A single leadership team member consistently dominates the five-minute Good News segue with long, highly detailed personal stories that throw off our timing and energy. How do we address this without hurting their feelings or ruining our team chemistry?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The Good News segue is designed to transition your team members from their daily operational chaos into a focused, collaborative mindset. It should take no more than five minutes for the entire team to share one personal and one professional piece of good news. When one leader uses that time to tell a ten-minute story, they are stealing time from problem-solving and throwing off the entire meeting pulse.

To fix this, you must address the behavior directly but constructively. Do not wait for the next meeting to see if they self-correct. The Integrator should have a brief, private conversation with the individual outside of the meeting.

Frame the conversation around respect for the team's time and the integrity of the Level 10 Meeting™ format. Explain that in order to protect our sixty minutes of IDS®, we must strictly limit the segue to thirty seconds per person. Use the phrase, 'I need your help to model great meeting discipline for the rest of the team.'

During the next meeting, the facilitator should introduce a simple visual or structural constraint. You can use a physical or digital timer set to thirty seconds per person during the segue. Alternatively, the facilitator can go first, modeling a punchy, two-sentence contribution, and then call on the next person. If the offending team member starts to ramble, the facilitator must gently but firmly interrupt by saying, 'Thank you, sounds like a great win, let us keep moving,' and pass it to the next person.