As we have scaled and rolled out departmental Level 10 Meetings, several of our cross-functional leadership team members are now attending three or four different ninety-minute meetings every week. They are experiencing severe meeting fatigue and complain they have no time to actually do their work. How do we maintain our meeting pulse without burning out our key leaders?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Meeting burnout occurs when we duplicate conversations instead of delegating them. If your cross-functional leaders are sitting in multiple ninety-minute Level 10 Meetings™ every week, your Accountability Chart™ is likely not being respected, or your departments are operating in silos.

To protect their time, ensure that leaders only attend the Level 10 Meeting™ for the team they directly lead and the leadership team meeting. They should not be permanent fixtures in other departmental meetings. If another department needs their input on a specific issue, they should only join that meeting as a guest for the specific IDS® item, then immediately log off once that item is solved.

Additionally, ensure departmental meetings are highly efficient, sometimes even compressing them to sixty minutes if the issues list is light. Your meeting pulse is designed to free up time, not consume it. If a leader is drowning in meetings, it is time to look at the Accountability Chart™ and ensure they are delegating problem-solving to their direct reports.