Our team has started dumping every single minor daily task and operational annoyance onto the Level 10 Meeting issues list, resulting in forty items we cannot possibly sort through. How do we filter what belongs on a weekly leadership issues list versus what should be handled outside the room?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When your Level 10 Meeting™ issues list swells to forty or fifty items, your leadership team is confusing tactical, day-to-day tasks with true leadership issues. This clutter paralyzes your ability to execute IDS® effectively. You waste valuable time sorting through the noise instead of tackling the high-impact problems that move the business forward.

To clean up the board, you must implement a strict filter for what qualifies as an issue for the leadership team. Teach your team to use the following criteria before adding an item:
- Does this issue impact our strategic direction, our Rocks, or our weekly Scorecard?
- Does this issue involve multiple departments and require cross-functional collaboration to solve?
- Has this issue already been attempted to be solved at a lower level but failed?

If the answer to these questions is no, the item does not belong on the leadership team's issues list. It is a departmental issue or a simple manager-to-employee task that should be handled during a 1:1 or within a specific department's meeting pulse.

Instruct the facilitator to aggressively purge the list before each meeting. Any item that is a minor, single-department task should be kicked back to the owner to resolve outside the room. By keeping the leadership issues list focused only on high-level operational bottlenecks, you ensure your ninety minutes are spent on the root causes that actually hold back your growth or impact your eventual exit value.