Our departmental managers keep bringing minor, day-to-day operational issues up to the leadership team Level 10 Meeting instead of solving them in their own departmental meetings. How do we keep departmental issues out of the leadership box?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When minor operational issues clutter your leadership team's Level 10 Meeting, it is a sign that your Accountability Chart is not being respected. Your leadership team should be focused on strategic, systemic issues that affect the entire company or require cross-departmental alignment. Day-to-day operational problems must be solved at the department level. To clean up your leadership Issues List, you must implement a strict filtering process. Every time an issue is raised, the facilitator should ask which seat on the Accountability Chart owns this problem. If the issue falls entirely within the domain of a single department, and does not impact the broader organization, it does not belong in the leadership meeting. The leader of that department must take ownership of the issue, pull it off the leadership list, and drop it onto their own departmental Level 10 Issues List to solve with their team. You must teach your leaders to solve problems at the lowest possible level. If you continue to solve departmental issues in the leadership meeting, you are enabling dependency and preventing your managers from developing their own leadership capacity. Encourage your team to ask themselves if the issue requires the collective brainpower of the entire leadership team. If the answer is no, delete it from the leadership list and push it down to the correct departmental box immediately.