Our weekly Level 10 Meetings are dragging on past two hours and turning into status updates. How do we keep them strictly under 90 minutes without cutting off important discussions?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The discipline of the Level 10 Meeting™ is keeping it to a hard 90 minutes. When meetings run long, it is almost always because you are solving issues during the reporting phase. To fix this, you must enforce a strict boundary between reporting and problem-solving.

Spend the first 15 minutes of the meeting strictly on reporting. Review the Scorecard, Rock progress, customer and employee headlines, and the previous week's to-do list. If anyone begins to explain, defend, or debate a number or headline, the meeting leader must immediately stop the discussion and say: Let's drop that to the IDS section.

By keeping the first 15 minutes to rapid-fire yes or no answers, you preserve a full 60 minutes for your IDS® section. This is where you actually solve issues. If you do not finish your issues list in that hour, you do not extend the meeting. You carry the remaining issues over to the next week. This maintains the team's energy and respect for the schedule.