Alignify

09/21/2026

Ten minutes of fake team building at the end of a staff meeting isn't going to create culture.

It's the first thing that gets cut when the issues run long. When it does happen, everybody can tell it's the item before the exit.

Culture probably needs more of your time, not less. It just doesn't belong in the last ten minutes of a task meeting. Have the whole team over for dinner. Go to Topgolf. Hold an actual prayer meeting where you're not trying to do anything else.

You can't Loom a prayer meeting, and you can't squeeze one into a kudos round either.

Full article on the four types of meetings and why they shouldn't share an hour: https://bit.ly/4h93I8x

09/18/2026

Somebody says "let's go around the table."

The first person gives an update and you're mildly interested. The second person, less. By the third, phones are out, because everybody already knew.

That's a communication meeting. It's efficient for the person talking and boring for everyone else. It could have been an email. Or a video. Or, as one pastor told me, a nap.

Most team meetings are trying to do four things at once: communicate, brainstorm, solve problems, and build the team. Communication is the easiest one to move out of the room, and once it's gone, the meeting gets a lot better.

New article on the four types of meetings and a better way to run them: https://bit.ly/4h93I8x

09/14/2026

In 1954, Eisenhower quoted a college president he wouldn't name: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."

That line explains most of the weekly meetings any of us have sat in.

Goals never feel urgent in a given week. That's what makes them goals. So the calendar conflict beats them. The thing somebody raised Thursday beats them. Every week.

You don't win that by trying harder. You win it by putting the goals first, before the urgent stuff gets a shot at the hour.

Here's how that works: https://bit.ly/3SEJIRL

09/10/2026

Our staff meetings had an agenda. We just never got past the third item.

Something always came up. Or I'd ask a question, somebody would pull up a spreadsheet that wasn't quite right, and we'd fix it real fast. Then it was time to end.

So the last thing on the agenda got cut. Every week. And it was often the most important thing on there.

Go look at your own agenda and find your goals on it. If they're near the bottom, you already know what happens to them.

The fix takes about a minute. Move them to the top and leave everything else where it is.

Full version here, with a fifty-minute agenda you can copy: https://bit.ly/3SEJIRL

09/07/2026

Six things that tell you a meeting isn't working, before anybody says a word:

Phones coming out in the same stretch of the meeting, week after week. Side conversations, which are just a second and more useful meeting happening inside your first one. One or two people carrying the discussion while everyone else waits it out. You doing most of the talking. The same item sitting on three straight agendas. And nobody asking a single question when you finish.

That last one gets read as agreement more than anything else on the list. Usually it means the room decided the conversation wasn't worth having.

The full article, including the three questions worth asking your team this week: https://alignify.com/articles/staff-meeting-blind-spot?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=facebook

09/03/2026

Your children's director has a private list of what she could have gotten done with those ninety minutes.

Nobody says anything, because the person running the meeting is usually the same person who signs off on the reviews. So the feedback never arrives, and the leader concludes the meeting is basically fine.

Here's the uncomfortable part. It isn't a character flaw. You set the agenda, you talk whenever you want, and you called the meeting because you wanted it to go well. Every one of those gives you a better hour than everyone else in the room got.

We wrote about how to get an honest read on your own staff meeting, and what to do with the answers: https://alignify.com/articles/staff-meeting-blind-spot?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=facebook

09/01/2026

Walk out of your next staff meeting and watch what changes about Tuesday.

Whose priorities moved? What decision got made that a specific person now owns? For a lot of teams, the honest answer is nothing. The updates were shared, the topics were discussed, and the week went on exactly as it would have anyway.

That's a connection problem, and it has a small fix. We wrote about what actually ties a meeting to the work your team does the other 39 hours: https://alignify.com/articles/unproductive-meetings

08/24/2026

Years ago our church ran an Easter outreach event that went badly enough that everyone on the team would have voted to kill it that night. Kids got separated from their parents. Traffic backed up down the road.

We ran evaluation meetings instead, and the goal turned out to still be right. Reaching families in our community mattered exactly as much on Monday as it had the week before. The plan was what failed.

So we separated the younger kids into their own area, fixed the timing, redid the parking flow, and ran it one more time. The next year went smoothly, and the event had a five year run.

Before you lower a goal, check whether the plan is the thing that needs the edit: https://alignify.com/articles/goals-off-track

08/22/2026

In 20+ years of church staff meetings, most of them aren't productive.

The meeting tries to do too many things at once, there's a constantly changing but never quite documented agenda, the devotion and updates take forever and people lose interest.

Work doesn't happen in meetings.

But they can be so much better. Talking about this on a new training happening on September 9.

Come join us.

A free live training on September 9 for church leaders who run staff meetings. Learn the five reasons meetings go bad and the STAFF framework that fixes all five.

08/20/2026

When a goal falls behind, most teams do one of three things. They lower the target, they ignore the goal and pretend it was never real, or they double down with no change to the approach and just more desire.

All three treat the goal as the problem.

The goal is rarely the problem, and neither is your team's commitment. The goal was a decision you made with clear eyes. The plan was a stack of assumptions you wrote before anything had tested them, and a missed milestone tells you which one broke.

That makes being behind useful information instead of a verdict on your people.

We wrote up the full diagnostic, five questions you can run with a goal's owner in about twenty minutes: https://alignify.com/articles/goals-off-track