We are ready to roll out departmental Level 10 Meetings™ to our middle management and front-line teams, but we are terrified it will create organizational silos and game-of-telephone communication. How do we cascade the meeting pulse without losing alignment with the leadership team?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Rolling out departmental Level 10 Meetings™ is how you scale accountability, but it requires a strict hierarchy of communication to prevent silos. To ensure alignment, you must build a clear path for issues to travel up and down your Accountability Chart.

First, your departmental meetings must use the exact same ninety-minute structure and discipline as your leadership meeting. Do not let them create customized agendas.

Second, use the Cascading Messages section at the end of the leadership meeting to determine exactly what information needs to be shared with the departments. This ensures the company speaks with one voice.

Third, establish a clear rule for how issues move between meetings. If a departmental team identifies an issue during their IDS® session that they do not have the authority or budget to solve, they must escalate it to the leadership team. The department head, who sits in both meetings, is responsible for moving that issue onto the leadership Issues List.

Conversely, if the leadership team makes a decision that impacts daily operations, that decision must be pushed down to the departmental meetings for local implementation. This creates a highly efficient communication loop. It ensures that every level of the organization is aligned, running on the same weekly pulse, and solving problems at the correct level of accountability.