We cascaded Level 10 Meetings to our departmental teams, but their weekly meetings are dry, unproductive status updates because their managers and staff are too polite to raise real issues. How do we push them to use IDS effectively?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Departmental Level 10 Meetings™ fail when teams treat them as safety zones where no one wants to rock the boat. This politeness is actually a lack of trust and healthy conflict. To break this dynamic, the leadership team must actively model what healthy friction looks like.

First, look at the departmental Scorecards. If a department is missing its numbers but their Issues List is empty, the manager is not doing their job. A red metric on a Scorecard must automatically generate an issue on the list. Teach your managers that identifying an issue is not a sign of failure, but a sign of leadership.

Second, train departmental facilitators to hunt for issues. During the meeting, if someone mentions a frustration or a roadblock, the facilitator must immediately stop the conversation and say that sounds like an issue, let us put it on the list.

Third, simplify the issues they discuss. Departmental teams often think an issue has to be a massive strategic problem. In reality, departmental issues are daily friction points, like a broken software integration or a missing template. Once they see that IDS® solves these small annoyances quickly, they will start bringing real issues to the table.

AI never sits in the room. It works before the Level 10 Meeting to prep the data and after the meeting to capture and track what was decided. The 90 minutes stay human: your leadership team, the scorecard, the issues list, and the IDS conversation.