Pat Lencioni, Catholic father and CEO of the management consulting firm The Table Group, firmly believes in the need to put as much intentionality into family life as one does in professional life. When he and I chatted about some of the overlap between family organizational principles and business management, he mentioned something companies do that families often don’t do, but should: hold family meetings. Family meetings are intended to promote better organization, establish a climate for more effective teamwork, and build stronger relationships among family members. Holding meetings with your family on a regular—preferably weekly—basis ultimately helps create more authentic Christian culture in the home.
If you are looking for a way to strengthen your spiritual leadership, sharpen communication skills in your family, intentionally pray together, inculcate essential family values, and reduce stress, then family meetings are your answer.
Ready to implement meetings in your family? Here are some pointers:
- Aim for a weekly gathering. More than weekly, and you’ll likely experience overload and burnout; less than weekly, and you will probably find that it doesn’t have as strong as an impact on your family’s spirituality and communication. Be sure to pick a time that works for everyone’s schedule. Sunday evenings works well for many families. Make the family meeting one of the top priorities of the week. Consistency is key, and eventually, holding family meetings will become an almost effortless activity on your family calendar.
- Decide, as a leadership team (you and your spouse), on a general outline for your meetings. Before your first meeting, come up with a plan of attack for your meeting’s structure, for example: opening prayer, topic introduction by the spiritual head, discussion, and closing prayer (in which everyone offers a special intention), a song, game, or dessert (or conclude with all of them!). It may take a few meetings to find out what structure works well with your family, given your children’s ages and
unique personalities. Flexibility is critical! Your meetings may vary greatly in length due to attention spans and amount of involvement each time, and that is entirely okay.
- Pick a discussion topic. This could be just about anything. Be creative, and be open to discussing both practical topics (how the chore chart is working, who needs help with what projects, how everyone is getting along with each other), learning topics (a short book or article study, life skills lessons like budgeting, table manners, how to exercise good citizenship, or ethical decision making) and fun topics (sharing highlights of the week, things you are grateful for, or brainstorming family fun days). Whatever you do, involve everyone in the discussion. Family meetings are not a time for your children to hear you ramble. If you don’t engage them, you will lose their attention.
- Bring your faith into it. Find creative ways to center your meeting around faith. In addition to prayer, consider picking a “virtue of the week” that your family will focus on practicing better, and then you can discuss how you all did exercising the chosen virtue at the next meeting. Other ideas for infusing faith into the meeting include picking a saint’s life to learn about or reading and acting out a parable from the Gospels. The options to make your meetings God-centered are endless.
Family meetings are opportunities to strengthen your spiritual leadership and regularly benchmark how your family is doing relating to one another and to God. Use these meetings to evaluate what is working well in your family, what isn’t, and what little changes you can make or what small things you can do to become more loving, communicative, service-oriented, and happy family members in the week to come. These meetings should remind you that drawing closer to God’s will for your family is done one baby step—one week—at a time. Rejoice in the process, the progress, and in all of the little moments and memories in between.
