Creating Effective, Engaging, and Enjoyable Church Leadership Meetings | An Interview with Mamie Kanfer Stewart

Mamie Kanfer Stewart founded her first business at the age of 12 and her entrepreneurial spirit combined with the desire to optimize how people work led Mamie to build Meeteor, whose mission is to enable individuals and teams to thrive at work, with a special emphasis on effective meetings. Mamie is a dynamic speaker and has presented at numerous events and been interviewed on a variety of podcasts. She has been featured in Forbes, Inc, Business Collective, and PCMag, and writes about productivity, healthy team culture, and meeting best practices. She is also a nationally syndicated columnist and national media personality and the author of “Momentum: Creating Effective, Engaging and Enjoyable Meetings”. Highlights (8:30) Common meeting challenges #1: Meetings that don’t have a clear purpose * “I don’t know why we’re having this meeting” and “I don’t know why I’m at this meeting” * (11:35) How to create a clear purpose * Create a desired outcome – “I want the outcome of this meeting to be….” * Detailed agenda helps to see if meeting is leading to desired outcome (agenda is created from desired outcome) * (19:20) At beginning of the meeting or subsection of meeting, state the desired outcome (22:30) Six kinds of meeting types: * Make a decision * Create a plan * Generate ideas * Align people’s understanding (different than sharing information) * Connect (building relationships) * Produce (24:25) Common Meeting Challenges #2: How meetings end and what happens after * Record of the decisions made and next steps (stated and written) * Make record easy for everyone to access * (34:00) Meetings are a cycle * Decisions and next steps coming out of one meeting may become part of the desired outcome of the next meeting * Helps people get out of the mindset that meetings are discrete isolated events * (37:15) Importance of reviewing and revisiting meeting notes (42:00) Engaging meeting participants as a meeting leader (45:00) Best practices for avoiding meetings that should be emails * Could this outcome be achieved by another form of collaboration? (50:00) Creating space in a meeting for private reflection time (51:00) “Norms” – ground rules or expectations for how the conversation/meeting is going to be run Links Momentum: Creating Effective, Engaging, and Enjoyable Meetings, by Mamie Kanfer Stewart Successful Meetings Start with Why Advance Your Meeting Conversation with Norms 5 Practices to Make Every Meeting Matter www.mamieks.com On Twitter at: @mamieks www.meeteor.com 7 Unbreakable Rules of Church Meetings, by Leading Saints