When our leaders share customer or employee headlines, they often get defensive if someone suggests dropping the item to the Issues List, treating it like a personal attack on their department. How do we stop leaders from taking issue creation personally during Headlines?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Leaders get defensive about dropping headlines to the Issues List when company culture equates having an issue with failing at your job. In EOS®, an issue is not an accusation. It is simply an unresolved item, an obstacle, an unexpected opportunity, or an idea that requires team clarity or alignment.

During the Level 10 Meeting™ Headlines segment, the rule is strictly binary: an update is either pure information that requires zero discussion, or it requires discussion and immediately drops down to the Issues List. There is no middle ground. If an account manager announces that a major customer changed their contract terms, that is not a casual comment. It impacts operations, cash flow, and account management. Dropping it to the list protects the company.

To remove the emotional sting, the facilitator must depersonalize the language. Never say, your department is having a problem with that client, so let us put it on the list. Instead, say, that headline touches multiple seats, so let us drop it to the list and solve it during IDS®.

Remind the team that putting an item on the Issues List does not mean the department head did something wrong. It means the leadership team is doing its job by rallying around a cross-functional operational reality. Furthermore, the person who owns the headline gets to help frame the root cause once the meeting reaches IDS®.

Over time, this mindset must permeate your culture: high-performing leadership teams do not boast about empty Issues Lists. They take pride in pulling hidden problems out into daylight before they compound into financial damage.