Issue No. 113 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a perfect Christmas or year-end gift book for donors and leaders. We’re also pleased to announce that the Mastering the Management Buckets Workshop is now “down under” and planned for five cities in Australia beginning Dec. 3, sponsored by Christian Management Australia. And this reminder, all of my past issues and book reviews are archived here, plus check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
Prioritize Core Values
This week’s book asks the $64,000 question. “What is most important in your organization? Is quality more important than innovation? Does customer service take precedence over quality? Are profits a higher priority than integrity?”
Author Jim Seybert adds, “It’s not enough to have a list of core values. They need to be prioritized so there’s no question about which has a higher value when push comes to shove.”
This leadership nugget was from the September 30 devotional selection from Seybert’s insightful book, The One Year Mini for Leaders. It’s the perfect gift book for donors, board members and other leaders in your organization. There are 12 themes addressed including Action, Communication, Focus, Future, History, Integrity, Staff, Success, Time, Uniqueness, Vision and Wisdom. Each day (January 1 to December 31) features a verse from the New Living Translation, a leadership insight, and a bottom line comment.
You’ll find dozens of street-smart gems like, “What you say in the elevator can become policy by tomorrow morning, so be careful what you say and where you say it.” To order this week’s book from Amazon, click on this title: The One Year Mini for Leaders, by Jim Seybert.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) Who would like to stand up, put their hand on their heart, and recite our organization’s core values?
2) In groups of three, prioritize our core values. If “push comes to shove,” which core value is the most important?
WOW Factor Meetings - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas in the Meetings Bucket, chapter 20, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is to create the W.O.W. Factor in your meetings: Welcoming, Organized and Warm. Smart leaders and managers produce a welcoming environment for every meeting and understand this axiom: “The meeting begins when the first person arrives.”
Skilled meeting facilitators have a sixth sense about the “WOW Factor.” They know that you don’t need a knock-your-socks-off extravaganza in every meeting, but you do need to monitor the meeting temperature constantly. The room temperature is important, but the group temperature is critical.
Routine meetings quickly spiral into boredom and sheer agony. Each of the four social styles (Analyticals, Drivers, Amiables and Expressives) has different expectations for your meetings. If you are not a skilled meeting facilitator and “don’t know yet what you don’t know,” ask two or three people at your next meeting to quietly evaluate the WOW Factor of your meeting with the checklist,
WOW Factor Meeting Evaluation (see download info below).
Check out chapter 20 for the three strategic best practices for meetings (including why Patrick Lencioni recommends four types of meetings). Plus, visit the Meetings Bucket on our website for resources, downloadable worksheets, and four book recommendations.
CEO DIALOGUES: DEC. 3, 2008. CEOs: Join your colleagues for the next CEO Dialogues, a one-day roundtable for presidents, CEOs, executive directors and senior pastors, at South Hills Country Club in West Covina, Calif. For more information, visit www.CEODialogues.org.
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