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 check on the human side of your business. It is not a place for progress reports, project updates, or administrative announcements. When headlines devolve into a long, boring list of status updates, you waste precious time that should be spent on IDS (Identify, Discuss, Solve).

Defining an Effective Headline

To clean up this section, you must enforce a strict definition of what constitutes a headline.

• A headline must be a significant piece of good or bad news.
• It must be about a customer or an employee.
• It should be stated concisely, ideally in one sentence.

Examples of valid headlines:

• A client signing a major contract expansion.
• An employee resigning.

What is NOT a headline:

• A team member finishing a routine project milestone.
• An employee attending a training seminar.

These types of updates belong in your weekly [To-Dos](/qa/customer-expectations-shifting-ai-vto) or can be shared asynchronously via email.

Facilitating the Headlines Section

The facilitator plays a crucial role in maintaining the focus and efficiency of this segment.

• Instruct your facilitator to cut off anyone who begins to give a status report. This strict adherence to the definition prevents the section from veering off track. For more on Level 10 facilitation, consider practices for when [the Integrator facilitates](/qa/should-integrator-facilitate-level-10-meetings).
• 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. This preserves the meeting's momentum and ensures that the valuable time for problem-solving is used effectively. If your team struggles with issues being dropped, refer to how to handle [red scorecard metrics](/qa/handling-defensiveness-around-red-scorecard-metrics) for similar enforcement.
• By keeping this section brief and strictly focused on critical human news, you protect your meeting momentum and save energy for solving real issues. This structured approach is similar to how you should manage your [weekly segue](/qa/rein-in-level-10-meeting-segue) to keep meetings on track.

This discipline ensures that your Level 10 Meeting remains a productive forum for addressing strategic and operational challenges, rather than becoming a lengthy status update session.

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