Issue No. 112 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a geography quiz and a unique resource book to add more value to your staff meetings, plus a comment from the Printing Bucket. And this reminder, visit my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
Inspired Meetings
I encourage teams to meet weekly (either in department groupings or in full staff meetings), but—trust me—I’ve endured (and often led) more than my fair share of really boring staff meetings. So if the meetings you lead are not fun and inspiring for you—why drag other team members into the drudgery?
The solution? Your weekly meetings need a balanced dose of Cause, Community and Corporation. The Corporation side (budgets, binders and bureaucracy) often overload the meeting agenda—to the neglect of the relational needs of Community and the results and strategy imperatives of the Cause. Always evaluate your staff meetings with an eye on the three-legged stool of Cause, Community and Corporation. Are your meetings balanced with all three?
To add inspiration to your weekly staff meetings, bring this week’s amazing resource book to your next meeting. Operation World lists every country of the world in alphabetical order and includes a map, population, language, religion and missions statistics, plus prayer requests. It also includes the percentage of evangelical Christians in each nation. Resources available on the Operation World website also feature revisions and updates and a different country to pray for each day. Check out the needs and stats for the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, the prayer reminder listed for today, November 3.
Amazingly, I met Rev. Kenneth Ragoonath, president of the Evangelical Association of the Caribbean, who lives in Trinidad and Tobago, last week at the World Evangelical Alliance’s General Assembly in Thailand. The 128 member countries of the WEA meet together just every six years. I was privileged to attend and lead six hours of workshops on ways leaders might strengthen their national evangelical alliances and associations. For news releases, photos, audio and video clips of this important assembly, visit the WEA media center website.
To order this week’s book from Amazon, click on this title: Operation World: When We Pray God Works (21st Century Edition), by Patrick Johnstone.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) Here’s a geographical quiz for you today. What continents are each of these countries located in? a) Suriname, b) Burundi, c) Papua New Guinea, d) Guyana, e) Guinea, and f) Trinidad and Tobago.
2) In each country, estimate the percentage of Christians. Extra credit: estimate the percentage of Evangelicals. (For the answers, consult this week’s recommended book.)
Elevate Execution - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas in the Printing Bucket, chapter 19, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is to elevate execution and the genius of aligning your printing and communication functions with your really big ideas and initiatives. Don’t leave the details to the novices.
Companies, nonprofits and churches all have the same disease: The senior team focuses on vision and the junior team executes. While this sounds good, it often relegates the incredibly important functions of the Printing Bucket to team members who are burdened with major responsibility and no authority.
The solution, of course, is to elevate execution. In the book, Execution, with co-author Ram Charan, Chairman Larry Bossidy writes, “My job at Honeywell International these days is to restore the discipline to a company that had lost it. Many people regard execution as detail work that’s beneath the dignity of a business leader. That’s wrong. To the contrary, it’s a leader’s most important job.”
At your next senior management team meeting, think differently about the Printing Bucket. Elevate printing by describing how the printing deadlines will help you improve execution. (No jokes please.) Leverage this bucket in new ways so that the printed piece (or your website or a podcast) becomes the eloquent summary of a thoughtful process that integrates all the details of your programs and projects.
When you use the printing press as the carrot (the motivator), be it a Heidelberg printing press or FedEx Kinko’s, you’ll be amazed at how you can align virtually all of the other buckets and balls together: customers, pricing, results, strategy, programs, marketing, volunteers, delegation, budget, and on and on.
When senior people are involved in the Printing Bucket, the top-of-the-line projects like your BHAG (Big Holy Audacious Goal), your key strategies and your passion for results will naturally ooze their way into your communication tools in unique and innovative ways. The results will be breathtaking. The monthly newsletter will no longer be one more task on your To-Do List; it will be an opportunity to inspire and motivate the troops.
Check out chapter 19 for the six strategic “printing” best practices (including why Fred Smith said that writing it down “burns the fuzz off your thinking”). Plus, visit the Printing Bucket on our website for resources, downloadable worksheets, and four recommended books for your printing coordinator.
NOVEMBER 18-19, 2008. Join your colleagues at our final Buckets workshops this fall. Mastering the Management Buckets Workshop Experience will be Nov.18-19, 2008, in San Dimas, Calif., hosted by Christian Community Credit Union. For more details and to download the workshop brochure, visit The Workshop page on the Management Buckets website.
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