I’m not sure what it says about me or my ability to lead my church or our meetings, but I was eager to read this book as soon as I heard about it. Death by Meeting (2004) is the work of Patrick Lencioni, a business consulting guru with a number of top-selling books to his credit. There’s nothing Christian about this book (though church life is referenced sympathetically), and this is certainly not the go-to book on how to do effective ministry. But most of us in the church go to meetings. And all of us probably wish those meetings were a little better. So if we can get, filtered through Scripture, a few common grace pointers from a business junkie, why not take them?
Most of the book is a fable about a video game company with really good people and really bad meetings. I’ll skip over the story and get right to the take-home points.
Lencioni highlights two problems with meetings. He’s talking about meetings in the business world, but I think much of what he says can apply to elders’ meetings, church staff meetings, worship committee meetings, or any other type of meeting. The first problem is this: meetings are boring. And the second is like it: meetings are ineffective. Meetings, says Lencioni, are boring because they lack drama. They are ineffective because they lack contextual structure.
Lack of Drama
Movies are interesting because they deal with conflict, be it real or imaginary, external or internal, epic or poignant. Meetings, conversely, are boring because “most leaders of meetings go out of their way to eliminate or minimize drama and avoid the healthy conflict that results from it.” Lencioni urges leaders to inject drama into a meeting at the outset. This doesn’t require theatrics, just an effort to show people that what they will be talking about really matters and everyone’s opinion matters.
More importantly, he cautions leaders against steering away from debate and disagreement. As one who has sat in many meetings and has led many meetings, I can testify to this danger. Most of us don’t like conflict. So we figure a good meeting is one in which everything is quickly approved and we get done on time. I’ve seen it often: pastors aim for boring meetings. After all, he doesn’t want to make his job harder. He doesn’t want to present his proposals only to have them shut down by lay critics. So over time the leadership team gets bored. Nothing happens at meetings. And when the real gut-wrenching issues pop up, the “good” leader knows how to quickly avoid those discussions. Lencioni says the opposite. “Avoiding the issues that merit debate and disagreement not only makes the meeting boring, it guarantees that the issues won’t be resolved.”
But, you may be saying (as I was saying too initially), “If I encourage vigorous debate, we’ll never finish our meetings. Won’t we get sidetracked down a thousand rabbit trials?” Not if you pay attention to the second problem.
Lack of Contextual Structure
Most of our meetings accomplish little because we aren’t sure what we are trying to accomplish. It’s not that we have too many meetings. Rather, we try to do too much at any one meeting. “In the end,” writes Lencioni, “little is decided because the participants have a hard time figuring out whether they’re supposed to be debating, voting, brainstorming, weighing in, or just listening.” Ouch. I’ve led a lot of meetings like this where the context is not clear. The urgent crowds out the important. Simple decisions are never voted on and weighty matters are never sufficiently explored. The problem is that most of us have one meeting where we are trying to do it all—deal with routine matters, problem-solve immediate crises, address long-term strategy, and dream about the future. This just doesn’t work.
Lencioni suggest four regular meetings: a daily check-in (5 minutes), a weekly tactical meeting where present problems are solved (45-90 minutes), a monthly strategic meeting where one or two big topics are analyzed (2-4 hours), and a quarterly off-site review where current priorities can be reviewed and team unity can be developed. Not all of this will work in a church setting, but some of it can and should. We need regular times to take care of the usual business and more extended times to look at the overall ministry. And we probably can’t do both of these at a monthly elders’ meeting.
I’m not entirely sure what it would look like to implement these two basic suggestions about drama and context at our church. I know that dealing with people and souls is different than inventories and bottom lines. So we don’t want to take all our cues from the business/management section of the bookstore. But I have no doubt I’ve put too many things, and too many disparate things, into our elders’ agendas. And because there have been too many things, we haven’t had time to adequately “fight” over the most important issues (which does not equal every issue). I benefited from this book and I think our meetings will be better for having read it. So after you read Strauch and Witmer and some others, something by Lencioni could serve you well.
Excerpted with permission from http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/kevindeyoung, © 2010 by Kevin DeYoung.
