May 12, 2021

How to Lead Meetings People Look Forward to Attending – Episode 192 | The Unstuck Church Podcast

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Creating Alignment in Your Church (Part 4)

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It doesn’t come up on the first day of strategic planning, but by the time we’re wrapping up the second day, pastors are often asking me for some input: “How do we as a team start using our meetings better?”

We’ve just had two days of focused, strategic, productive ministry planning time, and they want to know how they replicate that in the everyday ministry planning meetings they have throughout the week.

They want to know how to lead more effective, collaborative meetings, and how to cut down on wasted time.

Bad meetings are a waste of time. In fact, we learned from some recent data that most professionals attend 62 meetings a month, which is about 14 meetings a week. If even half of those are unproductive, you can see how quickly they can make an organization lose traction on priorities.

No one TRIES to lead ineffective meetings, but any leader can get a bit lazy. The 9 key practices we share in this episode aren’t rocket science, but they are things we see many church leaders just letting slip.

CREATING ALIGNMENT IN YOUR CHURCH

To gain more alignment you must first define reality for your team (Part 1), fix span-of-care and management issues (Part 2), and implement best practices for getting more traction on your priorities (Part 3).

In Part 4, Amy and I wrap up this series by sharing how you can correct one of the biggest time-wasters on any team: Unproductive meetings.

Are you seeing the return on your investment for your team’s time? In this episode, we’re digging into:

  • 9 key practices for productive, collaborative meetings
  • How to determine decision rights
  • The difference between consensus and alignment in decision-making, and which one is best for various situations
  • Making a plan for the take off and the landing
Church leaders can get bogged down thinking everyone must always agree… even when it comes to minor decisions that don't require 100% alignment. #unstuckchurch [episode 192] Click to Tweet No one TRIES to lead ineffective meetings, but any leader can get a bit lazy. #unstuckchurch [episode 192] Click To Tweet

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Transcript 

Sean (00:02):

Welcome to The Unstuck Church Podcast, where each week we’re exploring what it means to be an unstuck church. Recent research found that the average salary cost of a meeting was $338. Add to that the fact that there are about 11 million meetings each day in the US, and you quickly have a huge cost for having a meeting. How many meetings do you have in your day? Are you seeing the return on your investment with your team’s time? Today on the podcast, Tony and Amy tackle the dreaded meeting and how to make it more collaborative and effective. Before you listened today, make sure you stop and subscribe to get the show notes. If you don’t already get them, each week you’re going to get one email with content to go along with this week’s conversation, all of the resources we mentioned and access to the archive of all of our podcast resources from past episodes. You can sign up by going to theunstuckgroup.com/podcast. Now let’s join Tony and Amy for today’s conversation.

Amy (01:01):

Well, hello to all of our listeners and welcome back. Today, Tony and I are wrapping up our four-part podcast series on building alignment within your church and your team, and, Tony, since this is our last week of the series, how about a quick recap of what we’ve covered so far?

Tony (01:15):

Yeah, so week one, we talked about how leaders have to define reality for their teams if they want to build alignment around mission and future direction. And then in the second episode, we discussed how leaders have to focus on getting the right people in the right roles with the right span of care if we’re going to experience full alignment on the team. And then in week three, we talked about some hacks that help leaders gain traction on their ministry priorities. And if you haven’t listened to the previous week’s episodes, I would encourage you to go back and listen to those. I think it will help put today’s conversation into context as well, but that does bring us to today’s topic. And it’s a topic that many leaders struggle with. It’s about meetings and, you know, Amy, the challenge, of course, is good meetings, I want to participate. I want to fully engage. I look forward to them. Bad meetings, which I’ve been part of several of them. Unfortunately, I may have led several of those in the past.

Amy (02:19):

I’m not commenting on that.

Tony (02:19):

They’re just, they’re just not fun. And, it just, it feels like I’m wasting my time and I’m wasting my team’s time. So, we’re going to be focusing on effective, collaborative meetings. And actually this is a key practice of healthy aligned teams. And we’re going to dive even deeper on this and other ways to keep your team and strategy aligned during our next masterclass, which is tomorrow. So here’s the key thought for our masterclass. Alignment happens when we all know our purpose, our plan, and our part as we pursue our future together. And during the masterclass, we’re going to cover four key practices for building alignment, specifically how to clarify direction and define the win. Secondly, we’re going to look at how to get the right people in the right roles. Number three, we’re going to look at how to gain traction by embracing new systems and finally, how to lead collaboratively to eliminate silos. And if you need alignment with your team, you’re going to want to participate in tomorrow’s masterclass with your team. So there’s still time to register. Just go to theunstuckgroup.com/masterclass to get you and your team signed up today. Amy, you do a lot of work with staff teams through our Unstuck process. So I’d like to shift roles today and ask you some questions about how to lead more collaborative meetings. Are you up for that?

Amy (03:45):

Sure thing. Always.

Tony (03:46):

Well, good. I don’t know what I would have done if you would’ve said no there. All right. Well, I know the question of how to lead more effective collaborative meetings comes up often with the pastors you’re working with, where do you encourage them to begin if they don’t feel they’re getting the best from their team during these meetings?

Amy (04:08):

Yeah. Meetings are often something we don’t usually talk about it on day one, but by the time we’re wrapping things up on day two, we’re often having a conversation around just, how do we use our time better? And let me say that meetings often get a bad wrap. Many moons ago, Tony, I worked at the 3m company, and the joke was that 3m stood for meetings, meetings, meetings. And I’ve heard our friend Lance Witt say that there’s this old saying that if you want to kill time, a meeting is the perfect weapon. And there’s some truth in that. You mentioned it a second ago. Bad meetings are a waste of our time. In fact, here’s some, I know you liked data, so I like data, but you like data. But here’s some data we’ve pulled about meetings. First off there are approximately 11 million meetings occurring in the United States each and every day. And can you imagine during COVID, they’ve all been on Zoom, Tony?

Tony (05:02):

Yes, I can imagine. I think it was a part of at least a million of those.

Amy (05:07):

No wonder we’re all suffering from mental health issues right now. Most professionals attend 62 meetings a month, which is about 14 meetings a week. And you know what? I think that’s probably what I have every week. You?

Tony (05:20):

Yes, I agree. Yeah, actually you should see my calendar tomorrow. I think I have maybe eight. Well maybe I think actually there are eight separate meetings on my calendar tomorrow.

Amy (05:32):

But here’s the kicker. Professionals lose 31 hours a month in unproductive meetings. That’s roughly four days every month just by wasted time in meetings. And so that’s like what, roughly 50% of meeting time is wasted, right? In one study, 73% said they have brought other work to meetings, and 39% of people say they dozed off during meetings. So that would kill collaboration with your team, right? If your teammate’s sleeping?

Tony (06:02):

Sure. Actually, I recall a passage from scripture where people dozed off too when Jesus was holding a meeting. But let’s just assume that Jesus was real, if he did meetings, he would have been really good at them.

Amy (06:16):

I bet he was really effective. Well, anyways, so when you say, what do we have to talk about first? I think we actually have to begin with the leaders, those of us who are leading meetings, because the answer to more collaborative meetings isn’t more collaboration. It’s actually more clarity. We use that word a lot here. Don’t we? But that’s why it’s so important, like we’ve talked about the last several weeks that we have to have clarity in the direction we’re going and the win. We have to have the right people in the right roles. We need clear systems to help us build and maintain traction. And we can’t expect a high level of engagement or input and team collaboration if the team isn’t already clear on where we’re headed in how we’re winning and the specific action steps that we need to take to get it moving forward. So it begins with us as leaders having big picture clarity. And then we’ll talk about meeting clarity in just a minute.

Tony (07:09):

Amy, I completely agree. Let’s say, for the sake of today’s conversation, that a leader has listened to the last three podcasts, they’ve attended the masterclass on alignment and they’ve clarified direction and action steps. What are some practical ways they can get the best out of their team and the time that they’ve invested into these meetings?

Amy (07:30):

Sure. Well, getting to the best meeting outcomes doesn’t mean more or longer meetings. It just means more clarity about why we’re meeting, right? Why are we meeting? What’s the purpose of this? And if we’re making a decision, we have to have clarity in advance of the discussion, right? About how we’re making that decision, and then understanding how effective meetings function, and Tony, there’s several key practices that I, or we, coach leaders on to make sure meetings are more effective and productive. And some of them might seem really simple or simplistic, but we found that so many times leadership teams aren’t intentional about these practices, and it’s not like we’re trying to have ineffective meetings. We just get a little lazy about them. And, I mean, I bet you have stories. I have stories about painful meetings we’ve sat through, and I’m sure that, you know, as we talk through these principles, those meetings violated at least one, or maybe several of these practices.

Tony (08:24):

Yeah. I’m just recalling one. I mean, it was totally awful meeting where, goodness, there were probably I’m guessing 16, 18 different leaders in the room and we were…

Amy (08:36):

In one meeting?

Tony (08:36):

Well, see, that was the first mistake. We’re all sitting in a circle around the room. And it was that the topics were drifting towards very logistical, you know, key execution conversations that needed to happen, but only with two or three people that were present. And so at one point, this one person on the other side of the room was talking to another person on my side of the room, and I’m looking around the circle and no one is engaged in the conversation. Everybody’s on their devices. And it’s just unfortunately I think those are the meetings that give meetings a bad rap, Amy, but certainly I’ve had my share of those challenges in the past.

Amy (09:26):

Yeah. Well, there’s nine of these practices that I’m going to move through. I’ll probably go through them a little quickly, but we’ll include this list in the show notes where you can grab at theunstuckgroup.com/podcast, if you don’t already get them. And what I like about the list, Tony, by the way, is for any of you listening who lead meetings, I would encourage you to take that list and take it to your team and kind of red, green, yellow yourself on each of these practices and see where, as a leader, you’re doing a good job and maybe where you’ve, you know, gotten a little bit lax, but the first practice is meetings need to start and end on time. And I said these would be simplistic, but so many times we allow meetings to start late. And we’re not really sure when they’ll end, and if the team is focused on how they’re going to adjust their calendars for the rest of the day because your long meeting, you’re probably not going to get your best from them. And by the way, once you start meetings late, people actually just start to come to your meetings late. And then that time just erodes. And so start and end on time. The second one for effective collaborative meetings is, again, have a clear purpose and agenda. At the beginning of the meeting, I would actually identify the win so that everyone is clear on why you’re meeting. And by the way, if you’re leading the meeting, this is on you as the facilitator. Ironically, Tony, when I was leading at our church, I actually saw this a challenge for the regular recurring meetings, like I had a weekly programming meeting or a weekly leadership team meeting. And it’s almost like in those ones, we just get into a habit of gathering, and we’ve actually lost sight of why we’re meeting. And so, when I led, I actually made it a discipline either once a month or once a quarter, I would just start the meeting reminding everybody why we’re meeting. Here’s the win if we do this meeting right. And it actually sharpened all of us up to get back to the focus of that meeting.

Tony (11:23):

That’s good. That’s very good.

Amy (11:25):

I’m going to add one thing about an agenda. So you know, you and I are both pretty fast paced. We don’t need an agenda in advance most times. We could probably come together for a meeting, drop a topic and we’d both be ready to dance on that. We have to remember that our colleagues, some of us are wired fast. Some of us are on the other side of what we call the wheel, the disc wheel, the leading from your strengths, and people who work at a little bit slower pace, if you want to get the best out of them, they actually need to know in advance the purpose of the meeting and know in advance the topic so that they can actually bring their best forward to contribute.

Tony (12:02):

Because they need to start processing before the conversation to be able to contribute to the conversation.

Amy (12:07):

Right. Otherwise they’re just going to sit there because they don’t want to speak up until they’ve had some time to think about it. All right. The third practice is staying on topic during a discussion. The leader doesn’t want the meeting to wander or allow other people to hijack the conversation with their own agenda. So again, when we’re clear on why we’re talking about something, easier to monitor that. Fourth one, if you want to have an effective meeting, don’t allow technology to become a distraction. You just said in that example, everyone was on their phone, they drift. You don’t want to have anyone texting. These are meeting rules. No one’s texting. No one’s emailing. No one’s browsing Wayfair or Facebook during the meeting. And In the best meetings, just have people put their phones down. That’s the best discipline to make sure technology doesn’t hijack it. The fifth practice is robust discussion. So people are engaged. They’re bringing their best thinking. Again, we just talked through how to do that for the people on the left side of the wheel, right? Give them the agenda in advance, but robust also means we’re not afraid to disagree, and we invite input and feedback. And by the way, again, if this is your meeting and you’re not seeing robust discussion, you should be the one to say, hey, we haven’t heard from Tony yet. What are your thoughts? And engaging people to participate in the meeting.

Tony (13:30):

Yeah. And honestly, Amy, if there’s not that type of engagement where people are kind of wrestling through key decisions and direction and things like that, if that’s not happening, you probably could have just sent an email message with information rather than drawing everybody together to actually engage a topic. So, yeah, I love that. And I love being in conversations where, you know, good thinking people are bringing ideas and challenging ideas. Those are the fun conversations to be a part of.

Amy (14:05):

And if this is a new muscle for your team, you might have to come with some questions, things like who thinks other? Who thinks on the other side of this? Has anyone got a different opinion? You have to start to mine for the conflict as Patrick Lencioni would say. All right, anyways, the seventh, the sixth one, excuse me, there’s just minimal time spent in the weeds. So the example, again, that you gave. You cannot let a group of people get stuck on minor issues or one or two people get stuck on minor issues. So again, as a facilitator, when we go down that rabbit hole, you just got to say, let’s take this part offline and report back. You want team discussions. You don’t want a couple people having a discussion. The seventh one is that the team uses effective communication skills. So things like we don’t talk over one another. We don’t get passive-aggressive. In fact, I was just with a church, and we were having this discussion, and I had a participant who was so engaged and so participatory. And then when we talked about staffing allocations, this person just shut down, and I thought, Oh, there’s something there. You know, this person got hooked. And that’s an example of becoming passive-aggressive. Like I’m engaged when I’m happy, and out if you step on my toe. So that obviously that’s an example of non-effective communication skills, but in the team, you know, we demonstrate good listening, you know, tell me more, say that a different way if you don’t understand what they’re talking about, and of course, healthy conflict, it’s good. That’s how we get to our best answers. And we’ve talked about it before, even assigning someone a contrarian hat to go against the group think is something that really brings effective communication. Eighth, there are clear decisions and next steps. And so the leader leaves the needed amount of time at the end of the meeting to clarify what we just talked about. What decisions did we make? What action we did we say we would do? And really clarifies next steps, which leads me to the last one, which is around communications. So the ninth one is just having a plan to communicate any decisions that are made. I can’t tell you, Tony, how many times when I am working with staff teams, they just, they have no idea what’s happening at the leadership team meeting. They’re speculating on the things that they’re talking about, and the leadership team, they aren’t doing this on purpose. It’s just once you know something, you can kind of move on with your life, and we don’t remember what that’s like to be out of the loop on communications. So again, did we make any decisions? How will we cascade that information? And when will we do that? So Tony, when the team, I guess I would just say when the team’s really clear on direction and wins and they put these principles into practice, people actually like the meetings again. And we look forward to meetings because they help us clarify our work and move things forward. We need meetings. That’s how we collaborate and work together, and they turn into this more worthy investment of our time instead of an energy drain.

Tony (17:00):

Yeah. Yeah. As you, especially as you were talking about those last couple related to decisions and communications, again, some of these experiences from my past are rolling through my brain. And I remember one season where it was the same topic on the agenda for week after week after week, and every week it felt like we made a decision, but it wasn’t confirmed. We didn’t move on it. And because we didn’t take action, it was like we had to revisit it again. And so, yeah, that’s a cycle that you don’t want to get into. That’s all good stuff, Amy. I can think of some meetings I’ve been in that I really wish would have followed this advice. In one of your practices, you mentioned clear decisions. One of the reasons meetings aren’t collaborative is that there isn’t clarity on who will decide when a decision needs to be made. And we’ve seen that can lead to confusion and the lack of trust within teams. So how can leaders clarify decision-making to help their meetings be more effective?

Amy (18:03):

Well, we’ve talked about this in the podcast before, but you know, decision rights, it’s such an important part of effective and collaborative meetings. And so to our listeners, if you want to dive in a little bit further on this topic, you can go back. I think it’s episode 149 of the podcast, where we focus the entire conversation around decision-making, but as it applies to our conversation today, Tony, I think collaboration, like you said, gets frustrating. And it slows because there isn’t clarity on how a decision is made, which leads to lots of different people wanting to give input. And lots of different people maybe thinking they have decision rights. And so, as I said, a few minutes ago, the first decision when you have a decision to make, the first decision you have to make is how are we going to make this decision? And I would also say, Tony, that decision should probably be made before the meeting starts. It should be made by, in many cases, the senior and executive pastor making a decision around how a decision will be made, but I’m just going to walk through these quickly. There are seven decision rights to choose from, and we’ll put another visual example of this in the show notes, but I’ll give you example from a recent church. We just did their ministry health assessment. So they haven’t made a decision yet, but one of the topics came up is on Sunday morning, they have student ministries for middle school meeting, but they have senior high-ers, you know, supposedly attending the regular service, and they started to talk through, we started to talk through, really should middle school be a separate program on Sunday morning? Should it be a separate program on Sunday night? Or should they come to church on the weekend and have a mid-week program? And so let’s just say, that’s our listeners’ scenario right now. We have to decide, exec senior pastor, how we’re going to make this decision. So one way you could do that, we just call leader decides, and that could be the executive pastor is going to make the decision. It could be the student pastor’s going to make that decision. But leader decides means nobody else has to weigh in. We’re just going to appoint a leader. It takes very little time then. But buy-in is often a little bit lower. Leader decides with input, just like it sounds, we’re going to appoint a leader to make this decision, but we’re going to ask him or her to get some input from various other people before they make it. Subgroup decides is the next level. And then you just task a small team, a subgroup, with making that decision. And the fourth decision right, is subgroup decides with input. So that subgroup makes a decision after getting input from others. The next one, majority vote. It’s just like it sounds. It might say, Hey, leadership team, we’re going to make this call. We’re going to talk through our options. And then we’re going to take a vote. And whichever option gets the most votes is going to win. Consensus is the sixth leadership decision right. And consensus, again, is where no one is opposed. So consensus might look like, hey, as a leadership team, we’re going to make this decision on student ministries. And then once none of us are actually opposed to it, we’re all either neutral or favorable, then we’re going to make the decision. And then alignment is the seventh decision right. And that means we are all in favor of this decision. Now there’s a couple variables to keep in mind as I ran through that. One is how much time do you have? The higher level the decision right, Tony, often the more time it’s going to take to do that, because there’s going to be more input, more conversation. The second thing you have to consider is how much buy-in do we need to this decision? And again, theoretically, the higher the decision right, the more buy-in that’s going to be present when the decision is actually made. My only yeah, but to that one is majority vote, because I don’t think majority vote ever drives a high level of buy-in because there’s always winners. There’s always losers. And let’s say this team, they come up with the three different options. They take a vote. They decide to move it to Sunday night, six months later, it tanks. Anyone who didn’t vote for that is going to be clear. Well, I didn’t vote for that one so it doesn’t surprise me it didn’t work out. So that’s my only, yeah, but. But the key here is before you open up the discussion, determine who has a vote, who has input and who isn’t involved at all. And I think for like the student ministry leader, it’s going to be important, in this case it’s a guy, that he understands do I get to make this decision about when we have student programming or is this a higher level decision that the leadership team is going to be involved in? Otherwise he’s going to move forward, and then he’s going to get the carpet pulled under him out from under him. And then he’s going to feel like I’m not empowered. I’m not leading. But if he had the clarity up front, you wouldn’t have some of that tension on the team.

Tony (22:51):

Yeah. Amy, let me just follow up a little bit too on the difference between consensus and alignment that you talked about. So you suggested consensus. This is when no one is opposed. Alignment, everybody’s completely favorable with the decision. I actually was just having this conversation recently with a church leadership team, because, I think, in the past they have felt like for us to be a team and to be completely aligned, we all have to completely agree with every decision. And because of that, they got bogged down in a lot of their decision-making. And even, I would argue, decisions that didn’t require everybody’s complete, being completely favorable with the decision. And you’ve actually, I think, in past described how with your leadership teams in meetings, you would approach more of a consensus discussion where you decided upfront, we don’t have to all be in agreement, but everybody can support whatever the decision is. Can you explain how that has worked for you in the past?

Amy (24:05):

Yeah, it’s a really good differential. I agree, if we don’t clarify consensus, meaning no one’s opposed. Everyone goes for alignment, and that’s what takes a really long time. Yeah. We actually, when we were going for consensus, which our leadership team did most of the time, we would actually kind of put our opinion on a scale of one to five. So let’s say they’re going to move to midweek student programming, and we were going for consensus. A five would mean I’m all in. That’d be my first choice. I think that’s the best option. Four would be I see a lot of the positives. It’s not perfect, but four, I’m still positive. Three would be, you know what? I see the upsides and I see the downsides, but I’m sorta neutral. Two would mean I’m not really for that decision. I think there’s still some problems there, and a one would be I’m actually opposed to it. And so in this case, you know, if the whole team is a three, four or five, we have consensus. Doesn’t mean everyone’s a five, right? We’re ready to go. We’re three, four, and five. We’re still offering our best advice, our best input, but no one is opposed. No one’s a one or a two anymore. So we’ve gotten to consensus, but there are some decisions that warrant a five, but I honestly, Tony, I don’t think many of them do. One example for us was we had a long standing 11:00 PM service on Christmas Eve. And we had an opportunity to stop doing that because of the way Christmas fell. But it was so sensitive to some people that our team actually said, we actually better go. If we’re going to make this big change, we actually better have alignment around this as a leadership team. And very different example, but when we borrowed millions of dollars to build a new campus in a new city, we had alignment that this was where God was pointing us in what to do. But very few decisions, I believe, need to be at alignment. They just need to be at consensus, no one opposed.

Tony (26:04):

Amy, you and I have to fly a lot as we’re working with churches because we often go where they are. And we’ve talked about this before, but when I fly, I prefer my flights both to start and end well. It’s just, you know, it’s a pet peeve that I have. The airline could provide me a great experience through the entire flight, but if the pilot can’t land the plane, I don’t really care about the rest of the flight. And the same is true about meetings. If we have a robust and productive discussion, but then walk out and end the meeting, and nothing happens, or the meeting really hasn’t produced anything. Over time, the team and the outcomes will be affected by that. So what is your encouragement for leaders on how to land the plane or end the meeting?

Amy (26:55):

Well, that’s a great question, Tony. And I talk about this a lot, but if a meeting doesn’t have a landing place, and more specifically, specific outcomes and action steps, it really wasn’t meeting at all. Was it? It was just a conversation. And if we’re honest, it could have been an email, like you said earlier. So when we talked about the practice of effective meetings, I mentioned this, but here’s a few more specific principles on landing the meeting well. And by the way, you have to leave time for this, or you’re not going to end the meeting on time, where we already said we should start and end. And so around the last 10-15 minute mark, start with the question, what did we decide? And again, it’s amazing on how many times we can walk out of a meeting and think we made a decision, but others who were in the exact same meeting didn’t think anything had been decided. So before the meeting ends, we just have to be clear about what was decided and what was still, or is still, a discussion. And one other pro tip, because as humans, we’re amazing at interrupting, interpreting, excuse me, things differently. You should write down your decisions and actions so that everyone’s clear on exactly what was decided. And if you’re the facilitator of this meeting, that’s your job. So book some time after your meeting to capture the notes on just what was decided. Second, we need to determine who needs to know what we decided. And as we work with church teams, Tony, lack of communication is consistently an issue that comes up in the staff culture. So if your decisions aren’t clear and clearly communicated, you can’t expect to have a healthy and collaborative team. In fact, there’s a quote by Rick Warren that I think is helpful in this conversation. He said, “Whatever people are not up on, they’re down on.” So true. And as a leader, you know, part of our job is to clearly communicate decisions and actions. And that’s not only with the team that’s in the room, but also to those who were not in the meeting but still need to know. Man, that was one of my young leadership muscles. Who needs to know what I know? Because once I know it, I’m ready to move on. And I had to pause and always go, who needs to know what I know? Just the third key I was going to go into in landing a meeting well is determine who’s responsible for what and what the key deliverables are. Because all decisions become work that someone has to own in the end. And we can’t leave the meeting saying the team will get it done, because if everyone’s got it, then no one’s got it. And write down the decision, the deadline, it’s just meeting management principles. And I bet the leaders listening are like, no, I don’t want to do that. I know you don’t, but it actually moves work forward. Then we have clarity around what was decided, who’s going to do it by when, and what results are we looking for?

Tony (29:42):

This is so practical. I really appreciate this, Amy. The conversation’s been helpful and even a great reminder for myself as a leader about how I need to engage productive, healthy conversations and decision-making in the meetings that I’m having with our team, too. But do you have any final thoughts as we wrap up this episode in the series?

Amy (30:03):

Well, yeah, for our leaders that are listening, just think about how your ministry impact would grow if the whole team was pulling in the same direction? That’s been the heart of this series, and the team, they won’t naturally work themselves into alignment. This is a leadership thing, kind of like a car, Tony, over time, you know, your car gets out of alignment. People work themselves out of alignment over time. And if we aren’t intentional about maintaining that clear direction and effective systems and the things that we’ve talked about these last few podcasts, our team will work its way out of alignment. So I just hope our listeners will choose to join us tomorrow, May 13th, for our masterclass focusing on the four keys to align your strategy and team. And you mentioned earlier, Tony, just real quick, the four practices, clarify direction to find the wins, get the right people in the right roles, gain traction by embracing new systems, and part of this one here, lead collaboratively to eliminate silos. So we encourage you, by the way, to take your masterclass with your team and have them participate in these conversations with you altogether. And you can register at theunstuckgroup.com/masterclass.

Sean (31:10):

Well, thanks for joining us on this week’s podcast. As Amy mentioned, we’d love to have you and your team joined us on tomorrow’s masterclass online. The experience is going to help you collectively cut through all the murkiness of 2020 and clarify your priorities together. To sign up, just go to theunstuckgroup.com/masterclass. Next week, we’re back with another brand new episode. So until then, we hope you have a great week.

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