We have successfully launched departmental Level 10 Meetings, but we have no clear process for deciding when an issue should be kicked up to the leadership team or pushed down to a department. How do we manage this flow?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Without a clear escalation process, your weekly issues will either get trapped in departmental silos or clog up your leadership team's agenda. To manage this flow, you must use your Accountability Chart as your primary filter. When an issue arises in a departmental Level 10 Meeting, the department head must first ask: does our department have the authority and resources to solve this? If the answer is yes, the issue must stay in that department's meeting and be solved there. If the issue requires resources from another department, impacts a company-wide scorecard metric, or directly affects a quarterly Rock, it must be kicked up. The department head, who sits on the leadership team, is responsible for bringing that issue to the leadership Level 10 Meeting. Conversely, if the leadership team identifies an issue that is purely tactical and falls entirely within one department's scope, they must push it down. Do not waste the leadership team's time solving it. Write a weekly to-do for the relevant department head to drop that issue onto their departmental Level 10 issues list. By establishing these clear boundaries, you ensure that every problem is solved at the right level by the people who actually own the work.