The Key to Fixing Your Meetings Problem | Ep 40

If you want to build meeting rhythms that actually move your church forward instead of draining your team, learn more about the Ready Set Grow Mastermind: https://www.readysetgrowchurch.com/mastermind

Your team has a meeting for that... and another one for the thing the first meeting was supposed to fix.

Somewhere along the way, your calendar filled up with meetings nobody remembers agreeing to. Some of them made sense once. Most of them just... stayed.

And now every Tuesday feels like maintenance, not momentum.

This episode breaks down how to run a full meetings audit — one that tells you exactly which meetings to keep, cut, shrink, or fix.

In this episode:

• Why churches inherit meetings nobody actually needs
• The difference between Cycle Rock meetings and Critical Function meetings
• The Add, Subtract, Trim, Fix framework for auditing every recurring meeting
• Three of the Seven Essentials that make a meeting worth having
• Why shifting from "leading" a meeting to facilitating one changes everything
• How 90-day Cycle Rocks keep your meetings tied to your actual vision instead of tradition

Healthy churches don't need more meetings — they need the right ones.

Transcript

A Client's Seven-Meeting Problem

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey, welcome to the Rig Grow Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Brewer, and I've got Scott Wilson and Hunter Wilson here with me today. By the way, if you would prefer to watch this rather than listen, you can check us out on YouTube and we'll be patiently awaiting your arrival. So we recently had a question come in from one of uh the clients that we were coaching. He has uh taken a church, a traditional church, it's been around for a long time, and they got a lot of meetings. And I think a lot of meetings have been grandfathered in. And when I looked at the list, it was at least seven meetings that he was on the hook. Weekly? Not just weekly, but uh bi-weekly, monthly. But most of them were weekly. They even had two staff meetings. And so his question was, what am I supposed to do with this? Yeah. Like, do I just do all of these meetings? Are there changes I might want to consider making?

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Yeah, the the first thing I'd say is I know the feeling because uh, you know, when I came to Oaks Church, I mean, it was already 80 something years old. Now it's 104, you know. And so uh there were all kinds of meetings. I would say there's three things I was feeling in that. So, Pastor, here's here's the thing. Number one, we had meetings that I'm going, like, what are we doing here? This feels like it's just let's get together and just talk, and there's not really action together. So there were some Kumbaya meetings,

Three Kinds of Broken Meetings

SPEAKER_01 1:18

let's get together and discuss. It's almost like, man, I feel important because I'm in this room, you know, and that we're having this meeting and it makes what I do important or something. Yeah. Secondly, there were meetings that that needed to be happening that didn't exist. For instance, our Sundays were so by the seat of your pants. I'm going, we need a meeting that's actually planning this out, evaluating all of this that didn't exist. So there's meetings that are going on, I don't know why. Meetings that aren't in existence, and I'm going, I don't know why. And then the meetings we did have seem to be very mismanaged, and they go like most of our meetings would go three and four hours instead of it being like, here's the purpose, here's what's going on. So, really, the biggest change to me wasn't about kill that meeting, start this meeting, do this. It was more of I need to have a way to change my thinking about what we are doing here on this. And um, so Hunter, I mean you you were a big key uh later on, even after I made changes. Here's the thing about it. I started meetings that kind of probably went longer than they needed to. We kept meetings probably longer, and then like you guys helped me to even go like, let's evaluate how we even do meetings.

SPEAKER_02 2:28

Yeah, you know, I think when people first diagnose that they have a meetings problem, their first thing to do is add another one. Because we don't have one for this. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Just like you were saying, there were problems to be solved, but we didn't have a meeting that was specifically designed to solve that problem.

SPEAKER_02 2:44

And so we have to add another one to fix the meetings problem. And it's just like you just keep filling it up. And you know what's interesting is I think a lot of people think of meetings like traditions, like a Christmas tradition or a Thanksgiving tradition, where it's like, well, we can't kill that thing.

Meetings Are Not Traditions

SPEAKER_02 2:59

We always do this meeting. We've always done this, right? You know what's interesting about this is I think when people talk about like, hey, can we look at your priorities? What are they gonna say? They're gonna say, let's look at your bank account, see what you spent money on. Let's look at your calendar to see what you spent time on. And I wonder if you looked at it as an organization, I would say, and I can make an argument that your meetings and how you feel your week speaks louder than the vision that you're casting in the meetings.

SPEAKER_01 3:28

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 3:28

Yeah because the way that you're spending your time is showing your team what you prioritize. And a lot of it is just what we've always done. And a lot of it is a lot of meetings are dedicated to maintaining the status quo. And so when you are maintaining the status quo, that's probably the reason why is because you have no time to make improvements because you're so filled to the brim with maintaining, right? I think you got to take it back to uh first principles because first of all, meetings are a means to an end,

Meetings Are a Means to an End

SPEAKER_02 4:00

they're a communication tactic for us to get on the same page to accomplish our priorities. So, you know, the first question that the guy asks us is which of these meetings should I keep and which of them should I not? And I'm like, I I can't answer that question for you. Like I kind of have to reject the premise. Because we don't know the context. We don't know what's happening in the meeting. And I don't, you have to tell me the meetings are a strategy to pull off the vision. Yeah. And so what's the vision? It's not I can't even tell you what whether this meeting is good or bad. It depends on what the vision is. And is that a strategy tactic to help you get coordinated around what you're trying to do?

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Well, I like what you're saying, even on that, because you're you're you're reorienting us to meetings are to create action and activity that's meaningful for the vision. It's not just to get in a room and have discussions.

SPEAKER_02 4:54

We have done really well as a team and taught a lot of people how to work better asynchronously, which it means how do you get on the same page without being in the same room? And I think we've done an incredible job at getting better and better and better at this of utilizing software and documenting what we think and not keeping it in our head and actually having a paper trail of what we're deciding. So it's like, why, why, why do you need a meeting in the first place? Because people, I think, have a tendency to pendulum swing too hard and say, we only do meetings or we never do meetings.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Yeah, we're not gonna get we're not gonna meet

When a Meeting Is Actually Necessary

SPEAKER_00 5:28

at all. Meetings are killing us, so let's just cancel the meetings.

SPEAKER_02 5:31

I I'm not a fan of that. I think there is a uh a middle zone in that. I think what I would say is a meeting is appropriate when you need real-time discussion or a decision that needs to be made by the individuals in the room that's really hard to communicate over messages. I know that's kind of a mouthful, I'll say it again. I think it's worth having a meeting when you need real-time discussion, not in person. Like we have people on our team that live in Oklahoma. Like we we talk, I just need to see your face. I need to like, I need to talk to you like in real time. Real-time discussion to make a disc decision or have a discussion that is really hard to do by messages alone, a Slack, an email, a text message. Uh, that's just hard to do. It's it's I need that real-time discussion. And and what is it for? What are we discussing? What are we making decisions about?

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Yeah, you're you're talking about we don't ever get into the room and start a discussion that hasn't already had a tremendous amount of asynchronous work and recommendations. So by the time we get into the room to go, okay, guys, we're gonna discuss this and then we're gonna make a decision in the room. Yeah, there's been a lot of asynchronous work and back and forth. So we're coming in informed. Most people are looking for decisions from people that have been uninformed. Yeah. And so they get like 30 seconds to make to make a decision.

SPEAKER_02 6:52

And I think that is probably one of the essentials of what I'm talking about on how to trim down your meetings, either in length of time. Like it doesn't have to be a two-hour meeting, it could be a one-hour meeting. It doesn't have to be one hour, it could be 30 minutes. Or less frequently, like it's not weekly, it's bi-weekly. It's not bi-weekly, it's monthly.

SPEAKER_01 7:08

You know, but the other thing we haven't even said yet is it could be this is a meeting for the next three months for this reason, and then

Introducing the Meetings Audit

SPEAKER_01 7:16

we don't have that meeting anymore.

SPEAKER_02 7:17

Yeah. So so inside of this, to give like a macro framework of what we teach is I think you need to have a meetings audit. A meetings audit is basically saying, let's look at the communication rhythms that we have as a team. That's basically what a meeting is. Of is this still serving a purpose for us? How do we know it's worth uh having? Does that make sense? I think there's two buckets that you need to make sure that you're doing a quality check on. Is this helping us on what we call our cycle rocks or like what we call as this season's biggest priorities, right? Or is it serving to help us uh fulfill the standards of our critical functions? So, like you said, a Sunday morning is flying by the seat of our pants or whatever, right? Like we need to have a meeting about that. That's a critical function. You're gonna have that every single week.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

Critical function could be budgeting. Yeah, we've got to carry a budget on a monthly and weekly and annual basis.

SPEAKER_02 8:10

Even the staff meeting, I'm good with that because one of the things that you have to maintain a high standard on is a team that's in sync and high performing and informed of what's going on, right? So is it a critical function or is it this season's priorities, which we call a cycle rock? Yeah, in that, I want you to list all your meetings. So every single one that you have on a recurring basis, every recurring meeting. So not one-off meetings of like me and you met one time, but every single

The Red, Yellow, Green Exercise

SPEAKER_02 8:36

one of your recurring meetings, and then say red, yellow, or green. Red is bad, green is good. Is this serving one of those two buckets? Is this serving this season's biggest priorities, which we call psychock, or is it um serving one of our critical functions? Right. Now, what you're gonna see is when you actually list all of these out, especially when you're involving multiple people, uh, and and you're basically at a macro level looking at our team's meetings. I think you needed to figure out is there anything that we need to add that has not been started yet? Like you said, is like there's a meeting that we need to have, but we're not having

Add, Subtract, Trim, Fix

SPEAKER_02 9:15

right now. Is there any any meetings that we need to subtract, which means this and this could really be combined into one meeting? It's like, oh, that's a great idea. That's a great combining, right? Or just take it out, no longer serves a purpose. The other one is trim back. So subtract is eliminate. Trim back is either in length of time or in less frequent. Or the last one, the fourth one, so add, subtract, trim, the fourth one is fix. So this meeting still needs to be here, but it's no longer serving the purpose that it needs to, but it has the right people and it has the right purpose attached to it. We just need to fix the agenda, uh, like we talk about with our seven essentials that we've done in a podcast.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

Okay, so let me do a quick pause here because there's gonna be people that are listening to this for the very first time. They've never even thought of doing a meetings audit. Their church might be a hundred years old and nobody ever looked at the meetings and said, should we be having these? Are these the right meetings? So what I heard you say is you want to start with make a list of every meeting. Yep. Then determine is that helping us move our biggest projects for this season forward? And then is this helping us uh manage and maintain the standard for our critical functions? Okay, yes or no on that, or red, green, yellow on that. Then after we get that piece of information, we're gonna make some decisions about what we should do. And you shared the four things that we should do right now. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 10:45

And I think really ultimately you have to understand that you don't have a tattoo of your meeting on your arm. Like no one's forcing you to have that meeting. The meetings are there to serve you. You are not there to serve the meeting. Like the meetings are there as a strategy to help you fulfill the vision. Yeah. So when the vision changes, so should the strategy, right? But why do we revolve that and and add that to our pack of weight that we have to do where people are rolling their eyes, draining their energy in in going to a meeting that no longer serves a purpose? It doesn't make sense.

SPEAKER_00 11:23

Yeah. We kind of talked about this a little bit, but what I would want us to emphasize again is that when we have decided that we're going to spend time, talent, and treasure and put a meeting on the calendar, that meeting cannot be haphazard. There, that meeting must be essential, and there's some key elements that cause that meeting to be essential and actually strategized. Yes. That we are hitting every meeting with specific intentional strategy. We're not just showing up to the meeting. Are there some things that you could share on that?

SPEAKER_02 11:56

Yeah, we have a whole dedicated episode to this of the seven essentials, but I think here are some of the most important. Number one is what's

The Seven Essentials of a Meeting

SPEAKER_02 12:03

the purpose of your meeting? It needs to be stated. We know this is why we're in the room. Number two is who are the right people? Yeah. Not based off of org chart, based off of who can help you fulfill that purpose.

SPEAKER_00 12:15

Okay, do just a quick dive. Not based on org chart, but who can help you fulfill. That's a big one.

SPEAKER_02 12:21

We joke all the time that nobody wants to go to a meeting until you're not invited to a meeting. And then there's like, why am I not? Why am I not? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

And so the idea I have that feeling every time. I'm like, why are they in the conference room? And you know, and I can see y'all in there. I'm like, what are they doing in there? Why am I not in there?

SPEAKER_02 12:37

Yeah. So the idea is if your meeting has a purpose, then you have players on the team to help you fulfill that purpose. It's not based off of org chart, it's based off of what key players do you need to fulfill that purpose.

SPEAKER_01 12:50

Yeah. And I think it's important that they know what their purpose is in the meeting too. So we have a purpose for the meeting. We got the right people in the room, and the right people know exactly why you're in the room. This is why I have you in the room.

SPEAKER_02 13:02

And I'll tell you one more of the seven. So I'll just give you three of them, is a collaboratively built agenda, meaning that every purpose, if you have a key role in that meeting, that you are speaking into the agenda of that meeting before we actually enter into the room to do the agenda of that meeting. So that we are all bringing our full perspective to accomplish the objective.

SPEAKER_01 13:26

You know what's interesting on that is probably one of the biggest shifts that happened for me in meetings is when I realized I didn't need to be the one who's leading uh the agenda and uh lead like leading the meeting. And I know that sounds weird because my whole upbringing with my dad being a pastor was if I'm not the guy leading the the meeting, then I'm not the leader. But really, what I figured out is whoever's leading the meeting can be a facilitator of the agenda. They can be the one who organizes the information people are giving for the agenda. I can speak as the leader into the agenda, and then it leaves me in a position where I'm not having to figure out did we how much time do we have? What are we doing?

SPEAKER_02 14:09

The facilitator is more of a manager of the purpose. The leader is more of the decision maker to influence where we're heading in that direction.

SPEAKER_01 14:18

Yeah, because in the beginning, you know what I was doing the night before the meetings, which we had multiple meetings, I was writing the agenda, I was putting it all together, I was trying to figure out what do we need to talk about, how do we need to do it. Yeah. When I realized Mark needed to do that, he could get all of that gathered together, I could speak into it, I could say, no, I don't want us to talk about that, whatever. But then he could function, even give out the notes to people of what we would

What Cycle Rocks Really Means

SPEAKER_01 14:43

do afterwards. That was a game changer.

SPEAKER_02 14:45

I I want to give a little final thought on this because I think this is um, like you said, it's it's kind of a different concept for people to question the meetings. So I kept saying the word cycle rocks. What I'm saying on that to just explain the insider verbiage that we use at ReadySecGrow is a cycle is a 90-day period. So we make quarterly plans to accomplish our yearly objectives, right? So we create a yearly vision and accomplish it through quarterly objectives. So that's the season that we're talking about. If you ever looked at uh Stephen Covey's big rocks first, it's like, how do you make time for all of your priorities? Well, you don't put the pebbles in, then the sand, and then the big rocks because you're never gonna make space for them. You put the big rocks in first, right? Meaning you look at what are my critical functions, what are my biggest priorities? Let's put those on the calendar first. That's the container for those rocks. And then you add in the other things, right? So our cycle rocks is basically saying it makes sense to people that when we create a vision, we're gonna come up with a fresh strategy. Right. I want you to do that same thing when you are determining your next season's focus, and we we suggest you do it on a quarterly basis. When you look at what do we need to accomplish, what's the vision for this next quarter, make the meetings a part of the strategy that needs to be freshened up. So if this is what we're trying to accomplish, these five to ten objectives over the next quarter, what are the meetings we need to have to help us best fulfill those objectives and maintain the high standard of our day-to-day opportunity.

SPEAKER_01 16:23

I love that thinking because now it means that every meeting uh is being evaluated and audited every quarter to say, okay, do we need this meeting? Now we don't look at do we need staff meeting? That's a critical function. Yeah, but we can ask, hey, do we need it? Of course we need it. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 16:40

But we we what it does is we do need staff meetings still, but we adjust the agenda based off of the season. Yep. Yes. So inside of this, I would highly recommend that you create meetings to fulfill the purpose of the season that you're in. And and basically treat meetings, not that you're married to them, but you're dating them for the season. Does that make sense? Almost like you, these aren't tattoos, these aren't traditions. These are things that are a means to an end to help you achieve the objective. So when you look at your season, say what is the best type of relationship we need to have with each of our meetings.

SPEAKER_00 17:18

Oh, super powerful today. Hey, thank you for joining us here at ReadySet Grow Podcast, and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode.