Next month I will be speaking at ASAE & The Center’s annual “Great Ideas Conference.” This time I am doing a session about staff meetings. The title of the session is “Turning Staff Meetings into Strategic Conversations.” This session started with some work I did for a client a couple of years ago. I had done some work for the staff team at this small organization around conflict, but we also ended up talking about how they do their staff meetings. I was using Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting as a basis for the discussion (one of my favorite book titles, and favorite books for that matter). They incorporated some of those ideas into a new structure for their staff meetings.

I wrote an article about that, including quotes from the Executive Director, last year, and when I finished the article I mentioned to the ED that we should do a presentation on this sometime. So when the time rolled around for Great Ideas submissions, she actually contacted me and suggested we put something in. So here we are. The conference is January 27-30, at Marco Island, FL.

Of course, since that time, the ED changed jobs, and her new association’s annual meeting is the same weekend as Great Ideas, so I’ll be flying solo, but she and I are working together on designing the session.

If anyone has any good stories to share about staff meetings that were good and productive, let me know.