This is a guest post by Ryan T. Hartwig and Warren Bird, authors of Teams that Thrive: Five Disciplines of Collaborative Church Leadership, which is out today.

Certainly meeting advice is ubiquitous; our goal is not to repeat that here. Instead, we just want to report the meeting practices that differentiated thriving teams from underperforming teams in our recent study of nearly 150 church leadership teams. As you read what follows, notice what’s missing: the number of meetings or the number of hours spent in meetings. Thus it appears that “too many meetings” or “too much time spent in meetings” aren’t the scapegoats for poor team performance. Our data shows that there are many different ways to do effective meetings, but a few key practices make a great difference.

1. Teams do more than formally “meet” together. They collaborate continuously.

On top teams, meeting times don’t bound their teamwork. Instead, senior leadership teamwork is ongoing, not just occurring during meetings. In fact, we found that meeting informally for more than one hour per week was a contributing factor to differences between top and mediocre teams.

Two key strategies best enable continuous teamwork. The first is to fight like crazy against overwork and busyness. The second strategy is to develop office environments where it is easy for team members to bump into one another. Shared conference rooms and break rooms, stocked fridges, shared administrative support staff members and offices in close proximity to one another encourage team members to frequently bump into one another, creating additional opportunities to continue the team’s important work outside of the boardroom. This active engagement carries over in the boardroom as well.

2. Meeting agendas are distributed to all team members, preferably at least one day in advance.

Distributing meaningful agendas is so powerful for several reasons. First, it forces the meeting facilitator to spend time planning out the priorities and flow of the meeting beforehand, to an extent that it can be shared with others. Second, it informs all participants of the meeting’s purpose and content, which enables each participant to come prepared. Third, it provides structure to the meeting that encourages the team to stay on task and focused throughout the meeting.

3. Meeting agendas are not solely developed by the lead pastor.

Top teams get the whole team involved in setting the agenda. While most senior team meetings were convened and facilitated by either the senior pastor or executive pastor, top teams offered opportunities for other team members to shape the team’s agenda.

This input can be offered in a few different ways. First, meeting conveners can directly ask team members for items to include on the agenda several days prior to the meeting. Second, conveners can offer a standing invitation to send agenda items. Third, conveners can develop the agenda in such a way that a place to discuss the typical issues is slated on the agenda each week.

For instance, each week an agenda may have a slot for “personnel issues,” during which each team member is invited to broach discussions or to bring a decision to the group regarding personnel matters. To make this option work, however, conveners must create space for team members to bring up and discuss important issues, rather than overwhelm the meeting time with other agenda items.

4. Agendas clearly delineate the work for the meeting.

For top teams, the agenda is thoughtfully developed enough to truly guide the team’s discussion and progress through the meeting, rather than agendas that are so vague and routine that no one pays attention to them. Such agendas include:

• implicit or explicit time periods for each agenda item
• intentionally ordered items, often leaving the most important discussion items in the middle of the agenda
• consistent format so that participants know what you expect in each meeting and can find necessary information quickly
• enough detail to discourage participants from wondering what is coming later in the meeting

Agendas provide a forum to capture what has been decided during the meeting, individual expectations for followup and a framework to develop the agenda for the next team meeting.

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Excerpted with permission from chapter 12 of Teams That Thrive: Five Disciplines of Collaborative Church Leadership by Ryan T. Hartwig and Warren Bird, InterVarsity Press, 2015. Visit www.TeamsThatThriveBook.com for the book itself, exercises, and other tools to help your team.

A good word from Cut to the Chase: and 99 Other Rules to Liberate Yourself and Gain Back the Gift of Time:

The higher up in an organization you go, the more likely you will see appointments being scheduled in ten-minute slots. Below the top level, half an hour seems to be the shortest meeting achievable. Whenever possible, go for ten.

Seth Godin posted last week on Getting Serious About Your Meeting Problem. It was a good post, and brings up some things I’d like to develop further off and on.

For a longer treatment of the subject — and from a somewhat unexpected angle — I’d also recommend Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting.

Lencioni’s premise in Death by Meeting is not what you might expect. He doesn’t jump on the usual bandwagon of trashing on meetings. In fact, he believes that the mindset of “if I didn’t have to go to meetings, I’d like my job more” is not a good one. It would be like a surgeon saying, “If I didn’t have to operate on people, I’d like my job more.”

So instead, Lencioni’s point is that we need to make meetings better. In fact, he argues that meetings should be more interesting than movies.

The reason most meetings are bad is that they lack two things: (1) context and (2) drama. The way to make meetings better, then, is to provide context and drama.

To provide context, he lays out the different kinds of meetings that should exist, and argues that harm is done when we combine incompatible things into the same meeting. For example, tactical and strategic meetings should be kept distinct. You shouldn’t bog down a strategic meeting with tactical issues.

Beyond this, meetings ought to be more interesting than movies because they actually affect reality. They key to making them so is drama. Not artifical drama, for sure. But by being willing to engage in constructive ideological conflict and mine for differences, meetings become naturally engaging, compelling, and energizing.

One-on-one’s are weekly 30-minute meetings between a manager and each person that reports to him or her.

The guys at Manager Tools say that they are the most effective management tool that they know of. They have a series of three podcats on one-on-one’s along with a worksheet that provides some additional details.

I found the podcasts so helpful that I took some notes over them. Here are my notes.

Purpose
The purpose of 1:1’s is communication. A culture of communication, in turn, is a key ingredient of organization-wide alignment and coordination across departments. Communication is the most important lever an organization has for performance.

Basics

1. Regularly scheduled.
2. Rarely missed. This means “always reschedule,” instead of canceling. [I would say that sometimes, it just won’t be possible to reschedule and a week will have to be missed.]
3. Primary focus is on the team member.
4. Take notes. Keep in a notebook or electronically, and in each meeting refer back to follow-up items.

Agenda
Here is the standing agenda that seems to work best:

1. 10 minutes: Them. Agenda items they bring and whatever they want to talk about.
2. 10 minutes: You. Agenda items you’ve brought; updates that will be useful to them to know. Touch base on status of projects and quarterly goals if desired.
3. 10 minutes: The future/development. (If there is time left for this.)

Preparation
To prepare, they suggest that it can be helpful to review 5 questions. [What I basically do is review notes from the last meeting and pull together agenda items I’ve collected along other items that come to mind (updates that will be useful, etc.).]

Anyway, here are the five questions they suggest:

1. What things in my notes from last meeting do I need to follow up on? Then write them on your agenda.
2. What do I need to be sure to communicate to this person?
3. What positive feedback can I give this person?
4. What adjusting feedback am I going to give this peson?
5. Is there something I can delegate? (“There is a gross under-delegation epidemic in America.”)

When I think of suffering, I typically think first about major trials such as famines or significant personal hardship. As we probably should.

But there are many forms of suffering, some of which we are responsible for placing on others. In our organizations, bad meetings are one such instance that deserve more attention.

Bad meetings have an effect on people beyond the meeting itself. They have ripple effects that flow throughout the organization and, perhaps even worse, into the lives and homes of our employees.

Alternatively, running effective meetings — meetings where you get things done and people actually enjoy being there — creates positive ripple effects that impact the organization and, perhaps more importantly, the lives and homes of our employees.

Patrick Lencioni makes this point very well in his book Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable…About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business (p. 253):

Bad meetings exact a toll on the human beings who must endure them, and this goes far beyond mere momentary dissatisfaction. Bad meetings, and what they indicate and provoke in an organization, generate real human suffering in the form of anger, lethargy, and cynicism. And while this certainly has a profound impact on organizational life, it also impacts people’s self-esteem, their families, and their outlook on life.

And so, for those of us who lead organizations and the employees who work within them, improving meetings is not just an opportunity to enhance the performance of our companies. It is also a way to positively impact the lives of our people. And that includes us.