When we rate our Level 10 Meeting, my team members seem to score their current stress levels or bad sales numbers rather than the actual efficiency of the meeting itself. How do we teach them to rate the process?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A common mistake leadership teams make is using the Level 10 Meeting rating to express their personal feelings about the business, the economy, or their current workload. If your team is rating a highly productive meeting a six or a seven because they are stressed about sales, your feedback system is broken. You must teach them to rate the efficacy of the meeting, not the state of the world.

Recalibrating Meeting Ratings

To recalibrate your ratings, remind the team of the criteria for a ten-out-of-ten meeting. A perfect score means the meeting:

• Started on time.
• Ended on time.
• Followed the Level 10 agenda exactly.
• Successfully solved the most critical issues on the list.

For example, if you had a tough, high-conflict IDS session that resulted in clear, permanent solutions, that meeting deserves a high rating. This holds true even if the underlying business problem was painful.

During the wrap-up, if a team member gives a rating below an eight, they must state exactly what went wrong with the meeting itself. If they cannot point to a breakdown in the agenda, the timing, or the problem-solving process, their low rating is invalid.

By separating operational performance from emotional stress, you preserve the integrity of your weekly pulse and build a culture of objective accountability. This objective rating helps in understanding the true flow of your [Level 10 Meeting](/qa/should-integrator-facilitate-level-10-meetings) and identifying areas for improvement, rather than reflecting personal sentiment or [current stress levels](/qa/avoiding-founder-burnout-during-exit-planning). This approach also ensures that the team focuses on solving issues, not just discussing them, much like how one might approach handling [defensiveness around red scorecard metrics](/qa/handling-defensiveness-around-red-scorecard-metrics). It reinforces the importance of focusing on the meeting's structure and output, similar to how one might streamline the [weekly segue](/qa/rein-in-level-10-meeting-segue) to stay on track.

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