Our departmental Level 10 Meetings are turning into top-down lecture sessions where the department head does all the talking and simply reviews everyone's tasks. How do we shift the dynamic so the team actively brings and solves their own departmental issues?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

To fix a top-down departmental Level 10 Meeting, you must change who owns the Issues List. Many department heads mistake facilitation for management. They use the weekly pulse to review tasks and micromanage, which trains their teams to sit back and wait to be told what to do. This breaks the GWC of the team and stalls your operational execution.

First, the department head must stop running the meeting. Delegate the facilitator role to another team member. This forces the leader to step back and participate as an equal peer during IDS, rather than dominating the room.

Second, institute a rule where the department head cannot add more than two issues to the list. The rest of the team must populate the board before the meeting starts. If the team shows up with a blank list, do not fill the silence with a lecture. Sit in the uncomfortable silence, or end the meeting early. Once they realize that a blank list means their operational bottlenecks will not get solved, they will start bringing real issues to the table.

Your goal is to build a self-solving team. That requires the department head to practice the Help First mindset by stepping back, letting others facilitate, and forcing the team to identify their own road blocks.