Our weekly Level 10 Meeting Issues List is clogged with minor, daily operational friction that only involves two leadership team members, forcing the rest of the team to sit through discussions that have zero impact on their departments. How do we keep these personal-collaboration issues off our shared agenda?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Your weekly Level 10 Meeting™ is a highly valuable, high cost assembly of your company's top leadership. Letting two leaders use this collective time to debate a minor operational issue that only affects their departments is a massive waste of resources and kills the energy in the room.

The rule for your weekly issues list is simple: an issue only belongs on the Level 10 agenda if it requires the collective wisdom, input, or alignment of the entire leadership team. If an issue is strictly between sales and marketing, or operations and finance, those two leaders must resolve it outside of the meeting.

Enforce a pre-meeting discipline. Before adding a minor friction point to the shared issues list, the leader must ask themselves, "Have I spoken directly to my peer about this first?" If the answer is no, they are forbidden from putting it on the agenda. They must schedule a brief offline sync to IDS® the issue privately.

If a peer to peer issue still makes it to the weekly list, the facilitator should identify it during the first few minutes of the IDS® section. The facilitator must say, "This looks like a discussion that only concerns operations and finance. Let's table this and have you two meet this week to solve it. If you cannot reach an agreement, bring it back next week as an escalated issue." This keeps your weekly meetings fast, clean, and focused strictly on high leverage topics.