Ms. Ann Bezzerides: My name is Ann Mitsakos Bezzerides, and thank you for joining us for this episode today. The goal of this podcast is to give you, Orthodox clergy and lay leaders, the knowledge, tools, and resources you need to be better stewards of your influence and to have greater impact on the organizations you lead. I’m here today with Dn. Michael Hyatt. How are you, Dn. Michael?

Dn. Michael Hyatt: I’m doing great, Ann! How are you doing?

Ms. Bezzerides: I’m good, I’m good! You’re back from a couple productive days of meetings.

Dn. Michael: I am! I was in New York at St. Vladimir’s Seminary. We were having our biannual board meetings, and they were awesome. I mean, I don’t usually say that, and I’ve not always feel that way about meetings, but we had two days of very productive meetings. How about you? I understand you were doing some traveling, too.

Ms. Bezzerides: I was doing some traveling, too, but I want to pause on the fact that two days of meetings in the church you describe as “awesome”—

Dn. Michael: I know, those two words don’t usually go together.

Ms. Bezzerides: Exactly. Pretty unusual, and is a cool lead-in to what you’re going to share with us today, because I think so many of us struggle with meetings, and especially long church meetings.

Dn. Michael: Absolutely, and I’ve been in my share of meetings, as I’ll talk about in this episode, where I’ve wanted to doze off and had a hard time staying focused and kept looking at my watching and wondering: When is this going to end? But not the last two days, not the meetings we had in New York; those were very productive and I enjoyed them.

Ms. Bezzerides: You’re giving us all hope that we can get there, so that’s exciting.

Dn. Michael: Good! I’m so glad.

Ms. Bezzerides: Yeah! So today we are, for our listeners, we’re talking about how to lead highly productive meetings. I sense it’s deeply important, but, Dn. Michael, why would you say it’s super important?

Dn. Michael: Well, I think we have to start with visiting the honest planet and acting like we’re really honest here in the church, but church meetings are often poorly organized, they are poorly run, and hardly anyone knows why they’re there and what they’re supposed to accomplish. I’ve certainly been in my share of those kind of meetings. Worse, they seem to last forever! And these kind of meetings masquerade as productivity, but our time and our energy kind of tell us otherwise, and so there’s got to be a better way, and, thankfully, there is! And in this episode we’re going to explore five steps to flip everything you hate about meetings and turn them into highly productive, even enjoyable events. So that’s my commitment.

Ms. Bezzerides: Amazing. All right. As we begin, let me encourage all our listeners to post your comments in the comment section of YouTube or wherever you happen to be watching, comments and questions. Dn. Michael will be answering those questions live in the second half of our show. If you want to ask your question anonymously, you can text us at 615‐721‐2303. Okay, Dn. Michael, tell us about how you got interested in this topic?

Dn. Michael: Well, as I mentioned, yesterday I returned from what I thought was an incredibly productive meeting in New York at the seminary where I serve as executive chair of the St. Vlad’s board of trustees, and it was long. I mean, it was two days’ worth of meetings, and literally we were going ten hours a day, between the services and the meetings that we were having, but we accomplished what we had set out to do. And we stayed on point; we had great, lively conversations; we made significant decisions; we knew exactly what was expected of us afterwards; everybody left knowing exactly what the gameplan was and what their part of it was. But that hasn’t always been the case, and I’m not just talking about St. Vlad’s or church meetings, but throughout my career, I’ve sat in thousands of meetings, Ann, as I’m sure you have. Some of them were good; many weren’t. In fact, I’d say the majority of meetings that I’ve sat through in my past 40 years of career have been far less productive than they could have been. Some have been downright awful, and I don’t think I’m alone in that experience.

So about 20 years ago, I decided there’s got to be a better way. We’ve got to engineer these meetings for a better outcome. Meetings shouldn’t have to be something we dread, and especially in the church. This should be something we look forward to and should be a major tool that we can use for moving our churches, our local parishes, whatever organization we run—for moving those forward. So since that time, I’ve written an entire book on this subject. It’s called No-Fail Meetings, and you can find it at a link that my wife is going to provide in the chat because it’s kind of long and complicated. It’s not for sale on Amazon, I want to say, but you could pick up a copy at the link that Gail’s going to post. I’ve also got an entire course called “No-Fail Meetings” that thousands of individuals and hundreds of teams have gone through. In fact, it’s even taught now at St. Vlad’s Seminary. So this is something near and dear to my heart. It’s just something that doesn’t have to be as bad as we often make it.

Ms. Bezzerides: So cool. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, for passing this on to all of us.

Dn. Michael: You’re welcome.

Ms. Bezzerides: And I know you have a framework you’re going to share with us now, and I’m so excited to dig into that. As I think about our listeners and where we’re all at as we are trying to work on ministry and so many people across the country—parish ministry, organizational ministry, and generally how challenging to many of our meetings can be—I was just thinking, as our listeners head in to listening to you, what might make sense is just think of one meeting that you’re going into that you would love to improve. You’ve got a lot of suggestions, and I would love, myself—I’d love to retool everything all at once, and I know that if I thought that, I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do any of it.

Dn. Michael: Exactly.

Ms. Bezzerides: So that, as we dig in: just think of one meeting that you want to improve, and make a hundred times better than it is right now. So, Dn. Michael, take us through your framework.

Dn. Michael: So let me start by saying, and just kind of to your point, you know, the biggest improvements that we ever experience are a little bit like investing and experiencing compound interest for ourselves. It’s usually not a big, flashy return when we save, but over time it adds up, and that’s the same thing with meetings. If we can make these small, incremental changes over time, they’re really going to add up. And we can transform our organizations, transform our meeting culture: make it something that we actually want to look forward to. So what I want to share is a framework of five steps to kind of create these more highly productive meetings. Let me begin with the first one.

Step number one is that you’ve got to decide. You’ve got to decide that these meetings are going to be more important, that they’re going to be a bigger deal, and you’ve got to decide, frankly, whether you’ve got to have a meeting or not, because sometimes you don’t. And that’s the first step you’ve got to take: Decide if you need a meeting at all. If your church is going to achieve major goals, you’ve got to be able to plan, coordinate, and tackle them together with the people in your church, particularly the people that are in leadership in your church. Meetings have the power to focus thinking, create alignment, force decisions, and drive results. In fact, 97% of employees consider that kind of collaboration in the business world essential for doing their best work; and according to Joanne Cleaver, in an article for business researchers, they said that: most employees consider it essential if they’re going to collaborate and create alignment.

So, as much as we might fantasize about abolishing all meetings—and, frankly, as an introvert, I do fantasize about that—we don’t want to do that. Instead, we’ve got to learn how to lead great meetings, and I’m here to tell you that’s absolutely possible: for every leader, for everybody listening to this episode. You can lead and experience better meetings—but it might take some changes.

It really begins with making some key decisions about the meeting itself, and the best way to do that is by answering five what I call “filtering” questions. Let’s get to a few of those here, and I’m going to hope my graphics on my screen are going to cooperate, and it looks like they actually might. So five filtering questions. Number one, and that is this: Is the meeting necessary? Is the meeting necessary? You know, too often we just kind of default to meetings. We don’t ask that question, and we’ve got to know if it’s necessary. That’s the first decision that we need to make, and it’s often the one that we skip. So it’s simply to ask if this meeting is necessary. And as a rule, we’re too quick to meet. When a question or problem comes up, it’s so much easier to: “Let’s defer to a meeting. Let’s set up a meeting” than it is to spend a few brain-cycles in the moment to solve the problem.

And we need to be especially wary of what I’m going to call “status update meetings.” And the research shows that about 45% of all meetings are exactly those kinds of meetings. One-third of workers consider these a complete waste of times, and I’ve seen leaders spend hours in meetings for updates that would have taken mere minutes in Slack or email or some other communication; just picking up the phone would have been easier.

But as the leader, it’s your responsibility to determine if the meeting is actually necessary. I want to suggest you ask yourself three questions to determine that. First: Could I, as the leader, simply make a call about the issue at hand instead of roping in other people and belaboring the decision? And I think, honestly, a lot of leaders call meetings because they’re afraid to make a decision. They have the power; they have the authority; it’s not complex; it doesn’t require a lot of input—they could just make the decision. So don’t call a meeting if it’s a decision you could make and the path forward is pretty clear.

Second question is: If this is a recurring meeting established more than six months ago, is it still beneficial? Has it outlived its purpose? Could it be canceled? I’ve been in those kind of reoccurring meetings in the corporate world where I’ve just said, “This is a complete waste of time,” and I’ve gone to my boss or I’ve gone to whatever the governing group is, and I’ve said, “You know, there was a time where this meeting was really important, but no longer. It’s outlived its usefulness, and we need to consider an alternative.”

Question number three: Could we accomplish our desired outcome just as easily a different way, such as email exchange, maybe a quick Zoom call or a phone call? Or, maybe this is a fourth question, could a subset or a group meet or talk offline and still achieve the meeting purpose?

So that’s probably the first filtering question that we need to ask. Ann, by the way, feel free to interrupt me here along the time, and I’ll switch the screen so we’ve got both of us up. But there’s a second question, and the next question is this. It’s: Are you sure it’s necessary? Now, let me explain what I mean by this. You don’t want to be guilty of what David Grady calls in his TEDTalk “Mindless Acceptance Syndrome.” I love this phrase! So he says, “The primary symptom (and I’m quoting) of Mindless Acceptance Syndrome is just accepting a meeting invitation the minute it pops up in your calendar.” It’s an involuntary reflex. Ding—click—bam! Now it’s on your calendar. So here’s reality: you’re going to always have more opportunities than time, and accepting too many meetings leaves you overcommitted; it prevents you from doing your best work; and if you give your time away from anyone who asks, you’ll never have enough left to accomplish your most meaningful work, the work that you and only you can do as a leader of the organization.

So, before hitting “accept” on your next meeting request, ask: Is this meeting important? I mean, that’s a question we never ask, but it’s worth asking: Is the meeting important? Is it important for me? It may be important, but it may not be necessary that you actually attend. This is where you’ve got to trust the people that may be running the meetings in your parish, whether it’s the parish council president or somebody in charge of a committee, but you don’t have to be at every meeting.

And then: Can I afford the time given, given my other priorities? You know, sometimes we just have to triage our calendar and say, “Look, that’s an important meeting, but I don’t have the time to attend to that and everything else that I and only I can do.” Here’s another question: Could someone take my place? Could I send a delegate? Could somebody represent me in the meeting? And then finally: Is there another way this request could be handled? So that’s kind of the second of our filtering questions. I’m going to keep going unless you—

Ms. Bezzerides: Yeah, I do. I want to stop you here if I can. So both on these things give us some graceful ways… Let’s say somebody’s asked you for a meeting, and you realize right away it’s not necessary, or for any of these reasons—you can’t afford the time, somebody else could be in your place—give us some graceful ways of how… Let’s say you’re head priest at a small parish, with an overachieving parish council, for example, and they want to meet with you, and you realize that the meeting, for whatever reason, is not important—but you also don’t want to deflate them, and you also want to teach them about how to value your time.

Dn. Michael: Right. Well, I think one of the things you can do is simply encourage them that you believe that they’re completely capable of running the meeting and coming to a good conclusion. So I think that over time you’ve got to communicate that level of trust with your team so that they’re free to have those meetings without you. I know this happens all the time in my own organization, where lots of meetings: I don’t know a tenth of what goes on in my organization, and there’s meetings happening all the time. We’ve got about 75 full-time employees. But I think it’s because I trust them and I’m committed to developing them, and sometimes they just have to be able to go solo and without me kind of looking over their shoulder.

I don’t have a pilot’s license, but I have had friends that have gotten pilot’s licenses, and of course when they initially start flying, they fly with an instructor who sits right next to them and is kind of their co-pilot in case something goes awry, but eventually they have to solo. I think that if you’re in the people development business, which I think that all of us are as clergy or as leaders, that I think it’s important that we move from doing it all to moving kind of to that role of being a coach. And certainly with regard to meetings, we can coach people and encourage them and help them prepare and do some of the things we’re talking about today.

I think sometimes, though, we have to be the person, as the leader, if it’s a meeting that we think’s a waste of time and that’s really the reason that we’re going. If it’s a waste of our time, maybe it’s a waste—not always—maybe it’s a waste of everybody’s time, and maybe we need to call it into question.

Sometimes I get meeting requests from random people that are kind of one-off meetings, and I don’t know if this happens—it’s probably more difficult for priests to do what I’m about to suggest, but one of the things I like to do—and this is the reason I populate my calendar with actually scheduled activities or scheduled commitments with just me—and I call this, and I’ll talk about it, time in the alone zone. But here’s what happens. For a busy pastor, let’s say that he’s got to find time to prepare his homily: so schedule that time on your calendar so that when somebody asks for that time, you can honestly say, “Ooh, I’ve got another commitment at that time. Could we find another time?” And I think that a lot of us default to feeling like we’ve got to explain what that commitment is. Nobody needs that; nobody cares! If you say, “I’ve got another commitment,” I’ve literally never had anybody pry and say, “Well, what is your other commitment?” They just don’t do that. So just say, “I have another commitment,” and that’s legitimate: you do! You have a commitment, and if it’s a case of preparing your homily, it’s a commitment to prepare your homily; you want to do a good job. So, yeah, those are just a couple of ideas.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s great. Thank you.

Dn. Michael: You’re welcome. Okay, let’s go to the third filtering question: Who else should be involved? Who else should be involved? Let me elaborate on this just a little bit. Reality is that people are busy, and the last thing that anyone needs is another meeting, unless it’s relevant to them and their participation is relevant to the meeting’s purpose—more about that in just a little bit, because we’re going to talk about meeting purposes.

So here’s what you want. You want a diversity of viewpoints. Ann, I can’t overemphasize this. This is critically important, to cultivate a diversity of viewpoints. Don’t fall into the trap—pastors!—of only inviting people who are going to support you. I like to remember the old adage that says, “If two of you agree on everything, one of you is unnecessary.” So there are other people that you might, if you’re not careful, just sort of frame as “John’s always so negative” or “he always provides negative feedback.” Well, here’s the thing about John: John might see something that you otherwise would miss.

I used to have a guy that was a web developer; his name was Andrew. And Andrew was always the negative guy in the meetings. He was always the guy that saw the glass half-full; he was the guy that saw every problem that we had for every proposed solution. And honestly, he saved our bacon a number of times, but he wasn’t always appreciated. I had to go to him and coach him and say, “Look, Andrew, I do not want to throttle what you see. I want you to be fully expressed, and I want you to share what you see, but I want you to be sensitive for the timing, because the timing for that is not at the beginning of a conversation when we’re just kind of blue-sky thinking and all the rest. That shuts people down. But we’re going to eventually get to that; we’re going to eventually get to you, and we need what you see, because that will make it better.” So you want a diversity of viewpoints.

And you also don’t want people in the meeting—and this is a big, big problem—who refuse to engage: who just sit there, breathing the oxygen, and take up space; they’re kind of deadwood. You don’t want that. You want people who are fully committed, fully engaged, participating, and have something to contribute. But I would say this, and that usually less is more. You want as many as are necessary, but no more than are required to make good, solid decisions, because if you have too many people involved, it’s just going to bog down the meeting. It’s like you’re trying to get people aligned, and the more people you have, it becomes exponentially difficult to get people aligned. Does that make sense?

Ms. Bezzerides: It makes a ton of sense; very helpful.

Dn. Michael: Good. Okay, great. All right, let me go back to, I think—was I on question four?

Ms. Bezzerides: Can I follow up before you get there?

Dn. Michael: Yeah, yeah!

Ms. Bezzerides: So let’s say you’ve got a group, and within that group, meeting, wherever it is, you have either some dead weight or some people who… people who refuse to engage, or some people who are argumentative just to be argumentative, without the spirit that you’re able to coach around, of positivity at the end? What do you do? If you’ve got some people who are challenging in meetings that are really important, what do you do?

Dn. Michael: Yeah, you know, one of the things I’ve observed is that so often people in the church are so conflict-avoidant that they will skate around an issue and never be direct, and I’ll give you an example. So back when I was the CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, at that job I had about 75 vice-presidents in the company—we were a large, large company—we were having a meeting, and I had this one guy who was over-engaged. He was—every time there was a question, every time we took a pause for questions, he was the first guy on his feet and he would ask a question. And he would kind of suck all the air out of the room, so nobody else felt like there was time for them to participate, and it was really a negative thing.

So, as much as I hated it—and believe me, I am conflict-avoidant by nature; I don’t like to confront people; it’s difficult for me to be direct—but I went to him at one of the breaks, and I just kind of got down next to him, sat down next to him, and I said, “Hey, Ed, your input is fantastic, but I need you to manage it and be self-aware enough to know that there are other people in the room who also want to speak, and if you speak at every opportunity—” And I said, “I know you’re a quick thinker; you’re very smart, and that’s part of what’s happening here, but you’ve got to be self-aware as a leader, and you’ve got to make space for the other people in this group to be able to speak.”

Did he resent it? No! He thanked me! He said, “Thank you so much. I had no idea I was doing that,” but now all of a sudden he became aware, and then all of a sudden the problem corrected itself.

Ms. Bezzerides: Wow.

Dn. Michael: So I think you’ve just got to speak up and be direct with people. Jesus certainly was, and that’s just part of the whole process of—and I’m going to use a word that we don’t often use in the Orthodox Church, but that’s part of the process of discipling people, helping them to accept some level of discipline for themselves, and certainly disciplining their behavior, in conformity with Christ, so that they can live a life that’s well-pleasing to him, and that includes being in meetings. Does that make sense?

Ms. Bezzerides: It makes a ton of sense, and my guess, Dn. Michael, is that your spirit in approaching him was one of warmth, of positivity. In the church context we’d say you loved him, and there was that feeling there, as opposed to irritation, shutting him down “feel” when you approach somebody.

Dn. Michael: Right. Yeah, and, trust me, I’ve done that, too, and it doesn’t work. But somebody challenged me years ago; they said, “You know, the leader’s challenge is to speak the truth in love.” And we’ve talked about this in previous episodes, but it’s easy to go one stream or the other. It’s easy to speak the truth for some people—they’re just naturally truth-speakers. And this week I was with some of my friends at the seminary from Romania, and one of my buddies called me aside and said, “You know, it’s so fantastic in American culture. I feel like you guys just beat around the bush instead of just being direct.” And my experience, and it’s limited, but my experience of Romanian culture is that people are direct; they’re not afraid to speak the truth.

But the truth is not enough. It’s got to be done in love. And certainly they do it in love, but I’m just saying it’s got to be in love. But if we have love without the truth, then it’s just kind of this sappy, sweet thing, and people are kind of left wondering, “What do they want from me?” They’re nice enough, but that doesn’t improve anybody’s behavior, so I think it really takes both.

Ms. Bezzerides: Great. Thank you.

Dn. Michael: Okay, fourth question: What type of meeting do you want? Now, most meetings fall into one of three categories. First of all, there’s recurring meetings. These are types of meetings that occur on some type of regular schedule—they’re daily, they’re weekly, they’re monthly, quarterly, annually—and it’s a good idea to decide on what your cycle or what your rhythm or what your cadence—I really like that word—what your cadence of recurring meetings should be.

Let me give you a couple examples of recurring meetings. I think we all know what they are, but like a daily stand-up meeting with your staff, if you have one. I know that not all leaders here are pastors; some, like you, Ann, are leading organizations. Monthly parish council meetings; monthly clergy meetings if you serve at a parish that has multiple clergy, like our church does have multiple clergy: we have a monthly clergy meeting; quarterly budget review meeting; maybe an annual vision-casting meeting, which, by the way, if you don’t have an annual kick-off meeting with a vision-casting thing, that’s something really to consider.

But for these meetings, the participants may be obvious, like elected parish council members, or members of the clergy. For others, you want to select the members, or let the chair of that meeting select them. And because these recur regularly, you should be able to create a standard agenda template—and I’m going to say some more about that in a little bit—that you use for every meeting of that type, and this means that these meetings are often the most efficient meetings you can have. You can get better at them, but you can really fine-tune them and really nail them. So that’s the first kind of meeting.

The second kind of meeting is a task force. These meetings are for solving specific problems or doing specific kinds of work, and they’re typically disbanded when the work or the project is done, and you can’t confuse this with recurring meetings, because some meetings live on even though the work has been done. So examples in a parish might include things like a new building task force, or a Parish Life Conference task force—we just had one in Nashville for our diocese, and so our pastor appointed a committee to oversee that—or a youth director search committee. Again, these committees or these organizations have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

For these meetings, you want to identify a task force chair—somebody’s got to run the meeting; somebody’s got to lead the meeting—and you might even appoint the members, though I often let the chair choose his or her own members as long as they don’t try to just include people that they know are going to agree with them or people that think like them—that’s not diversity and it’s not helpful and you won’t get the best decisions.

So recurring meetings, and then task force, and then what I’m going to call third: one-off meetings. And these meetings, similar to task force, are designed to solve specific problems due to specific kinds of work; however, the scope is more limited than the second type. So they are, too, disbanded when the work of the project is done, hopefully in one session. And examples could include a clergy evaluation and compensation meeting; or a Sunday school orientation and kick-off meeting; or a committee to brainstorm a new coffee hour plan.

So for these meetings, again, you want to identify a meeting chair, perhaps even the members, though again I often defer to the chair, let them pick their own members. Now, there’s also, before I go on to the fifth question, three primary meeting purposes: brainstorming, where you just want to get the creative input of a group of people; number two, goal-tracking and project reviews, so “where are we on that project?” problem solving and so forth; and then the third meeting is just trouble-shooting meetings. So that’s really the fourth question. Do you have any comments on that?

Ms. Bezzerides: I think in a church context—I’m thinking of the ones that… I guess the question is, give me some examples of how, in a parish context, you might use a brainstorming or a goal-tracking and project review meeting.

Dn. Michael: Well, for example, if you were getting together to discuss—sorry, I’ve got the wrong screen up, it looks like; give me just a second here. There we go. So if you had a new building that you were creating, a new parish hall or something, you’d want to get together, and you’d want to see how that’s tracking. Or maybe you began a prison ministry in your local parish, and so whoever’s in charge of that group would probably have some goals around that in terms of recruitment, in terms of frequency of visits, number of people that were being impacted. So you’d want to get together and review how you’re tracking against the goals and how the major projects that roll into those goals are doing. Does that make sense?

Ms. Bezzerides: It makes a ton of sense, and I think to that end I think a lot of us in ministry aren’t so good at goal-tracking? [Laughter]

Dn. Michael: Yeah.

Ms. Bezzerides: We just don’t think about it. We think about ministry. And so that’s one example, a great example of where people in other professions can really contribute substantially to: How are we actually going to measure our progress here? How can I walk along this progress and help put some metrics around it in a way that’s helpful for the whole parish?

Dn. Michael: Yeah, I often say in the business world we can focus a little bit more on relationships, and in the church world we can focus a little bit more on accomplishments or achievement. The truth is, you need both. It’s kind of like that “speaking the truth in love”: there needs to be a balance between being and doing, or relating and doing. And so there are times when we just need to hold people’s feet to the fire, track the project, make sure we’re making progress on the things that we’re being held accountable for or the bishop’s holding us accountable for or the parish council’s holding us accountable for, and that’s kind of the purpose of that type of meeting.

Ms. Bezzerides: All right. Can I throw out one more question for you?

Dn. Michael: Absolutely. I love this!

Ms. Bezzerides: On the brainstorming, I think to myself, okay, again, small or medium-sized parish, or even a big parish, “Okay, we’re going to have a brainstorming meeting on how to redo youth ministry”—my area. Then everybody gets together; everyone is passionate about their ideas. I let them brainstorm, and then—O Lord!—everybody thinks that their ideas have to happen, and I’ve created a monster.

Dn. Michael: Yeah, I think it’s all about setting the expectations on the front end. So part of what you might say on the front end is something like—and this will get to the purpose, which we’re going to discuss here in a moment—“Our purpose here is to brainstorm possible solutions.” And then that could go a lot of different directions. “Then we’re going to rank them. We’re going to vote, and we’re going to come up with the one that we intend to implement.” Or you might say, in another context; you might say, “We’re here to brainstorm, because I need your input. I’m going to make the decision. We’re not going to pursue everything, and just because you have an idea and just because you have a good idea doesn’t mean we’re going to pursue it, because we have more ideas than we have resources. So we’re going to have to narrow the focus.” But, again, I think it’s all about setting expectations on the front end rather than just kind of let people go with the brainstorming, like: “Oh, all that cool stuff we talked about is going to happen.” Not necessarily.

Ms. Bezzerides: Great. So helpful. Thanks.

Dn. Michael: Okay. So the fifth question is: What’s the right format? This is pretty simple, but one of the things we’ve learned during COVID if we’ve learned anything, I think, is that face-to-face meetings are desirable but not always necessary. So I still think there’s huge value in face-to-face meetings. I mean, there’s nothing that can take the place of sort of the 360° experience that you get in a face-to-face meeting. Like in my meeting at St. Vladimir’s this past week, we had some important decisions to make, and it wouldn’t have been appropriate—I don’t think it would have been as effective—if we had done that virtually. We need to be able to have side conversations apart from the meeting, to have the relational component—so face-to-face is often the best way to meet.

But then there’s video conference! Zooming! That was a thing that was foreign to a lot of people before the pandemic. Maybe people used Skype, but Zoom just exploded, and now we’re all very adept at Zoom meetings. My own sense is that a virtual meeting on Zoom, where you can at least see the people and insist, by the way, that they have their cameras on—really important, because a lot of people turn their cameras off and start multi-tasking and that’s not productive for anybody; that wastes everybody’s time, including the person who’s there to participate. But I think that video conferencing can get you about 85% of what you can get in a face-to-face meeting—it doesn’t get you that last 15%, but for a lot of meetings it’s fully sufficient.

Another format is phone conference. Now, I’ve got to be honest. I hate, with a passion, phone conferences. Those have gone the way of pagers and fax machines; they’re just not used that much any more. Why? Because there’s better technology. The problem with phone conferences is that, first of all, people can multi-task, so there’s kind of not that inherent accountability that comes with video conferencing, but the worst thing is, people don’t know when somebody else is speaking, because you can’t see it. So you end up stepping on one another, and it just becomes this incredibly awkward, frustrating experience. So I’m not a big fan of that, but those are the five questions.

Ms. Bezzerides: Those are great. So the first step is to decide: decide whether you actually need a meeting at all. What’s the second step?

Dn. Michael: Okay, so the second step is this one, which is to schedule. Step number two: schedule the meeting. Schedule the meeting. That’s pretty simple, right? That’s pretty straightforward. How could anybody miss that? It’s pretty easy to figure out. But it’s not that easy to actually make happen in the real world, because too many people approach scheduling kind of like a game of Battleship. Remember that game? So when they need to set up a one-off meeting, for example, they open the calendar, find an opening, and drop a meeting bomb. And, of course, they’re also hoping that everybody else’s calendars look just like theirs so that their availability syncs up, but that’s almost never the case, and as a result either you or your assistant can literally—and we’ve all had that experience—spend hours trying to coordinate with other people to find a day and a time that works for everyone.

So I want us to look at the when, the where, and the how of scheduling, and I’m going to try to get through this quickly. First of all, let’s talk about the when. Two components here: the date and the time. The date: schedule recurring meetings as far in advance as you possibly can. You want to claim the date and the time for your meeting before somebody else does, and the further you can get those out the better. For example, the recurring meetings that I’m part of, typically those are scheduled a year to a year and a half in advance. And sometimes this involves a simple rubric, for example: We’re going to meet on the second Tuesday of every month. That makes it pretty simple. People can plan; they can get it on their calendar. You want to avoid having to play calendar Battleship for every meeting.

Batch meetings as much as you can, and I talk about this in my book, Free to Focus, but in it I discuss the concept of an “ideal week,” where if you said, “If I had 100% control of my time, how would I arrange my meetings, my activities, so that they were the most efficient?” For example, in my ideal week, I hold all internal meetings—in other words, meetings with my team, my one-on-one meetings with my staff, the people who report to me—I arrange all those so that those are on Monday: internal meetings are all on Monday, and it’s a day; it’s a blizzard full of meetings all day on Monday. Then on Friday, I have meetings with external people, so people outside of my organization that want to meet. Now, I’m not suggesting that this is what pastors can do, but people like you that are leading other kinds of organizations can do this. But I really think that priests could do this somewhat as well and have an ideal week.

And the other person doesn’t actually know you’re doing this. My assistant, Jim, when somebody outside the organization wants to schedule a meeting and they’re outside the organization, Jim just pushes them towards Friday. Now, it doesn’t mean we can’t make an exception when necessary, but insofar as we can, we try to arrange the calendar like that.

By the way, as I mentioned earlier, I highly recommend scheduling time with yourself for important projects. Again, I call these meetings “time in the alone zone,” but I honor these commitments just like I honor commitments to other meetings. And if someone asks to meet during that time, I simply say, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got another meeting.”

Now let’s talk about the time for a second. That was the date; let’s talk about the time. Make meetings shorter than you think you need, and I would say just as a general rule we give too much time to meetings, and here’s why. Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to the time allotted for it. Hyatt’s Corollary says work shrinks to the time allotted for it. So if you compress the work by compressing the amount of time, you’d be amazed at how much more efficient you are in terms of accomplishing the agenda. For example, I used to think that I needed to meet with my executive assistant one on one for an hour every week. Now Jim, my assistant, and I have it down to 30 minutes! We’re communicating through Slack, which is the tool that we use for internal communication; that’s happening every day, and sometimes Jim will call me because he’s got an urgent need or question or request; sometimes I’ll call him. But for the most part we’ve been able to compress that and get it done in 30 minutes.

Okay, so that’s the when. What about the where? Where you meet matters. And just a couple thoughts on that. Restaurants are typically not good options for lengthy meetings or meetings where you’re going to be discussing confidential information, and as Orthodox Christians we love to eat. We love to have food at our meetings; we love to have something to snack on. But restaurants can work for things like one-on-one meetings, but be aware of noise levels, the restaurant ambiance. Noisy restaurants can be stressful—they are to me, as an introvert—also distract. Conference rooms can be useful, but pay attention as the leader to things like available electricity for charging computers or wireless internet access or comfortable chairs, the temperature of the room and so forth. So that’s the where.

And then the how. I love this part. Use technology to schedule meetings. It’s not efficient, it’s not helpful for you as the meeting organizer to have to go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, trying to find a time to meet. So use technology. I recommend an application—we use it extensively—called Calendly—calendly.com; you can look it up on Google and you’ll find it directly. But if you’re a meeting organizer, here’s how it works. You send out an email through their system indicating all the times that you’re available for this particular meeting. So as the leader you’re going to go first; you’re going to try to get people to accommodate your schedule rather than trying to accommodate their schedule. The recipients indicate which of those meetings times would work the best for them. Then you schedule the meetings, and it saves hours of going back and forth.

Then what I would suggest is that you issue a formal invitation. Once you’ve decided the time, once you know that it’s going to work, issue a formal invitation, and I recommend Google Calendar. Most systems can convert those invites and place them directly on the participant’s calendar, so they don’t have to do really anything. So it’s a super easy way to do it.

Ms. Bezzerides: Awesome. So, step one was to decide; step two was to schedule. What’s step three?

Dn. Michael: All righty. Step three is to prepare. Prepare. So this is kind of the missing step, and this is the X-factor that takes meetings you abhor to meetings you adore. I believe that most bad meetings that you’ve attended in the past and that I’ve attended in the past can be traced back to one missing piece: preparation. Too often, leaders pull people into conference rooms without taking any time to figure out what they’re going to do when they get there. They know they need to have a meeting, they know it’s important, not quite sure what they’re going to talk about, but they jump the gun. Preparation is the missing thing that makes it effective.

So you should purpose now that you’re not going to hold a meeting or attend a meeting that doesn’t have an agenda distributed or prepared prior to the meeting. Until you have that, you’re not ready to meet. The value of an agenda, if you’re the meeting organizer, is that it requires you to think about the meeting before you get together and waste people’s time. So this is critically important. It makes the meeting more efficient and it makes it more effective.

People go wrong with agendas in one of two ways, and I would suggest that people either do too much or they do too little. And of the two, I would often say that people do too little. The meeting template, which I discuss in No-Fail Meetings—and again, you can get that book or you can get the course, but it’s only one sheet, and this is usually sufficient for most meetings. I referenced the meeting that we had with the board of trustees of St. Vladimir’s on Thursday and Friday of last week. That was a two-page agenda. We had an agenda for each day, but it was one page per each day, and we were meeting about seven or eight hours each day.

That template is broken down into three sections, and I want to go through these quickly; I’m hoping I can leave time for questions here. But the template is both in the book and in the course. First of all, basic information. Basic information: the meeting title, the date and time, the participants, the meeting leader and the meeting facilitator. Now, the meeting leader—if you’re the meeting organizer, this is probably going to be you—plays a strategic role, whereas the facilitator handles meeting processes. So the leader sets the purpose of the meeting, owns the results, he or she drives the meeting and leads the discussion. The facilitator—and for recurring meetings, I really recommend this, but the facilitator prepares the agenda with input from the leader, distributes that agenda, keeps track of the time, takes and distributes notes, and follows up on any action items.

In bigger organizations, non-profits, we might have literally a corporate secretary who’s tasked with that, and I do that at St. Vlad’s, and it’s enormously helpful. In a church, you might just want to appoint somebody; in an organization, you might want to appoint somebody. But the facilitator might be an administrative assistant or someone else who agrees to serve in that role, and the latter is an important option on smaller teams, even. It’s hard for the leader to play both roles, to both facilitate the meeting and lead the meeting, so that’s number one; it’s just kind of the basic information.

Number two on the template is the meeting’s purpose. This is where you discuss the purpose of the meeting. You decide in advance, before anybody’s gotten together, why you’re meeting, and that’s really what you’re trying to answer in the purpose part of the template, is: Why are we meeting? What’s this meeting about? What outcomes do we want? If you can’t succinctly state what you hope to accomplish in the meeting, you should take it off the calendar! Don’t waste everybody’s time until you know, as the leader, why you’re meeting. Nobody wants to take time out of their busy week to sit in a room and watch you try to figure that out in real time, and I’ve had my share of those kind of meetings where I’ve sat in a meeting watching the leader trying to figure out why were were taking an hour—or two hours or three hours—to meet.

So clearly state the meeting purpose on the agenda, followed— And most agendas don’t have this, but state it on the agenda, and then followed by two or three specific results that you hope to accomplish. Now we get to the guts of it: this is the meeting program. This is what people typically think of when they think of the agenda, but it’s the list of topics that you want to discuss—now, get this—along with the amount of time that you’ve allocated to each one. You don’t need to slavishly follow this, but it gives you a guideline so that if you know you’re off track you may need to shorten some other topic, because I really believe in ending meetings on time. More about that in just a moment.

So five parts here in the meeting program. We always start, in our organization—I highly recommend this—we always start with achievements or wins; we don’t just jump willy-nilly into the problems we need to discuss. We talk about what we’ve accomplished since the last time we met and what’s worth celebrating. This is an opportunity, frankly, as the leader, to encourage people, give everyone a sense of forward momentum, and it’s especially important in recurring meetings, and it creates the right kind of emotional climate for the meeting to be productive and for people to kind of be in the realm of possibility and not in the realm of survival.

Second, we move to expectations. State the meeting’s purpose; literally read it from the agenda. State the meeting’s purpose and what you expect to get done during your time together. And note the time you plan to finish and the time allotted to each topic.

Third, review prior commitments. Use the minutes from the previous meeting—I’ll talk about that in a minute—to review the action items that were assigned. Ask each item’s owner to go ahead and to report in on what they accomplished: Did they accomplish their assignment? This creates a culture of accountability that’s enormously helpful.

And then get to the various issues. Now these are kind of the guts of the meeting: the various topics that brought you together. But identify what is to be discussed, who will make the presentation or lead that part of the discussion, and again how much time they’ve got to do it. It’s their responsibility to manage the clock.

And then five—this is critically important; most leaders do not do this, but summarize the action items. Make sure everyone leaves knowing exactly who is responsible for what and when it’s due. You’ve got this meeting. You’ve taken all this time: summarize the action items. This step requires discipline to enforce, but it’s essential if you want to lead highly effective meetings, and that’s why I recommend it.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s great. On that last one, I’ve realized as a strategic thinker or a vision thinker at the meeting, I cannot do that five, and I find the best person to do that, who’s just on it and won’t let us go unless we’ve done that.

Dn. Michael: Yeah, it’s so good. And I find, Ann, that most organizations just do not do that for whatever reason. And that’s why it feels like sometimes you keep having the same meeting over and over again. That’s why you’ve got to keep track of the action items.

Ms. Bezzerides: Yeah. It’s fabulous. Okay! So step one is to decide; step two is to schedule; step three is to prepare. What’s step four?

Dn. Michael: Step four is to meet! Go ahead and have the meeting. If you don’t know how to lead a good meeting, you aren’t alone. And to be honest, it’s probably not your fault, because according to Emily Pidgeon’s summary of the research, 75% of people have received no formal training on how to conduct a meeting. And yet most leaders are dropped at the end of a conference table and expected to drive a discussion on a regular basis. This is not typically taught in seminary; it’s not typically taught in college—and it’s critically important. It’s a survival skill; it’s an essential skill that all leaders have to have. And we’re not born knowing how to lead a meeting! It’s not a genetic trait that we get from our parents; it’s a skill that we’ve got to learn.

The good news is that anybody can learn it, but after leading hundreds of good meetings and suffering through thousands of bad ones—and probably having led a few bad ones myself—I believe a good conversation comes down to five things, and I want to walk through these with us. So, number one—let me get my graphics here. Number one: stay on topic. A quarter of the meeting time is often spent on discussing irrelevant issues, again, according to Pidgeon’s research. And in my experience, the time spent chasing rabbits and following tangents is even worse than that.

So what I suggest is to use a “parking lot”—this could be a whiteboard, it could be a big piece of paper, it could be anything: but use a “parking lot” to park ideas that someone suggests that are important but off-topic to the subject at hand. Now, here’s the deal. You can discuss those at the end of the meeting, if the agenda permits, if time permits, or you might have to schedule another time to discuss them, but don’t let them distract you for the topic at hand.

Then I would say practice what I’m going to call the “one conversation” rule. And the “one conversation” rule says that we’re only going to talk about one thing at a time. That means—and this is important—no side conversations; no chatter in the background. Everyone stays engaged in the same conversation at the same time. So stay on topic.

Number two: guard against distractions. This is also important, because it’s easy to get off-track, to be distracted. So before the meeting every begins, state the ground rules. Turn off notifications on your cell phone. Tell people you expect them to be focused on the work at hand, and that means—and this is important, too—no multi-tasking. No answering email. No scrolling social media feeds. No side conversations.

I was literally—when I was at Thomas Nelson, I was leading a board meeting, and we’d gone through an elaborate explanation of something the board had asked at a previous meeting, and we had a slide deck, the whole thing. The guy who was the principal that we were trying to answer his question was caught up on his phone doing who knows what, but when we got done with the presentation, I said, “Are there any questions?” And he asked the same question he’d asked in the previous meeting that we had just spent ten minutes explaining. His body was there, but his mind was somewhere else, so it was a total waste of everybody’s time. So you’ve got to guard against distractions.

That brings me to the third recommendation I have, and that’s to ask good questions. You know, this is another skill, Ann, that people need to learn to develop. But I like what Stephen Covey says: “Seek to understand before you comment. Seek to understand before you seek to be understood.” So ask open-ended questions—not rhetorical yes-or-no questions; there’s really no place for those. Get behind the assumptions. If somebody’s assuming something, you want to get behind those assumptions. Get both sides of the story. Ask follow-up questions, kind of like an onion: peel it one layer at a time. Ask the first question, ask the second question, ask the third question.

Get comfortable as the leader with what I’m going to call “dead air,” where it’s just silence. Sometimes people need a little time to think. They need a little processing time, and if you’ll just zip your lips, people will contribute, particularly quiet people. So get comfortable with dead air.

Help people also discover their own insights. It’s much better to ask and kind of direct the conversation as you can so people come up with their own conclusions rather than you telling them, and this is really important if you’re a fast thinker, because you might be way ahead of everybody else and you’ve already got the solution, but you haven’t brought everybody with you. So ask, don’t tell.

And then understand the difference between facts and speculation. I used to have a boss that said to me; he said, “Whenever you’re presenting something to me, I want you to tell me what you know and what you think you know, and I want you to explain the difference between the two things, because they are absolutely different.”

Ms. Bezzerides: Dn. Michael, can I just say a quick word?

Dn. Michael: You can!

Ms. Bezzerides: Number three: Ask good questions. I’ve always said for all youth ministry, the key to great youth ministry is asking questions that are so good you can’t help but listen because the question’s so good. And that your list under that—all the “seek to understand before you comment,” open-ended questions, get behind the assumptions, both sides of the story, follow-up questions, comfortable with dead air—that whole list actually parallels great adult investment in young people. It’s the exact same principle as with good meetings. It’s how, when we try to engage young people, it’s all of those same things.

Dn. Michael: Absolutely, and I would say it’s good in any conversation with anybody at any level. One of the things—I have five daughters; I have nine grandkids with another baby on the way, but whenever we get together for Thanksgiving or whatever it is, we even in those situations practice the one conversation rule. My family knows this from instinct now, but we just say, “Look, we want everybody’s involvement, everybody’s participation. Everybody’s going to get a chance.” So another thing that we do, even in our family, is we’ll prepare questions before Thanksgiving or before any time we get together with the family, and we’ll just have those questions at our hip pockets so as the leader, I can ask, or if Gail wants to, she can ask, a question that engages everybody. Then we just kind of go around the table; it’s really an amazing experience.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s fabulous!

Dn. Michael: Okay, fourth suggestion, and that’s to facilitate transformative conflict. Facilitate transformative conflict. Let me explain what I mean by this. You as the leader have got to create an environment that’s safe for dissent, and here’s why. You may think you want everybody to agree with you, everybody just to say, “Yes, sir,” or “Yes, ma’am, what are my marching orders?” and go their separate way, but you really don’t want that. Here’s why. In case anybody hasn’t told you as a leader: You’re not omniscient. You don’t know what you don’t know. And if you try to throttle dissent or you try to shuttle it down—and obviously it’s got to be respectful, but if you try to shut that down, you’re going to miss important pieces of input that might just keep you from going off-track. So you’ve got to create a meeting kind of environment, a meeting culture that’s safe for dissent, where people can speak their minds.

And then I would say this—and this is a complete reframe from how we often think in the church—vigorous debate is helpful. And sometimes, depending on how we were raised or what the environment was at home, we may start to get really uncomfortable with debate, and we may feel threatened, and especially if you’ve gone through some kind of trauma in your family. But I’m telling you, vigorous debate—respectful, vigorous debate is one of the best things that can happen in an organization. Don’t be afraid to try it. Tell people, “Look, we’re having— I want some vigorous debate around this topic, and it’s okay.”

And then in real time, affirm it. So when Betty disagrees with Bill, then just say, “Hey, Betty’s disagreeing”—and just affirm this in real time—“but this is the kind of vigorous debate that we want. Betty’s being respectful, and this is awesome. We need all the perspectives we can get.” Because here’s what happens. If you don’t get them on the table at the meeting, people leave the meeting, and then they talk about them after the meeting. My goal is never to have a meeting after the meeting. I don’t want people meeting privately or in small groups after the meeting and talking about the stuff that they couldn’t express in the meeting. I want that all expressed where I can deal with it. So don’t be afraid of the discomfort of that; just don’t let it become personal.

Any thoughts on that one?

Ms. Bezzerides: I love it. It’s so important, so hard, but it really does work magic when you say to people, “Oh, I love that you just debated right here. I love that we have two perspectives,” and just honor their perspectives. It changes the whole dynamic in a real way.

Dn. Michael: It does, and if people know that you’re receptive to it, they won’t shut down and they’ll actually love it, and they’ll know that they can talk to you about anything and that you’re—first of all, it demonstrates humility, and I think that’s so important. Start with humility.

Okay, I’ve got a fifth recommendation; then we’re going to go on to the last point. Start and end on time. Now, that’s kind of ironic, that we’re here at the bottom of the hour and we try to end at 7:30 Central, 8:30 Eastern. We’re going to go for a few minutes today, but start and end on time. I don’t wait for everybody to show up. If three of the seven people are there, I start the meeting on time to honor the people who were present who made the effort to be there on time. If you start your meetings late, you’re rewarding the people that, for whatever reason, couldn’t get there on time. Now, when somebody comes in and they’re late, I don’t embarrass them; I don’t even comment. In fact, I’ll welcome them. I’ll say, “Hey, John. Glad you’re here; have a seat,” and then just keep going with the meeting.

But I’ll also say it’s important to end on time, because people often—not so much tonight, but people often have other meetings that they have to go to, particularly if it’s a daytime meeting. And so you don’t want to be the domino that creates the effect of all the other dominoes falling. So end your meetings on time. That builds trust, and then people feel like they can count on it.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s great. So step one is to decide; step two is to schedule; step three is to prepare; step four is to meet. So tell us step five.

Dn. Michael: Okay, step five is to follow up. You’ve got to follow up; this is where it’s got to end. A couple things I would say [are] that, first of all, you as the leader evaluate the meetings you lead, and I would ask myself these four questions. I call this the KISS ideology, but not KISS in the sense of “Keep It Simple, Stupid,” although that’s not a bad acronym either, but here’s what I’d say: What do we want to keep doing that we just did at the meeting; what do we want to keep doing in subsequent meetings? because we don’t want to forget the good stuff, the stuff that’s working. And that’s the K.

Number two, the I: What do we want to improve? It’s working, but it needs to be optimized. It could be incrementally improved and we don’t want to lose it, but we want to do it a little better next time than we did it this last time.

Number three—this is the first S—what do we want to start doing. One of the things I thought at the St. Vlad’s meeting, I thought, “Oh! We need to have name tags, because we always have new board members, we have visitors, and just as a courtesy to them, as being gracious to them—an act of hospitality—we should have name tags so that—they’re meeting all of us; we’re just meeting a couple of them—they can call us by name and feel confident in that.

Then the fourth question: What do you want to stop doing, that absolutely doesn’t work? So that’s “KISS”: What do you want to keep doing, what do you want to improve, what do you want to start doing, and what do you want to stop doing? And you really can get better if you iterate on small improvements.

Then I would say, as part of the follow-up, ask for feedback. In some meetings, if they’re significant enough—I wouldn’t do this for every meeting, particularly in a recurring meeting—but do a survey. You can use a tool like SurveyMonkey. Sometimes people won’t tell you to your face what they will tell you anonymously if you ask, so surveys are helpful. And then review the meeting notes, make sure you transfer all the action items that have been assigned to you as the leader—you want to set a good example—to your task-management system, so you’ve got them in the system and so that you actually follow up and do them.

And then the final thing I want to say as a matter of follow-up is make sure that you schedule time to follow up. You want to do that. So get it on your calendar if there are action items that you need to do; make sure that you get those on your calendar so that you can do them.

So that’s the five steps.

Ms. Bezzerides: I love them. Okay, so we want to see if we have any listener comments or questions, but first let me summarize what I heard you say, Dn. Michael. The path to transforming your church’s meeting culture starts with five simple steps: decide, schedule, prepare, meet, and follow up. So, with that, let’s take some questions or comments. Again, if you have a question or even a comment, just post it in the comments section below. If you want to ask your question anonymously, you can text us at 615‐721‐2303.

Dn. Michael: We actually have an anonymous question.

Ms. Bezzerides: I love it.

Dn. Michael: Bingo. So here we go. “What is your best tip to make sure the meeting ends on time? You talked about having an agenda and assigning time limits to each time, but things invariably go off track. How do you handle that?”

Well, the best way to handle that is, first of all, you’ve got to be mindful of the time as you go through the meeting. And it kind of becomes a math exercise, and I don’t mean literally you calculate the time, but, for example, in the meeting that I was having last Thursday, at about noon, I just said to the entire group, “Hey guys, I want you to know, and I want everybody to be mindful of this in our conversation. I don’t want to throttle conversation, but we’re about 30 minutes behind right now. We’re going to go to lunch. I promise you, we will make this up some time this afternoon, but I need your help.” So I think the meeting facilitator can specifically do this, but at various points in the meeting, it would be appropriate to interject and say, “Hey, by the way, guys, we’re 30 minutes behind or we’re 15 minutes, so I just wanted to make everybody aware of that.” Usually people can self-regulate and modify their behavior, maybe not ask that additional question. But people get swept up in good meetings, and the conversation can go on and on, so you kind of just put the milestones in there to make sure the meeting is continuing to move forward.

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s awesome. Ah, we do have several comments from Emi Nicole here, and I think I’ll highlight a middle one and just have you reflect on it. Emi says, “The first sip of the cup of natural science makes man an atheist, but at the bottom of the cup, God is waiting for him.” And I wonder if you see any natural connections with that quote and meetings, Dn. Michael.

Dn. Michael: [Laughter] Well, you know, I’ve been part of church meetings that made me wonder if I really wanted to be a Christian… [Laughter]

Ms. Bezzerides: That’s the obvious one, isn’t it?

Dn. Michael: But I’m not sure I can correlate that to meetings. Is there something you were thinking of as you saw that?

Ms. Bezzerides: You know, I think overall actually what you alluded to is so important. Administration has within the word “administration” is the word “ministry.”

Dn. Michael: Wow! I think my head just exploded a little bit. I never thought of that. That’s amazing!

Ms. Bezzerides: Isn’t that wild? And so we often find in my office that we have to justify our attention to little details as being sort of “not Orthodox,” and yet the way we interface with all ministry today is something as basic as a meeting, and if people don’t experience the presence of God at church meetings, then why are we having them? And so how do we facilitate sort of the beauty of our conciliar tradition, the beauty of discipleship—all of the things that are so important to our lives as Christians in the faith—how can we actually have that pervade the meeting itself?

Dn. Michael: Yeah, I think this is where a visit back to Church history or even back to the Bible will find that significant decisions happened in meetings. We’ve got for example the first council ever convened in the Church was in Acts 15, and it was convened to settle a problem, to make some important decisions. And we have a history as Orthodox Christians of these sacred meetings that happened.

We have all kinds of meetings. We have— You and I were even talking about how we have a Great Feast that’s called the Meeting of our Lord—different kind of meeting, but nonetheless a meeting. So I think our history is rich with the tradition of meetings, and the best meetings are conciliar, the best meetings do have an agenda, the best meetings somebody facilitates and really brings out the best. And we’re better when we do the faith and do our work together. It may be more efficient to just go it alone and do it yourself, and in America we have this tradition of the rugged individualist, but not in the Church so much. It works much better if we collaborate with one another.

Ms. Bezzerides: I love that. I also—again, to sort of say what I said right at the beginning—St. John Chrysostom is my favorite, and he just says to his hearers, over and over and again, “Go slowly, slowly, to learn; learn little by little. Progress is slow. Progression and learning is important.” You’ve offered us such a rich feast for us to think about with our meetings, and I just want to encourage listeners to even a tiny, tiny little baby step for the life of the people you serve would be amazing.

That’s all the time we have for this episode. We so appreciate you joining us tonight, Dn. Michael. Thank you, thank you.

Dn. Michael: Thank you.

Ms. Bezzerides: You will be on vacation next week; I’ll be on vacation the week after that. So we’ve scheduled our next episode on Sunday night, November 28. In that episode we discuss how to fix five common communication problems.

Dn. Michael, as we wrap up, any final thoughts you can share with us?

Dn. Michael: I would just say, if you’re frustrated with meetings, if you’re discouraged by your meetings, don’t lose heart. You can make a difference. And even if you’re just a participant—and I don’t mean this as a plug so much, but get a copy of my book, No-Fail Meetings, and distribute it so that everybody’s on the same page, has the same vision, has the same language. But you can be the catalyst for better meetings in the Church, and that would be a great service to God and to the Church.

All right, guys. Thank you so much for being with us. We look forward to seeing you next time.

Ms. Bezzerides: Thank you, Dn. Michael.