Budget Meetings You Can Look Forward To

Last week, we had the best budget meeting ever!

We arrived at a balanced budget, every person left with unity of thought, and all our finances connected to the vision of the church.

How?

Every person accountable for a line of the budget provided their 2010 figures to the Treasurer ahead of time. Making no adjustments to the figures, the Treasurer compiled the numbers and brought the first draft of the budget to the meeting.

At the meeting, the budget was projected on the wall (side note: it's frustrating to me to have paper copies shuffling of papers, don't know what line item people are talking about...if it's projected, you can point to what you're talking about.)

We had a dialogue and cut figures and came up with ways to balance the budget.

Then came the fun part...

In order to balance the budget, all of us had to cut out funding in certain areas and had to leave some items unfunded. But that doesn't mean we ignored those items.

We took out large sheets of paper and each of us wrote down a personal wish list of items that we would like funded for 2010. Then, each person got 5 stickers. They could use their 5 stickers to vote for any item on any wish list but they could only vote for only 1 item on their own list.

We compiled all the items that got votes and ended up with 10 items. Each person took the list of 10 items and ranked them 1 to 10 (1 = lowest priority and 10 = highest priority). We added up all the votes for every item and found that there were 2-3 top priority items that everyone agreed that needed to be done.

Now, when God blesses us with more than we budgeted for and when donors come to us to fund projects outside the budget, the whole team (not just me) has the same answer on how that money gets spent.

I can't tell you what our top 3 items are for 2010 (that wouldn't be fair to our church) but I can tell you that this process broke down the silos of ministry and created a unity of vision like none other!

Leadership Team

My Leadership Team just finished talking about the book "Trust and Teams" by Jane Fryar. As one team member put it, "it ate our lunch". This is a great book which has great questions to help build teams in a religious environment.

Our next book we're discussing is: The No Complaining Rule. That should generate a lot of discussion as well as changing our whole climate of conversation.

Boy, do I complain too much...

Long and Short Meetings

What was the longest meeting you've ever attended?

(mine: 5 hours @ a church council mtg once a month...thankfully, not at the current church I serve!)

What was the most effective meeting you've ever attended?

(mine: 45 min @ a youth mtg to chart out service ideas and actions)

When you compare the two, did you notice how preparation, focus and input ahead of time affected the length of the meeting?  How?

Death by Meeting!  That's what Patrick Lencioni's fable concludes: that we're killing ourselves by meetings all day long.  My experience of meetings is that they turn out to be all talk and no action.  This is very frustrating to try to get things done.

I came across a post by Seth Godin re: meetings and how to make them more effective and productive.

Some takeaways from Seth's post:

1. Schedule meeting in incriments of 5 minutes: this would be interesting to try out.  It would force us to keep the meeting moving, not get bogged down on one item, and cover items succinctly.  It would also force people to be prepared.  If you find it hard to share everything in 5 minutes, check out the book Say It In Six!

(Well, of course the book shows you how to share your thoughts within 6 minutes and with a 5 minute timeframe, you'll have to really hone your skills!  But you get the idea...)

2. Remove all chairs: I've heard of this and have tried it a couple of times with great success!

3. Short Email summary: I take this to the next level and use Google docs with my teams.  Every member of the team can interact and add their progress and thoughts on a project.  The doc can be easily accessed by anyone else on the team.  Then, when it comes time for the meeting, all the thoughts and ideas have been posted and the meeting can go beyond the initial "idea-share" and getting to the action of "how are we going to proceed?" During the meeting, the doc is updated in real time based on our conversation.  Ideally, though, I'd love to jump on Comapping so that it gives my team an accurate picture of how our brains process information.