Our weekly Level 10 Meeting is efficient on paper, but we spend most of our IDS time discussing minor department symptoms rather than the root-cause operational issues holding back our scale. How do we elevate our leadership team's problem-solving?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

If your leadership team spends their weekly Level 10 Meeting discussing minor departmental symptoms rather than root-cause strategic issues, you are wasting valuable executive energy. This usually happens because leaders are comfortable solving easy, tactical problems and hesitant to tackle the hard, systemic issues that actually impact your scale and exit readiness.

To elevate your IDS sessions, you must train your team to dig deeper during the Identify phase. When an issue is brought to the table, do not let the owner of the issue simply state a symptom, such as sales are down this week or our software integration is lagging.

Force the team to ask why multiple times until they uncover the underlying operational bottleneck. Often, what looks like a marketing problem is actually an unaligned Accountability Chart seat or a lack of clear standard operating procedures.

Use your V/TO and your quarterly Rocks as the benchmark. Every issue on the weekly list should be filtered through your long-term goals. If an issue does not directly impact your core processes, your current Rocks, or your path to a clean exit, push it down to the departmental level and do not let it consume leadership team time. By keeping the focus on strategic, systemic issues, you teach your team to think like owners and build a highly resilient operation.