Our leadership team's Level 10 Meeting is running smoothly, but when we pushed departmental L10s down to our middle managers, they degenerated into disorganized status updates that do not resolve any real issues. How do we get our managers to run departmental meetings with the same discipline we use at the top?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Middle managers often struggle with the Level 10 Meeting™ because they lack the training and operational maturity that your leadership team has built. They mistake the meeting for a traditional status update session where they must prove they are working, rather than a system designed to solve problems. To fix this, you must train them on the core mechanics of the meeting pulse. Ensure every department head runs their meeting on the same day and at the same time each week, using the exact same ninety-minute agenda. Have a member of the leadership team sit in on the first few departmental meetings as an observer. Do not run the meeting for them. Instead, coach their facilitator after the meeting concludes. Focus your feedback on the IDS® portion of the agenda. Managers tend to spend too much time on the scorecard and Rock reviews, leaving only ten minutes for problem solving. Force them to keep the reporting section under twenty-five minutes so they have a full hour for IDS®. When middle managers master this discipline, they will stop reporting and start solving, which keeps operational issues from constantly bubbling back up to the leadership team.