Our weekly Level 10 Meeting™ always starts late or gets derailed in the first five minutes because our team members share long, winded stories during the Segue instead of keeping their good news brief. How do we stop the Segue from eating up our valuable IDS® time without killing the positive team connection?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The Segue is designed to transition your team from working in the business to working on the business. It should take no more than five minutes total, with each person sharing one personal and one professional piece of good news in fifteen seconds or less. When team members start storytelling, sharing complex context, or giving status updates, they are eating into your precious seventy minutes of IDS® time.

To fix this, the facilitator must enforce a strict, friendly, but firm boundary. Instruct your team that the Segue is a headline, not a paragraph. If someone starts to wander into a lengthy explanation about a client success or a personal weekend project, the facilitator must gently interrupt them and say, save that for headlines or drop it to the issues list.

You can also reset expectations by sharing the objective of the Segue before the meeting starts. Remind everyone that the Segue is about human connection and positive energy, not status reporting. If your team is remote, have the facilitator call on people in a rapid-fire, predictable order so there is no dead air or time wasted deciding who goes next. Maintain a high tempo from the very first second to set the pace for the rest of the ninety minutes.