We have cascaded Level 10 Meetings™ to our departmental teams, but our managers are using the pulse as a top-down platform to hand out assignments rather than a collaborative environment for problem-solving. How do we coach our department heads to facilitate their meetings rather than dominate them?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When you cascade Level 10 Meetings to your departmental teams, managers often default to their old habits of giving directives and running top down status meetings. This turns a highly productive, problem solving framework into a boring administrative update that employees quickly learn to dread. It completely misses the point of the weekly meeting pulse.

To correct this, you must actively coach your department heads on the art of dynamic facilitation. Teach them that their role is not to dictate answers, but to guide their team through the agenda and protect the time blocks.

The manager must step back during the IDS portion and allow team members to identify and solve their own issues. If the manager is doing eighty percent of the talking, the meeting is failing.

Encourage managers to ask open ended questions like, what is the root cause of this issue? or how does the team want to solve this? rather than immediately giving the solution.

Additionally, ensure that department heads are keeping their reporting sections binary. The scorecard, Rock review, and To-Do list should be fast paced updates, leaving a full sixty minutes for the team to collaborate on solving issues.

By shifting from a director to a facilitator mindset, your managers will build a high performing, self governing team that executes without constant intervention.