JANUARY TRAVEL: When To Call A Meeting Or Just Send An Email

I got a message from Liane of our national office inviting me to teach ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP specifically LEADING MEETINGS EFFECTIVELY (to my surprise) at the ENCPCDT.  I felt honoured but also puzzled.

For a moment I actually thought they mistook me for another pastor in our movement with the same name and who is way more deserving to teach this subject. But Liane assured me that yeah, I was the Jon she wanted to invite.

So I did my research, consulted with our staff, interviewed leaders, identified best practices, collected and analyzed data to come up with a simplified set of principles to help leaders lead meetings effectively.

Thought I'd share them with you here. 

First of all, if we want to lead effective meetings, we need to know the difference between 

EFFECTIVENESS and  EFFICIENCY 

Efficiency is all about doing the meeting right while effectiveness is making sure you are doing the  right meeting in the first place.  One has to know the right thing first, before he/she endeavors to do it right. Otherwise one will just waste time. In other words, effectiveness must take priority over efficiency. 

Secondly, it's good to know what a meeting does to your organization:

1) IT GETS THINGS DONE

2) IT BUILDS YOUR TEAM

Needless to say, if your meetings do not do these two things to your team or to your organization, it’s probably good to reconsider how your meetings are done.

Thirdly, It's important to know that it's not really a meeting if it doesn't have these two general description:

1) IT'S DONE FACE TO FACE  (face time/video meetings included)

2) A DISCUSSION TAKES PLACE

Which also implies, that if you don't really need a face to face discussion, the best practice is DON'T CALL A MEETING. :-) Just send an email. Trust me, your team will love you for it!

Now that we got that out of the way, let me share to you the elements of an effective meeting here.