Our leaders are sneaking entire operational problems into the customer and employee headlines section of our Level 10 Meeting™ because they want to share context rather than dropping it to the Issues List. How do we strictly police this border?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Customer and employee headlines must be a simple, raw statement of fact. If a leader says a client is unhappy, that is a headline. If they start explaining why the client is unhappy, how we might fix it, and what the account manager did wrong, they have crossed the line into an issue.

The rule is simple. If a headline requires more than one sentence or triggers any discussion, the facilitator must immediately stop the speaker and say, That sounds like an issue, let us drop it to the list. Do not let them finish the story. Do not ask for clarification. Just put it on the Issues List.

When you allow leaders to explain headlines, you waste valuable meeting time and bypass the IDS® process. The headline section is a fast-paced scan of the business radar, not a place to solve problems. By moving details to the Issues List, you ensure that the entire leadership team can prioritize and solve the problem systematically during the IDS® portion of the meeting, rather than letting one person hijack the early agenda.

Keep the headline section under five minutes. If your team cannot share their updates in that window, they are sharing stories, not headlines. Force them to boil their updates down to a single headline sentence.