Everyone who loves meetings, raise your hand. Yeah. I will never forget when I was doing some calendar work with 3 board members. As soon as I mentioned that we needed to schedule some regular committee meetings, I got an eye roll, a sigh and an outright “aarrrrrggghh!” as she slumped in her chair. Yikes! These volunteers were part of my work force and we needed to engage their energy to make important social change.

So why was everyone dreading committee meetings?

Obviously the time spent in meetings wasn’t valuable to them and I needed to figure out how to change that fast. We had work to do and I needed them – for their expertise, to challenge assumptions, to influence their peers, to innovate, and also to follow up on action items and share the work.

After some crucial discussions (and yes, I had to have thick skin and realize this was for the greater good in service to the community) we came up with 4 steps to ensure highly effective committee work.

1. Create a COW. Do your committee members understand the purpose and role of the committee? Is it written down? When was the last time you reviewed your committee structure? Once that is done, sketch out what needs to be managed by each committee. After you’ve looked at the broad view, break it down into months. This Chart of Work (COW) will help you stay focused on the right things in your meetings. The COW doesn’t have the level of detail an agenda would; it’s just meant to outline key topics. It’s a road map and can be adapted as needed throughout the year. Write it up and share it at your first committee meetings of the year.

2. Activate the Information Highway. Committee productivity is highly dependent upon the information provided. If you expect them to create a strategy, be sure they know why, what’s been done before, provide other examples, etc. Post documents on a sharing site so it’s there whenever they would like to reference it. If you expect them to respond to something, give it to them in advance so they can read and process it. I see this all the time – a document is passed out at a meeting and folks are asked for their feedback. Really? That’s not setting them up to engage and be successful.

3. Love Thy Chair. In order for all this to work, the person who is staff liaison to the committee must be allowed extra time to build the relationship with the committee chair. To create agendas in advance, to discuss action items between meetings, to ensure you enter all meetings on the same page and are clear about desired outcomes – this takes intentional effort. If you want your committee members to be engaged, you must engage them. And by the way – did you orient your committee chairs on how to be effective in meetings? Or on what is expected of them on the whole? Ask yourself what you are committed to, and invest your energy wisely.

4. Cancel the Meeting. Woop, woop! Sometimes there is enough work for a committee to meet every month. When we had an unexpected windfall one time, the Finance committee actually met every 2 weeks for several months as we created new policies, determined how to allocate funds, etc. But even if your COW says you need to address a certain issue, when you’re creating the agenda the week before, if there is nothing but information items on your list, cancel the sure-to-be-boring meeting and send updates via email instead. The fastest way to burn out and discourage volunteers is to waste their time with unproductive meetings. Trust me, they will love you for canceling when the agenda is too light.

This nonprofit governance thing can be so rewarding! It can also make you want to slump and holler if you take the wrong approach.

How will you adjust your mindset and shift to more productive committee meetings? The community is counting on you.  Share your thoughts below.

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