During the Customer/Employee Headlines portion of our Level 10 Meeting™, someone shares a major piece of news, and the entire team immediately starts brainstorming and trying to solve it on the spot instead of holding it for the IDS® portion. How do we shut down this immediate problem-solving reflex?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This is one of the most common ways leadership teams bleed time during the first fifteen minutes of their weekly meeting. A headline is shared: such as a major client threatening to leave or a key developer resigning: and the room immediately goes into a panic. Leaders start asking questions, offering opinions, and defending their departments. Before you know it, you have spent ten minutes having a sloppy, unstructured debate without looking at the Scorecard or reviewing your Rocks. You must treat the Headlines segment as a pure reporting phase, not a problem-solving phase.

The rule is simple: you are only allowed to state the headline in one or two sentences. If the headline requires any discussion, action, or decision, it must immediately be converted into an issue on the short-term Issues List. The facilitator must be ruthless here. The moment a second person chimes in to ask a clarifying question or offer a solution, the facilitator must interrupt and say: That is a headline, it sounds like an issue, let us drop it on the list and move on. No discussion is permitted. By keeping the reporting phase completely clean, you protect your sixty minutes of IDS® where you can solve the issue systematically rather than reactively.