Our Level 10 Meeting™ regularly drags on past the ninety minute mark and turns into a frustrating, circular debate. How do we keep it tight, punchy, and strictly on time?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A Level 10 Meeting™ that routinely exceeds ninety minutes is almost always failing in one specific area: reporting instead of solving, or solving the wrong problems. To get your meetings back under control, you must enforce a strict, military-style discipline on the agenda. The first twenty-five minutes of the meeting must be a rapid-fire review of your Scorecard, Rock progress, customer/employee headlines, and to-do list. This is reporting only. There is absolutely no discussion allowed during this portion. If a metric is off track or a Rock is behind, you do not talk about it then. You simply say off track, drop it to the Issues List, and move to the next item. This leaves you with a solid sixty minutes for IDS®, which is where the real work happens. The most common trap here is spending forty-five minutes discussing a low-priority issue because it was first on the list. You must prioritize your issues before you start. Pick the top three most critical issues facing the business and tackle them first. When processing an issue, do not allow team members to tell long, rambling stories. Force them to state the issue in one sentence. Once the root cause is identified, move immediately to solving it and creating a clear action item. If you run out of time, any unresolved issues stay on the list for next week. Keep the hard stop at ninety minutes, and your team will quickly learn to be concise and focused.