We are spending our weekly Level 10 Meeting IDS time solving problems for departments that are not even represented on our leadership team. How do we push these issues back down to the right seat on our Accountability Chart?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a leadership team solves front-line or departmental issues during their weekly Level 10 Meeting™, they are reverse-delegating. This habit creates a bottleneck, disempowers your middle managers, and wastes valuable leadership time on tactical firefighting. To stop this, you must strictly respect your Accountability Chart. During the Identify step of IDS®, the facilitator must ask which seat owns the issue. If the root cause of the issue lies within a specific department, and that department has its own Level 10 Meeting, the issue must be pushed down. The leadership team's job is not to solve the issue, but to assign a weekly to-do for the responsible department head to take the issue to their own departmental meeting. This keeps accountability where it belongs. If you do not have departmental Level 10 Meetings yet, the leadership team member who manages that department must take the issue as a to-do and solve it directly with their team. Stop hoarding decisions. By pushing tactical problems down the Accountability Chart, you free up your leadership team to focus on strategic execution and ensure your managers are developing their own problem-solving capabilities.