Our short-term Issues List is constantly cluttered with minor administrative tasks and transactional problems that should be handled offline, leaving us with zero time to solve our major strategic bottlenecks. How do we filter our Level 10 Meeting Issues List before the meeting starts?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A cluttered Issues List is a sign that your team does not understand what constitutes a leadership-level issue. Your Level 10 Meeting™ is reserved for systemic, high-impact problems that require the collective brainpower of the leadership team.

To clean this up, implement a hard filter for every item added to the list. Before any issue is allowed on the agenda, the person raising it must ask three questions:

- Does this issue affect more than one department?
- Does this issue directly impact our ability to hit our quarterly Rocks or annual goals?
- Have I already tried to solve this one-on-one with the relevant team member?

If the answer to these questions is no, the issue does not belong on the leadership Level 10 Meeting™ agenda.

The facilitator must actively curate the list before the meeting starts. If they see minor, transactional items, they must push them back to the owner and instruct them to solve them offline. For example, a broken printer or a minor client complaint is a departmental task, not a leadership issue.

Furthermore, coach your team to use their weekly one-on-one meetings to handle these smaller items. Protect the sanctity of the Level 10 Meeting™ Issues List so that when you sit down for IDS®, you are only tackling the big, hairy issues that are holding the company back from growing.