As bishop, he could cancel any meeting on a whim. Soon after his call, he shared with me one day how different the feeling is to be a counselor to a presiding authority as opposed to being the presiding authority. I had a good friend that was released as a bishop because he was called to his stake presidency. 2. Anyone Can Cancel (No Excuse Required) If you can’t see how the meeting can stay under an hour, just cancel it because you aren’t ready to hold a meeting. But never, and I mean NEVER, is a meeting worth 61 minutes. I’d even go so far as to say that any meeting can be done in 30 minutes and I’ll encourage you to try, but you can be comfortable with 60. Let’s close with prayer.” If you go over, you will find the creativity in the room plummet and individuals will agree to anything just to get out of there. Once the timer sounds the presiding authority should say, “Well, looks like we have more to discuss but our time is up. This shouldn’t be a vague 60 minutes that grows to 90 minutes with the presiding authority stating, “oops, looks like we went 30 minutes over.” This is a hard 60 minutes. If you don’t give the meeting a time limit, it will grow out of control. There is a concept called Parkinson’s law, which states that a meeting (or any task) will expand to fill the time you allotted for it. Set it for 60 minutes and tell everyone in the room they are free to walk out once that timer sounds. If you need help with not getting carried away in a meeting, your next meeting should have a kitchen timer present. If you can’t help but go over the 1 hour mark, then you need more discipline through a timer. Nobody enjoys them and they need to stop. Do you disagree? (please comment below) Meetings longer than 60 minutes damage your effectiveness as a leader. This is nice encouragement for those holding 3 hour meetings (you should be ashamed), but in reality there is no meeting that needs to go longer than 60 minutes. Handbook 2 ( 4.6) advises ward council should be 60-90 minutes in duration. In an effort to do this, let’s review the 7 Unbreakable Rules of Church Meetings 7 Unbreakable Rules of Church Meetings 1. 60 Minute Limit (seriously) If it isn’t, cancel it it isn’t worth holding a meeting that is anything different. So let’s agree that you won’t hold another meeting unless you have sufficiently outlined it as a revelatory experience. So all of that speaks to the spiritual nature of this work and seeking for the inspiration to do what the Lord wants us to do. In these latter days, given the forces of the adversary and the darkness, no one person in the family and no one person in a ward is going to be the conduit through which all of the answers come. And if members of councils, if members of families, as they come together, would think in terms of “I’m preparing to participate in a revelatory experience with my family” instead of going to a meeting-a revelatory experience with the members of the ward council-I think we would prepare and act much differently. We’ve been talking about a revelatory experience with the members of the ward council. We have not been talking about a ward council meeting. If I had the wish of my heart, I would remove from the vocabulary of the Latter-day Saints the word meeting. I’m not saying meeting as a ward council more often is a bad idea but if you do, make sure you set some clear objectives and rules. They want the ward council to work together more often and elevate the ward in general however, I’m not sure if scheduling more meetings is the answer. I don’t think these authorities are trying to torture anyone with more meetings. Some are even mandating ward council to be held weekly. Handbook 2 ( 18.2) tells us that ward council should be held “regularly (at least monthly).” I’ve heard about general authorities visiting local stakes and encouraging bishops to hold ward council more than just once a month. I’m talking about council meetings (ward council, presidency meetings, stake high council, etc.). When I say meeting I am not referring to any meetings in the 3 hour block. I want to use Ward Council as the model in this post, but this information can be applied to most meetings within the church. If you run a bad meeting, the only thing to increase is the eye-rolling. If you run a good meeting, those who follow you will be more willing to serve you. How you run a meeting has a dramatic influence on how you are loved as a leader. This may come across as a blunt message, but meetings are either well done or toxic and it’s important that leaders get them right. Rarely do people enjoy attending meetings but we still discover ways to plan more meetings. Meetings in the Church-it’s a love/hate thing. Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
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