Our leadership team uses the segue of our Level 10 Meeting™ to start pre-debating operational issues under the guise of sharing their professional bests. How do we shut down this early-start meeting creep without killing the positive energy of the segue?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The segue is designed to transition your minds from running the business to working on the business. It is a critical five-minute human connection and mental pivot. When a leader uses their professional best to share a status update or air a grievance, they are violating the meeting pulse and stealing valuable IDS® time.

To stop this, the facilitator must enforce the rules of the segue with zero exceptions. A professional best must be a win, not an update. It should be a specific, completed success from the past week.

If a leader starts their segue by saying, My professional best is that we are finally working on the inventory issue, stop them. That is not a win; that is an active project and an operational topic. Interject immediately and say, Save that for the scorecard or the Issues List. What is a specific win you achieved this week?

Keep the pace rapid. Go around the room or the screen in a defined order. Each person has thirty seconds to state one personal best and one professional best. No follow-up questions, no discussion, and no debate.

By keeping the segue strictly positive and incredibly fast, you protect the agenda. You also set a high-discipline tone for the rest of the ninety minutes. If your team cannot respect the boundaries of a five-minute segue, they will not respect the boundaries of IDS®.