My leadership team members are great friends individually, but when we gather as a group, they engage in political maneuvering and hold secret meetings after the meeting to lobby me directly on strategic issues. How do we eliminate this backchannel lobbying and ensure all real debate happens openly during our Level 10 Meeting™ sessions?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The meeting after the meeting is a symptom of a highly toxic and dysfunctional leadership team culture. When your directors smile and nod during your Level 10 Meeting sessions but then lobby you privately in your office, they are bypassing your team's collective intelligence and destroying peer-to-peer accountability.

To stop this behavior, you must shut down the backchannel immediately. The next time a leadership team member approaches you privately to complain about a colleague or lobby for a departmental project, stop them mid-sentence. Tell them that their issue belongs on the Issues List of the leadership team, and refuse to discuss it one-on-one.

Force all strategic debates into the open during your Level 10 Meeting. Use the IDS process to smoke out the real concerns. If you know there is tension between two departments, put it on the agenda and force them to solve it in front of the entire team.

Make it clear that as the Visionary or Integrator, you will not play the role of the referee or mediator. Your leaders must have the courage to look each other in the eye and engage in healthy, constructive conflict.

When your team realizes that the only way to get a decision made is to debate it openly during your weekly meetings, the backchannel lobbying will die. This shift builds a culture of absolute transparency and establishes a healthy executive team that can lead the company to a successful exit.