This accountability means that dad can’t just forget and have work get in the way. Mom can’t just decide she’d rather pull in another overtime shift the day of the next meeting. This has to be in the calendar. This has to be considered very high importance and high priority.

The children will quickly know how serious this is by how well the parents keep to the promised set times. They will learn how to value appointments and how to judge who can be trusted to value appointments based on how we model for them the importance of keeping the round table alive.

Like all new habits, it will take considerable effort to get momentum built. Once built, it’s a lot easier to keep. Plan ahead. During the school year, it’s easier to keep pace. Everyone has a busy routine. The holidays is a bit rough because the routine is paused. Summer is harder still, as vacation mode tends to undo a lot of routines.

This is where CEOs earn their worth. Parents, during these times when routines are challenged, your ability to keep pace and keep on top of the round table will pay off. This will help keep a sense of routine. This will keep a sense of continuity and trust going.

This holds even more true when there are special rituals built around the round table meetings. These rituals will vary greatly from family to family of course.

Any rescheduling should be for really important and unavoidable reasons. A death in the family or urgent medical emergency. A book report or bringing work home is not a valid reason. Well, 99% of the time anyway.

Because of how these meetings tend to work, those who do quarterly meetings have to be extra careful not to miss a meeting. It’s only four times a year. Those who are ambitious enough to attempt multiple times a month meetings… can afford to have a miss or two happen during the course of the year.

because these round tables are business styled meetings… weekly may not be necessary or for everyone either. All depends on what’s going on and the vision of the family

Keep in mind, each family has seasons. Some seasons require quarterly meetings. Others are so intense it requires weekly meetings to keep everyone on the same page.

When one has fewer meetings a year, they can afford to have the meeting run a bit longer. (keep in mind the ages of the children participants…). When having a higher frequency of meetings, one can afford to run the meetings a bit shorter as there will be another opportunity to continue the discussion in the near future.

So how long is long enough? Enough for everyone to contribute something at the short end and not so long to put many to sleep. This is not the time to do grand-standing speeches. It’s a collaborative discussion.

Conclusions

Now that I’m the CEO of my own family, I can relate to the challenges of running such round tables. Before having my first child, it was just my wife and I. We had many meetings at irregular intervals to help us grow as a couple. They were less formal in setting.

Now, with young children, it’s proving to be an adjustment period. One child is old enough to participate some but the others aren’t. Those who aren’t tend to go to bed a bit after the one who can, so keeping him up to chat is not an option. The others do not nap, so that isn’t an option either.

Yet, we do have short meetings. Those tend to be led by our oldest. He has questions, we have answers. That usually leads to all the children asking their questions in their own unique way. We all get a good laugh. They like the bonding experience. We learn how they perceive us.

As they grow, the level of sophistication will improve. The topics available will increase in range and complexity. According to my mentor, by the time they reach junior high age, nearly all topics will be fair game. Beyond high school, the complexity of these meetings will set the stage for their launch into their own independent living.

The round table is the foundation. The nature of the meetings will change to suit the needs of the family. At all points of time, the CEOs are responsible for making sure the groundwork is set for everyone to flourish in the meetings.

As you try your own style of round table meetings, do share with me what you think. Let me know what’s working. Let me know what’s not. This will help me better prepare other posts to share knowledge with you. Not only that, it helps me learn.

My understanding of the round table happened because several shared with me their experiences. Without those, I wouldn’t be able to set up my own, let alone discuss about it on the blog. I had no idea as a child that families did that. What I had was family worship. We had that daily. Twice daily actually. I don’t know many families who ran their worship anywhere near the way my parents did theirs. To me, that was church at home.

We will touch that in the future.

CEOs, this year is your year to make your home better than last year(s). Keep everyone in the know of how the family is going and let them have ownership in the path to get to the vision. In one of the near coming blog posts… we will continue the conversation. So do share this post and leave me a comment so I can better tailor the next post to what your needs are.