Our leadership team uses the Customer and Employee Headlines segment of our Level 10 Meeting to share generic praise and cheerful updates, but we realize they are using this positive spin to mask massive operational failures. How do we force our leaders to share the brutal facts instead of marketing to each other?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The Customer and Employee Headlines segment is a five-minute quick pulse to share good news and bad news. It is not a corporate public relations session. When your team only shares polished, positive updates, they are hiding reality, which is a direct violation of the trust pillar of your organizational Charter.

To break this habit, your Integrator must change the expectation of what constitutes a headline. A great headline is a brief, objective data point about a customer or employee experience, whether it is positive or negative. For every positive headline shared, your Integrator should actively prompt the team by asking for the negative counterpart. Specifically ask, who is struggling, or what account is currently at risk?

If a leader shares a headline like, our largest client loves our new service department, but you know that same client had three service delays last week, call it out. If a positive headline actually hides an underlying systemic issue, it must immediately be dropped to the Issues List.

You must reward vulnerability. If a department head stands up and says, we completely dropped the ball on a key client onboarding this week, praise them for their honesty before dropping the issue to the list. When your team sees that sharing bad news does not result in public execution, they will stop hiding behind fake, polished headlines. Start demanding the raw truth, because you cannot solve problems that you refuse to name.