Our Level 10 Meeting segue has turned into a weekly venting session where leaders share professional bests that are actually sarcastic complaints about clients or other departments. This toxic energy ruins the transition and derails the entire ninety minutes. How do we clean up the segue without policing people's feelings?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The segue is designed to transition your minds from working in the business to working on the business. It is a hard pivot. When leaders use this time to air grievances or drop sarcastic comments under the guise of a professional best, they are polluting the meeting before it even starts. You are not policing feelings by demanding discipline during these five minutes. You are protecting the team's collective energy.

As the facilitator, you must stop this behavior immediately. If a leader shares a best that is actually a complaint, interrupt them. Keep it simple and direct. Tell them that their update sounds like a frustration, not a best, and ask them to save it so it can be added to the Issues List for IDS later. Then, ask them to share an actual win.

A professional best must be a positive achievement or progress. It could be a closed deal, a project milestone, or a team member who went above and beyond. If a leader genuinely cannot find one positive thing that happened in the business over the last seven days, they have a deeper seat or cultural alignment problem that you need to address outside of the meeting.

Do not allow the segue to become a therapy session. Force the team to focus on the good stuff for five minutes. This builds the positive momentum required to tackle the hard, uncomfortable problems waiting on your Issues List. If you let the meeting start in the mud, you will spend the next eighty-five minutes trying to crawl out of it.