Our front-line departmental teams say they do not have enough new weekly issues to fill their Level 10 Meeting IDS time, so they end up ending the meeting after twenty minutes. How do we teach them to find the hidden operational friction they are ignoring?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When front-line departmental teams claim they have no issues to solve, they are either hiding their problems or they do not understand what an issue actually is. Every department has friction. If a team ends their Level 10 Meeting in twenty minutes because their Issues List is blank, they are settling for average performance and ignoring opportunities to optimize operations.

To break this pattern, the departmental leader must train the team to identify issues proactively. An issue is not just a massive crisis. It is any obstacle, inefficiency, process breakdown, or missed expectation that keeps the department from running perfectly. Teach them to look at their Scorecard and Rocks first. Any missed metric or off-track priority is an automatic issue that must be added to the list for IDS.

Additionally, have the leader bring a list of proactive questions to spark discussion. Ask the team what is slowing them down, what customer complaints they heard, or where they experienced communication gaps this week. Once the team realizes that identifying an issue is a sign of leadership rather than a sign of failure, they will start populating the list. This shifts the meeting from a quick status check to a highly active, problem-solving engine that drives departmental performance.