6 Elements of a Successful Staff Meeting

Sports teams have huddles.

Armies have briefings.

At Life.Church, we have weekly staff meetings to help the teams at our campuses review the weekend services, celebrate wins, and focus on the goals ahead of them.

So what exactly do our campus staff meetings look like? Here are a few key components for our staff meetings—take them and tweak them to fit your unique team.

Learn more about our staff meeting process in this free video with Campus Pastor Tome Dawson.

6 Elements of a Successful Staff Meeting

1. Start with Stories

What you do first matters most which is why we start staff meetings with stories of life change. These stories from the weekend remind us why we do what we do—work to impact people’s eternities. Stories move the heart, so it’s a great way to kick off meetings with a tone of celebration, inspiration, and awe. Because our team knows that we share stories each week, they’re actively engaging with attenders and seeking out stories all weekend long. If a team member rarely has a story to share, it’s usually an indicator that he or she isn’t connecting with attenders or volunteers, and that’s something we want to address.

 

2. Calendar

Going through logistics isn’t fun, but when all team members are present, it’s best to walk through what’s coming up the next four to six weeks. Many of our campuses use a large whiteboard calendar to highlight upcoming events, sermon series, vacation time, etc. to make sure everyone’s on the same page.

 

3. A Look at the Bench

We couldn’t do what we do at Life.Church without awesome volunteers. Each team meeting we take a look at our “bench”—the list of people who have expressed interest in serving at our campus, but haven’t started yet. We write every name on a whiteboard, and then each week we celebrate when someone serves for the first time. Going through the bench list each week allows us to celebrate with our volunteers, but it also serves as an accountability tool to make sure we’re doing everything we can to get people engaged and serving.

 

4. The Mile Marker

Mile Markers are integral to accomplishing our goals as a campus. If you want to do more than you thought possible, set a target and track its progress with Mile Markers. A Mile Marker isn’t the same thing as a goal. Instead, we use Mile Markers to track the work we’re putting in to reach a goal. For example, if we have a goal of seeing attendance of 350 for Easter services, we’ll set one Mile Marker for onboarding enough Host Team volunteers to serve 350 people and one for consistently asking attenders to invite people to services in the weeks leading up to Easter.

Mile Markers work best when they are focused on one team-wide goal within a two to three month chunk of time. When walking through this portion of the meeting, allow different team members to lead through the current Mile Marker.

 

5. Status Report and Action Steps

During this time, every part of the campus team discusses relevant updates for their respective areas: Host Team, LifeKids, etc. We look at what’s just happened (review data), what’s going on right now, and what’s coming up over the next four to six weeks. We don’t move on until we land on answers to these specific questions:

• What needs to be done?
• Who is responsible to get it done?
• When will it be completed?

When everyone is crystal clear about expectations, you’re more likely to see results and get the team to work together to accomplish goals.

 

6. Leadership Development

Every week, our staff meetings end with a focus on leadership development. It’s a huge part of what we do—we usually devote half of our time to leadership development. There are many resources to pull from like books, podcasts, TED Talks, and more.

The Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast, for example, is a great place to start. In a single podcast episode, Craig might cover four specific points related to one leadership topic. Your staff could cover one point per meeting, which dramatically expands each episode’s shelf life. Each week’s topic is really just a jumping off point. We want to generate discussion so that everyone can get involved, share unique perspectives, and grow together as individual leaders and as a team.

 

Transforming your staff meeting into the highlight of your team’s week doesn’t have to be hard. The most important thing is to communicate the right mindset: This is where we’re going to get better as a team. A staff meeting shouldn’t be a “check-the-box” event. If you’re proactive about becoming more effective as a team, you’re going to reach more people for Christ.