 25:47

All right, so the going, going, gone is where we're creating those assignments.

SPEAKER_02 25:50

And and they would come back and put it in the database to say they contacted them and what was going on.

SPEAKER_03 25:55

Yeah, here's what's up.

SPEAKER_02 25:56

So we we plug that back into planning. One of the things that helped me on that is that when somebody might leave the church and they said, Man, I y'all I've been gone and no one has done anything, no one has said anything, no one's cared, you haven't called me, and I can look up in the database. You know that probably it it may be 50-50, maybe even better on our side, yeah, that we did contact multiple different ways. It may not have been me, yeah, but there were three other people who called or two, you know. And I'm kidding.

SPEAKER_00 26:25

This is a real big double clip and double click inside of this little thing, but a voicemail was

Tracking projects with red, yellow, green dashboards

SPEAKER_00 26:30

sufficient for us if they didn't answer, and a lot of times they're called back. But yeah, hey, I left them a voicemail and said this. Yeah, blah, blah, blah. All right. Next up is announcements. This is easy. What do I know that the team needs to know? Try to keep that brief two minutes. Cycle rock dashboards really big. So during this cycle, which is our 90 days of focus, what are the big rocks? So Steve and Covey, big rocks, a big rock goes first. Above all else, above maintaining the normal of a Sunday's coming, a Wednesday's coming. What are the five to ten big projects that we're pursuing this cycle? And then the dashboard is the one place where all the projects live, and we're giving a status report during the meeting of how's this project going? Red, yellow, or green. Red means I don't believe I can accomplish the objective by the given due date. Green means I believe, even though I'm 5% done with this, I believe I can accomplish the objective by the given due date. Everybody that is a project owner, so like there's a bunch of different boxes right here in our little base camp, and you could do this on a whiteboard. Everybody is just basically saying, How's this project going, red, yellow, or green? Uh and so we would just move it over. This one's doing a green, this one's doing a red, this one's doing a yellow, and we just move it accordingly so we know where everything stands, and then offline we can be like, hey, Mark, I noticed your thing was a red. Um, what do you need from me to help you get unstuck here?

SPEAKER_03 27:53

Yeah, what you're unpacking there is this dashboard check-in is not a place to fix uh why it's red or yellow, it's a place to surface that information and then downstream we're gonna go fix it. Yep.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

Because you it's kind of goes back to that whole thing of like, why am I sitting here for 30 minutes? My stuff's green.

SPEAKER_03 28:11

Yeah, pastors helping the youth pastor fix all of these things, that has nothing to do with me. Right.

SPEAKER_00 28:16

You don't want to waste people's time like that. Team check-ins is the last thing here. Dad, I think there's a myriad of reasons why we do the team check-in, but basically all we're asking here is everybody in the room, uh, so like for our team is you we've done this with like 12 people in the room at a time. Uh, we ask them in a circle, and I usually start being like, all right, guys, uh, last thing here, we're doing our team check-in. Uh, as you know, uh, we want to give a number of one through ten, tens being the best you've ever been, one being the worst you've ever been. Uh, where do you sit today? Of course, you can give as much detail or as little detail as you want to. Um, why do we do this? Why do you think this is important?

SPEAKER_02 28:55

Well, number one, I want people to know we value them as a person, not just as a cog in the machine. Yeah. You know, like, hey, you're you're here to accomplish my vision. No, you are the vision. I want to take care of you. I want to help you, I want to serve you, I want to make sure you're good. So, number one, I want them to say what it is because I want to know how to pray for them and where they're at and be sensitive to that. So if I have a meeting with Mark that day, but he said he's a four, you know, then I'm gonna understand, hey man, I know that you're a four. Are you you okay to have that meeting still, or do you want us to put a different time like that?

SPEAKER_00 29:27

Now, Mark is gonna be the best four that he can possibly be, but we do know he's at a four too.

SPEAKER_03 29:31

So it so it helps you manage your expectations. Yeah. We talked about a lot that the expectation gap. If you know that I'm a four, it doesn't mean I still don't need to get my job done and do stuff, but your expectations of what I can bring to the table for that day help.

SPEAKER_00 29:46

It's setting up expectations and even setting up conversations. If Mark's a four for a month in a row, that's a different kind of conversation. What's happening, dude?

SPEAKER_02 29:53

But uh but that could be life stuff. I mean, something's going on with your kids, something's going on in your marriage, something's going on with your health.

SPEAKER_00 29:59

I mean, there can be all kinds of things. I'm not saying what's happening as in like you need to get your crap together. I'm saying you've been a four for a month, I've noticed this, but you haven't really given detail. Like, how are you? What's going on?

SPEAKER_02 30:10

So we're gonna look at that. But secondly, here's the deal. I find that a lot of times people don't even know what they are until you ask them. Yeah, so I think especially men, we're not always uh connected to our emotions as much as maybe ladies are sometimes. And so part of it, what that even my wife sometimes doesn't know, hey, I'm really mad at you, but really it's probably because I'm a four right now, and that's probably skewing how I see it. So when you say I'm a four or you say wherever you're at, then you're owning right now. My perspective may be a little bit skewed. I and so I'm so true though.

SPEAKER_00 30:47

A lot of times we'll go in a circle, and it literally even is. It's like, okay, and Scott, how are you? And you're like, good question. Um yeah, I'm probably it's like they don't even know until you're asked.

SPEAKER_02 30:59

Yeah. So you have to analyze that. Thirdly, I think it it um gives us an opportunity that um people even own that, sharing that there's some kind of release of okay, I don't have to walk around and go, sorry guys, I'm a four, I'm a four, I'm a four. I mean, it's like a release in the place of uh this is where we're at. We can pray for each other, we can care for each other, and it validates. So I think it's like huge value for us, and it I think it helps the team uh camaraderie and connectivity really be strong.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

Yep. So that's like two minutes, and then we pray, and then we're done with the meeting. So as we look at this as a whole, we have all of these elements. I would say that you can rearrange almost all of these. I usually like to do a P3 at the beginning and team check-ins at the end. It's probably a good way to end it. All of the other Lego pieces, I think you can move around. And again, this is 62 minutes, I think, if I added this right. Um, you can balloon this up to 90 or 30 or 45, however you want to do it.

SPEAKER_02 32:00

And I think as you're getting bigger, you may say, you know what, we're not gonna do this start, stop, and scale in our staff meeting. We're gonna do it in a production meeting or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 32:09

You know what I love about this too, as you get bigger is what we teach is there's a big difference between leading a meeting and being the leader versus facilitating a meeting. And I want to train people in how to facilitate uh a meeting. So what I want to do is when these are really clear and the headings stay the same, but the bullet points change is like, hey, you know, Sarah, I want you to lead our start, stop, and scale this week. Yeah. Hey, uh Bill, I want you to walk through the staff values, uh, all of them, and say why they're important. It gives people a chance to uh practice facilitating.

SPEAKER_03 32:42

We talked about that in the due date discipleship idea that I always want to be making disciples. What's cool about how it's compartmentalized like that and it's puzzle pieces that we can just add in. Yeah. Then if I want Sarah to eventually be a person who can facilitate a whole meeting really well, let's give her a part of it and start helping her navigate through leading those different pieces, and then once she's skilled at leading all those different pieces, boom, now you can lead a whole meeting.

SPEAKER_02 33:10

I'm saying there's three that usually I would lead. I would usually lead the P3, the teaching time, and the team check-in at the end.

SPEAKER_01 33:17

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 33:17

Because at the end, I wanted to be able to let everybody know I'm telling you, I value you, you're important. Really carefully call out. Yeah, I like that. But then what I did is I said, you're the facilitator, Mark, but that may mean that you say you want Sue or whoever it is, hey Sue, this week I want you to do the start shop. But you're doing that, not me to tell you.

SPEAKER_00 33:36

The skinny of it, and we won't go into the full facilitation versus leading. Uh, if you guys want to, we can hit on that in a future podcast, just let us know. But the facilitator is teeing up the leader for the segments that they're supposed to lead. Yes. The facilitator is doing a completely different job than the leader. The leader is supposed to make decisions and lead with the vision, right? So the facilitator is doing the agenda planning, they're doing the timekeeping, they're making sure we're not going off on rabbit trails. That's a completely different mindset. And most teams do the leader and the facilitator is the same person. Okay, I want to do final thoughts here of why I think each one of these elements is important. And then, Dad, I'd love for your thoughts as we close. So P3 is here for spiritual alignment. The staff values are here so we maintain cultural alignment. The team teaching is here because we always want to make sure that we use uh leverage opportunities to make the team better. It's a leadership development opportunity. The start, stop, and scale is here because we want to make every Sunday better. Mission metrics are here to make sure that we have scoreboard clarity of are we pursuing and moving towards the outcomes that we said we wanted to? Yeah. Going, going on is here for pastoral follow-up. The announcements are here to keep everybody informed. The Cycle Rock dashboard is here for accountability and execution tracking. And the team check-ins is here is pastoral care, not just for your church, but for the people that are taking care of the people in your church, which is the team that you have every single week.

SPEAKER_03 35:10

Yeah. So the premise originally was that one of the biggest time wasters is ineffective meetings. Yeah. And all of us have an all-staff meeting. Closing thoughts, Pastor.

SPEAKER_02 35:21

I think this is genius. I mean, when I have this, then I can uh really just kind of have that menu of what I need to do. It's not like I'm going, so what do we need to do this week? We already know it. It's just what needs to go in there in this season, in this time, to move forward. I I think it's genius.

SPEAKER_03 35:38

I love it. So thank you for being with us here today on the Ready Set Grow Podcast, and we will look forward to seeing you next time.