Video Arts helps trainee priests to manage meetings
Trainee priests at St John’s Seminary in Surrey are using Meetings, Bloody Meetings, to improve their ability to organise and chair meetings.
“Priests and assistant priests are involved in many meetings, such as parish committee meetings, pastoral care group meetings, finance committee meetings and school governor meetings,” said Peter Andrews, a trainee priest at St John’s Seminary. “Running effective meetings is part of good management but these skills are not covered in our training. I’d used Video Arts resources in industry, before I joined the seminary, so I was able to recommend this resource.”
Meetings, Bloody Meetings shows how to plan the agenda, how to chair meetings, how to control the discussion and how to take minutes more effectively. Featuring John Cleese, Robert Hardy and Jeremy Childs, the 30-minute film uses humour to highlight five ways of making any meeting more efficient and productive.
“Meetings can be boring and frustrating because there are all sorts of egos and priorities that you have to balance and sort out,” said Peter Andrews. “If you’ve never been trained in the skills needed to run meetings effectively, you don’t know how to respond if someone across the table dominates the discussion or if the agenda starts to run away from you. This resource is very well produced, it’s engaging and it’s very memorable. So when one of our students has to chair or take part in a meeting in the future, these learning messages will instantly come back.”
St John’s Seminary, which has been preparing trainee priests for over 100 years, will stream Meetings, Bloody Meetings online via the internet. The resource will be incorporated into the five-six years of spiritual and pastoral training that St John’s students undertake in preparation for the priesthood.
“If the learning messages in this resource help even one of our students to be more effective in running a meeting, it will all have been worthwhile,” said Peter Andrews.
The five rules for running shorter and more productive meetings, outlined in the resource, are:
- Be clear about the precise objectives of the meeting
- Make sure everyone knows exactly what is being discussed, why, and what you want from the discussion
- Prepare a logical sequence of items and allocate time to each based on its importance, not its urgency
- Control the meeting and stop people jumping ahead or going over old ground
- Summarise all decisions and record them straight away with the name of the people responsible for any action
