Our weekly Level 10 Meeting™ Issues List is constantly clogged with thirty or forty minor, tactical items that should be resolved between individual leaders during the week, leaving us with no time to IDS® our major, company-wide bottlenecks. How do we filter our Issues List before the meeting to keep it focused on leadership-level priorities?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A clogged Issues List is a symptom of a leadership team that is not communicating during the week or does not understand the Accountability Chart. When your weekly list has dozens of minor tactical items, your Level 10 Meeting becomes a sluggish administrative grind. This operational noise prevents you from focusing on the deep, strategic issues that drive enterprise value.

To clean up this clutter, you must enforce the rule that issues should be solved at the lowest possible level on the Accountability Chart before they ever make it to the leadership team agenda. If two leaders can solve a problem with a quick five minute phone call on Thursday, it has no business being on the weekly leadership list on Monday.

Before the meeting begins, the Integrator should review the list and challenge any item that looks like a minor department task. Ask the owner of that issue, did you try to solve this with the relevant department head before putting it here?

Additionally, teach your team to group related issues. If you have five separate issues about a single client account, bundle them into one major issue.

By filtering the noise, you ensure that your sixty minute IDS block is spent on the critical barriers holding the business back, rather than administrative clutter that should have been handled days ago.