Our leadership team feels physically and mentally exhausted by the end of our ninety-minute Level 10 Meeting™. How do we diagnose whether this fatigue is due to poor facilitation or just a lack of team alignment?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A healthy Level 10 Meeting should leave your team feeling energized and aligned, not drained and exhausted. If your team is consistently worn out by the end of ninety minutes, you have a process leak that must be plugged immediately.

To diagnose the root cause, look at how you spend your time during IDS. If the fatigue is caused by poor facilitation, you will notice that the team spends too much time on the identity and discuss steps without ever reaching a solution. You are likely repeating the same points over and over, resulting in circular arguments that lead nowhere.

If the fatigue is caused by a lack of alignment, you will notice that the team is constantly debating basic strategic questions that should have been settled on your V/TO. If you cannot agree on your Core Focus or your target market, every weekly issue will turn into a deep, exhausting debate about company direction.

Use your next meeting rating to address this issue. Ask the team to rate the meeting based on its energy level and identify when the fatigue set in. If it is a facilitation issue, the facilitator must become more aggressive in moving the team to the solve step. If it is an alignment issue, you must schedule a Same Page meeting to resolve the strategic disagreements offline.