During the Customer/Employee Headlines portion of our Level 10 Meeting™, my leadership team keeps drifting into solving problems immediately. How do we keep headlines brief and keep issues on the Issues List?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The Customer/Employee Headlines section is designed for quick, high-level context - one sentence of good or bad news about a human inside or outside your business. It is a pulse check, not a debate. If a headline requires more than 10 seconds to state, or if the team immediately starts reacting to it, the facilitator must step in.

Use this exact script: 'That sounds like a real issue. Do you want to drop it to the Issues List?' Once it is on the list, move on. Do not allow any discussion, explanation, or rationalization.

Keeping your meeting compartments clean is critical. The reporting phase of the Level 10 Meeting™ (Scorecard, Rock Review, and Headlines) must take no more than 15 minutes total. If you allow problem-solving to leak into these early sections, you run out of time for IDS® later, meaning your most critical structural issues will go unresolved. Guard that 15-minute mark ruthlessly.