When an issue is raised in a departmental Level 10 Meeting but requires leadership team input, how do we systematically route it up or down without creating administrative confusion?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When running departmental Level 10 Meetings, teams often struggle with issues that are outside their scope of authority or require cross-departmental alignment. Letting these issues float in email chains or private chats creates silos and slows down your operations.

The solution is a clean routing protocol on your Issues List. When a department-level team identifies an issue that they do not have the power to solve, they must formally agree to push it up.

The department head, who sits on both the departmental team and the leadership team, is responsible for this transfer. They will add the issue to the leadership team's Level 10 Meeting Issues List before their next weekly pulse.

Conversely, when the leadership team solves an issue that requires departmental execution, they must assign a to-do to the respective department head to bring it down to their team's meeting.

This creates a highly efficient flow of information. Issues are either solved at the lowest possible level on the Accountability Chart or systematically escalated to the leadership team. By keeping this routing clean, you ensure that no critical operational problems slip through the cracks, maintaining a high level of organizational transparency that potential buyers look for during exit due diligence.