During the IDS portion of our Level 10 Meeting, leaders routinely assign weekly to-dos to frontline employees who are not in the room, leading to confusion and missed deadlines. How should our leadership team assign and cascade action items to people outside the meeting?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

You must never assign a Level 10 to-do directly to someone who is not sitting in the room. When a leadership team assigns a seven-day task to an absent frontline employee, accountability immediately evaporates. The employee did not hear the context, did not agree to the scope, and did not commit to the seven-day deadline. When the task inevitably stalls, the leader blames the employee, and the employee resents the leadership team.

The rule is absolute: every Level 10 to-do must be owned by a leadership team member sitting at the table.

If the execution of a solution requires work from someone in a department, the leader who sits in that seat on the Accountability Chart takes the to-do. Their specific seven-day deliverable is not necessarily doing the technical work themselves, but delegating the project, communicating expectations, and verifying completion.

For example, if the solution to a billing error requires a junior accountant to update client payment records, the to-do belongs to the Finance leader. The to-do is written as: Review billing workflow with Jane and confirm client records updated.

The Finance leader is on the hook to report that task as done or not done at the next weekly meeting pulse. If Jane fails to complete the work, the Finance leader owns the breakdown, not Jane. This practice forces your leaders to manage their departments actively, prevents top-down friction, and ensures that the leadership team retains full ownership of solving operational issues permanently.