Patrick Lencioni was one of the Summit favorites last year! Patrick is a sought-after speaker and consultant, as well as the author of several best-selling business books. He’s taught at Willow a few times for different events so we’re excited to have him join us again. On Friday, March 16th our team is hosting a webcast that will announce this year’s Summit line up. And to serve your team, the webcast will also feature Patrick as he shares insight from his book, The Advantage. Here are a few of our lessons from that title, join us Friday for much more from Patrick!

Meetings are not inherently bad, but yet we love to hate them. In order to transform meetings, you must first understand why they can be so bad. Patrick argues meetings lack drama, context and purpose which leads to boring, unfocused and endless. An engaging (less boring) meeting starts with identifying and nurturing the natural level of conflict that should exist. It’s about having the right people at the table to wrestle with the right issues. To address the issue of context, leaders must differentiate between different types of meetings. Patrick maintains there are four: Daily Check-in, the Weekly Tactical, the Monthly Strategic and the Quarterly Off-site Review. Purpose comes when the appropriate type of meeting is held at a given time. Too often organizations simply throw all the pertinent topics into one big staff meeting.

One of the tensions many leaders face is balancing meetings and productivity. To this Patrick says that reshaping your current meetings into his four-pronged approach should add up to about 20% of a leader’s time. And he would challenge a leader with the basic question: “What is more important than meetings?” The answer may indicate that perhaps a leader should reconsider their role. Because, Patrick says, “if you think about it, a leader who hates meetings is a lot like a surgeon who hates operating on people, or a symphony conductor who hates concerts. Meetings are what leaders do, and the solution to bad meetings is not the elimination of them, but rather the transformation of them into meaningful, engaging and relevant activities.”

Creating healthy meetings and a healthy team isn’t easy but it’s worth it. Patrick argues that addressing healthy team is one of the remaining competitive advantages in business and ministry.

Check out Patrick’s book
Or
Take the Meetings Quiz