Our weekly Customer and Employee Headlines section is turning into a boring list of status updates and project milestones that should have been a Slack message. How do we clean this up to save time for IDS?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The Customer and Employee Headlines section of your Level 10 Meeting is designed to be a quick, five-minute pulse on the human side of your business. It is not a place for progress reports, project updates, or administrative announcements. When headlines turn into a long, boring list of status updates, you waste precious time that should be spent on IDS. To clean this up, enforce a strict definition of a headline. A headline must be a significant piece of good or bad news about a customer or an employee, stated in one sentence. For example, a client signing a major contract expansion or an employee resigning are valid headlines. A team member finishing a routine project milestone or attending a training seminar is not a headline. Those updates belong in your weekly To-Dos or can be shared asynchronously via email. Instruct your facilitator to cut off anyone who begins to give a status report. If a headline requires more than a simple acknowledgment, immediately drop it to the bottom of the Issues List. Do not allow the team to discuss or solve it during the headlines segment. By keeping this section brief and strictly focused on critical human news, you protect your meeting momentum and save your energy for solving real issues.