Thanks for allowing me to crank out 5 or 6 posts all about a 90 minute meeting I had over a week ago. I cranked out a lot of words, but hopefully there was some stuff in there you found helpful. Enough teasing though.

So what did I learn from this experience?

  • I’m disappointed that I haven’t done this before (at least to this capacity). From this point on, I’ll ask to lead our all-staff at least once every year.
  • Although they didn’t know it, the staff wanted to hear about NextGen. It’s not that they don’t care, they just don’t wake up in the morning thinking, “I wonder what’s happening with the kids this week.” However, I had everyone’s attention and they were truly interested in what was being said.
  • People truly do respond to vision, even if it’s not a vision that pulls them to action. Since my talk last week, I’ve had many questions about NextGen and a few people wanting to do more to be involved. Most in the room won’t do anything more for NextGen tangibly, but so many were inspired by the vision of this important ministry and will represent NextGen well from this point on.
  • Like I said earlier, a good meeting takes time to develop. I put in at least 15 hours into planning, writing and preparation and the end results were more than worth the time invested. This has greatly challenged me toward the level of preparedness that I come to other meetings with.
  • Google Wave is a useful tool. I used Wave with several people from my staff. We were able to walk into our first meeting with several notes on the Wave that several people had contributed to. Wave was also the platform we used to document our notes while we were meeting. In the end, I took it out of wave and finalized the talk in Word.

I think that does it for me.

If you haven’t done it before, arrange an opportunity to talk to your staff about what you do and why it’s so important. Most of us don’t have a problem communicating passion, just take plenty of time to organize your thoughts so it really grabs the attention of your listeners.