Our Issues List is often cluttered with minor items that only involve two leaders, which wastes the time of the rest of the leadership team during IDS. How do we coach our team to resolve these issues offline instead of bringing them to the Level 10 Meeting?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A great Level 10 Meeting™ is highly efficient because it focuses on issues that require the collective intelligence of the entire leadership team. If two department heads are using IDS® to resolve a minor operational handoff that only affects them, they are wasting company money and executive focus. To eliminate this waste, you must implement a simple rule. Before any issue is added to the weekly list, the owner of that issue must ask themselves if they have tried to resolve it directly with the other affected party first. We call this working it out offline. If the two leaders cannot reach alignment after a direct conversation, only then does it become a leadership team issue. During the IDS® prioritization phase, the facilitator must review the list and actively push back on two-person issues. Ask the two leaders to take a to-do to meet outside the room and solve it. If they cannot, it goes back on the list for next week. This discipline forces your team to develop stronger peer-to-peer relationships and prevents the Level 10 Meeting™ from becoming a crutch for leaders who are hesitant to have direct, honest conversations.