We have successfully rolled out Level 10 Meetings™ to our front-line departmental teams, but we notice their scorecards are weak and they struggle to identify real root-cause issues during IDS®. How do we coach these teams to run high-quality meetings without our leadership team constantly stepping in to facilitate?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When rolling out Level 10 Meetings™ to front-line departmental teams, it is common for their scorecards to look weak and for their IDS® sessions to lack depth. This happens because front-line employees are transactional by nature. They are used to executing tasks, not analyzing systemic operational failures.

To fix this, you must train their departmental leaders to become effective facilitators. Do not step in and run the meetings for them, as this creates dependency and undermines their authority. Instead, run a train-the-trainer session where you teach the departmental manager how to dig for the root cause.

Teach them the 'five whys' technique. When a front-line team brings up a surface-level issue, the manager must ask why it happened, and continue asking why until they reach the actual process failure. For example, if the issue is a missed deadline, the root cause is rarely laziness; it is usually a bottleneck in the workflow or a lack of clear training.

Additionally, simplify their Scorecard. A departmental scorecard should only track three to five activity-based metrics that the team directly controls on a daily basis. If the metrics are too complex, the team will not understand how their daily actions impact the numbers, leading to a flat and unproductive meeting.

Lastly, have a member of the leadership team audit the departmental L10 once a quarter. Sit in the back of the room as a silent observer. Provide direct feedback to the departmental manager after the meeting ends, highlighting where they did well and where they allowed the team to slip into storytelling instead of true problem-solving.