PRODUCTIVE PASTOR
Questions
Here’s a ton of questions to help you in your next meeting.
Running High Impact Meetings
Use these questions in your next meeting to keep thing fresh and fun while at the same time keep the ball moving down field each and every week.
Learn about the 8 meeting types and get sample agendas on the Meetings Overview page.
Asking Better Questions
To improve your questioning skills, here are some tips that have worked for executives I have coached:
- Be curious. Think more about situations and problems and encourage everyone else at your organization to do the same.
- Challenge your beliefs and assumptions. We can’t fully trust our own beliefs and assumptions because they are skewed by personal bias and past experiences. Open your mind to the potential complexity of the subject at hand.
- Ask yourself whose decision it is to make. If it is your decision to make, ask questions that will help you arrive at the best answer. If it is another employee’s decision to make, ask the employee questions to help him or her reach a conclusion.
- Don’t ask leading questions. I call these the Jeopardy questions. Leading questions attempt to lead others to see the way you do, rather than to understand the other person’s perspective.
- Ask open-ended and diverse questions.
- Ask empowering questions. Empowering questions move people to positive action, rather than assigning blame.
- Ask questions that create clarity. What else is known about the situation or problem? Can it be broken down?
- Ask questions that help employees think analytically and critically.
- Understand that asking questions take time.
- Only ask questions if you are prepared to listen and consider the answers.
Building A Leadership Pipeline
Here a few question you can use to help your team think through their leadership pipelines.
Want more info about how to build a Leadership Pipeline?
Checkout – www.MinistryLibrary.com/leadership-pipeline-workshop
- Who are you developing? Bus Principle
- What parts of your job are you delegating?
- How many leaders do we have at each level?
- How many do we need?
- How has your pipeline bench deepened in the last month?
- Who are the new potential leaders that you’ve identified? Which one most excites you?
- How many of your leaders and currently reproducing themselves? How are you helping them?
- How are you celebrating their reproduction?
- What is the biggest obstacle you see for continual reproduction of leaders in your area?
- What resources do you need?
- How can I help you?
Personal Growth & Delegation
I recommend writing these questions on a whiteboard and giving everyone 10-20 min to write their answers and then we take time to share our answers with the team.
- What do you need to learn in order to be a better leader?
- What do you want to learn more about?
- What are you doing to grow yourself?
- Who can you learn from?
- What character or competencies do you need to focus on in the next few months?
- What do you need to START doing?
- What do you need to STOP doing?
- Make a list of all the tasks you did last week.
- Of the tasks which are filling you up and which are draining you?
- Of the draining task, which are one you don’t HAVE to do?
- Can you effectively delegate those?
- Who can you delegate them to?
- When can you hand them off?
1 on 1 Meetings
1 on 1’s are some of the most exciting meeting I have. I think that when a leader gets to spend focused one on one time with a team member there is an opportunity for a huge amount of growth and productivity. I also find that my teams love these too!
- How are you doing? (personally & spiritually)
- What are you working one?
- What’s your biggest struggle?
- What are doing to overcome?
- What are your big goals?
- How can I help you?
- What should I start doing?
- What should I stop doing?
- What should I continue to do?
- Is there anything I’m doing that is wasting your time?
- Is there anything we haven’t talked about but should?
Debriefing Big Events
Maybe it’s Easter, Christmas, or a Community Event, we all have big events and if we’re not evaluating them correctly they can become sacred cows that pull away time and energy.
I use these question to help continually improve each big event we do.
DUPLICATE
- What did we do well?
- What worked best?
- What do we know we want to do again next time?
DUMP
- What do we not need to do again?
- What didn’t work at all?
- What was the most draining effort, but produced little or no return for the investment?
- What is tired, worn out, ready to be laid to rest before we do this again?
- What was missing/confusing?
DEVELOP
- What was good, but could be better?
- What did we learn?
- What strengths did we see in a specific person or team?
- How can we improve our teamwork, systems or communication?
- Where did we see the greatest energy, that with a little more effort could be huge?
- What do we know is a part of our values for the event — or for our church (or organization) — but it didn’t get enough attention?
DREAM
- What’s the wildest idea we could think of to do next time?
- What could we add next time that has the potential to be a “signature” aspect?
- If money was not an option, what would we do to make this better?
