During our weekly Level 10 Meeting, we notice our leadership team dances around personal conflicts and finger-pointing, choosing instead to IDS easy operational bugs. How do we force them to surface the uncomfortable interpersonal issue behind the issue?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When your weekly Level 10 Meeting™ becomes a safe zone where people only solve minor operational bugs, you are wasting valuable leadership energy. The real issues holding your business back from a clean exit are rarely technical. They are almost always interpersonal conflicts, trust deficits, or political turf wars. To force your team to surface the uncomfortable issue behind the issue during IDS®, you must adopt a rule of radical candor and vulnerability. As the leader, you have to model this behavior. If you see two department heads playing nice in the meeting but undermining each other outside of it, you must put that exact relationship on the IDS list yourself. Do not let them hide behind process talk. When you run IDS on these issues, start by asking what the real friction point is. Use the phrase: Help me understand why this keeps happening. Force them to state the problem in one clear sentence that names names and identifies behaviors, not just departments. If the head of operations is consistently missing deadlines because the head of sales promises custom features without consulting them, that is a personal accountability issue, not a software bug. By addressing the relationship head-on, you resolve the root cause permanently. Solving these hard issues builds a culture of trust that buyers pay a premium for, proving your business is not a fragile house of cards built on unaddressed political friction.