Should our departmental Level 10 Meetings happen before or after our executive leadership team meeting each week, and how do we sequence the schedule so issues flow smoothly between tiers?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Hold your executive leadership team Level 10 Meeting first, ideally early in the week, and schedule departmental Level 10 Meetings twenty-four to forty-eight hours later.

This sequence creates a clean cascade of operational clarity. During the leadership team pulse, the executive team establishes company priorities, resolves systemic bottlenecks, and finalizes clear Cascading Messages during Conclude. When department heads walk into their departmental pulses later that week, they bring approved messaging, verified company Scorecard performance, and solved cross-functional decisions directly to frontline supervisors.

If you reverse the order, departmental teams waste time speculating about leadership decisions or debating issues that leadership has already solved. Running the leadership pulse first prevents frontline managers from operating in an informational vacuum.

Issue flow upwards still works cleanly in this sequence. When a frontline department encounters an issue requiring executive budget or cross-departmental alignment, they push that issue to their manager during their weekly pulse. That manager places it on the leadership team Issues List for the following week.

To make this flow work without friction, adhere to two structural rules:
- Never schedule departmental pulses immediately following the executive meeting. Give department heads at least a half day to digest decisions and frame their notes.
- Require every manager leading a departmental Level 10 Meeting to start their agenda review by delivering the exact Cascading Messages recorded in the leadership meeting conclude step.