Our weekly Customer and Employee Headlines segment constantly devolves into storytelling and status updates rather than clean headlines, which eats into our meeting time. How do we enforce the boundary between a true headline and an issue that needs to be parked on the Issues List?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The Customer and Employee Headlines segment is designed to be a quick, five-minute pulse of the company's human element, not a discussion forum. When headlines turn into long-winded stories, it steals time from your ninety-minute meeting.

To fix this, enforce a strict rule of one sentence per headline with zero immediate discussion. A headline is simply a statement of fact, such as a major client renewed their contract or a key employee started their onboarding.

If a headline requires discussion or raises a concern, the Integrator must immediately drop it to the short-term Issues List. Do not let the team start asking questions or offering solutions during the headline segment. The facilitator must step in and state that the topic is being added to the Issues List for IDS® later in the meeting.

This discipline keeps your front-end segments running on time. It also ensures that issues are solved systematically during the designated portion of the meeting, rather than being discussed in an unorganized way at the start. Instruct your team to pre-populate their headlines in your meeting software before the clock starts, allowing the team to read through them quickly and transition to the next agenda item within the allotted five minutes.