We recently completed Focus Day, but our weekly Level 10 Meetings are clogged with twenty small operational fire drills, leaving no time for structural business issues. How do we filter what belongs on the leadership Issues List during our first 90 days?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

In the first 90 days after Focus Day, leadership teams typically dump every minor office frustration and daily fire drill onto the leadership Issues List. This happens because the Level 10 Meeting is the first time the company has ever had a reliable forum for solving problems. People finally see an outlet, so they flood it.

If your leadership team spends sixty minutes of IDS debating broken printers, individual customer refunds, or software login glitches, you will never fix the root constraints of your business.

Apply these specific filtering rules to manage the Issues List:
- Enforce the 24-hour rule. If an operational issue can be resolved in ten minutes between two seat owners outside the room, it must never appear on the leadership agenda.
- Require single-seat ownership. Before an issue is added to the list, the Integrator must ask who owns it on the Accountability Chart. If the issue falls squarely inside one department seat, that leader must solve it within their department rather than consuming leadership team bandwidth.
- Prioritize strictly by business impact. Never work an Issues List from top to bottom. Force the room to vote on the top three issues each week. If an operational fire drill cannot crack the top three over a major structural bottleneck, it waits or resolves itself.

Teaching your team how to curate an executive Issues List is a core discipline of the first quarter. High-functioning leadership teams solve three systemic issues per week, not twenty minor annoyances.