When an issue raised in a departmental Level 10 Meeting requires input or resources from another department, managers tend to let it stall or debate it endlessly. How do departmental teams escalate cross-functional issues cleanly without clogging the leadership team's Issues List?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Cross-departmental issues die when managers try to solve them in isolation. A frontline customer service team cannot fix a billing software bug, and an engineering team cannot unilaterally rewrite a sales agreement. If an issue requires another seat's authority, departmental teams must not waste forty minutes debating it.

First, the department head must determine if the issue is a peer-to-peer alignment problem or a true leadership issue. If two department heads simply need to coordinate, the issue generates a seven-day to-do for the department head to meet with their peer outside the meeting and return with a resolution. Departmental meetings should never sit and wait for a third party who is not in the room.

Second, if the issue stems from conflicting priorities, broken company-wide process, or unallocated capital, it must be escalated up to the leadership team. The department head puts it on the leadership team's Issues List for their own weekly Level 10 Meeting™.

When escalating, the manager must bring three data points: the clear root cause, the operational impact on their departmental Scorecard or Rocks, and their recommended solution. Never dump raw complaints onto the leadership list. The leadership team then runs IDS® (Identify, Discuss, Solve), decides the path forward, and cascades the decision back down during the next weekly pulse. This keeps departmental meetings moving while protecting executive bandwidth.