Our leadership team has fallen into a rut of automatically rating our weekly Level 10 Meeting™ a perfect ten every single week, even when we fail to solve our top issues or get bogged down in administrative updates. How do we break this complacency and get honest ratings?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a leadership team routinely rates their Level 10 Meeting™ a ten out of ten while the business is stalling, it is a sign of complacency or fear of conflict. A true level ten meeting is rare and requires intense focus, hard conversations, and massive accountability. Automatically giving top marks is lazy and robs your team of the chance to improve.

To break this habit, the facilitator must redefine what an eight, nine, or ten actually means. A level ten meeting means the team started on time, followed the agenda strictly, reviewed the scorecard without getting derailed, completed eighty percent of their To-Dos, and solved their most critical issues during IDS®.

The next time your team starts shouting out tens, challenge them. If you did not finish your top three issues, or if the scorecard review drifted into a twenty-minute discussion, the meeting was not a ten.

Ask anyone who rates the meeting a ten to justify their score based on the actual results of the ninety minutes. Encourage the team to start rating the meeting lower to create room for growth. A rating of eight should be your baseline for a solid, productive meeting. Anything lower requires immediate feedback on what went wrong. By forcing the team to defend their ratings, you will shake off the complacency and restore the integrity of your weekly meeting pulse.