When we transition to the IDS portion of our Level 10 Meeting, our leadership team consistently votes to solve the easiest, most comfortable issues first, leaving the hard, controversial, or structural issues completely untouched. How do we break this avoidance behavior?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Solving easy issues while ignoring hard ones is a form of operational procrastination. It gives your team a false sense of accomplishment because they are crossing items off the list, but it leaves the real, structural bottlenecks of your business to fester. This behavior will stall your traction and exhaust your team over time.

To break this habit, your Integrator must change how the Issues List is prioritized. At the start of the IDS® segment, do not let the team vote on what they feel like discussing. Instead, your Integrator must look at the list objectively and ask the team, what are the top three most critical issues on this list that are holding back our Rocks, our Scorecard, or our business today?

Identify those three issues and label them as number one, two, and three. Do not move on to number four until those three are fully solved.

If the team tries to select a minor tactical issue as a top priority, your Integrator must challenge them. If you have a critical people issue or a massive revenue drop on the list, a minor software update or office supply problem cannot be prioritized.

Furthermore, you must build the cultural discipline of running toward conflict. Remind your team that the purpose of the Level 10 Meeting™ is to solve the issues that hurt the most. By forcing the team to tackle the hardest problems first, when their energy is highest at the beginning of IDS®, you will build the operational muscle needed to run a healthy, high-performance company.