At the end of our Level 10 Meeting, our leadership team rates the meeting based on how happy they are with our overall business performance that week rather than how well we ran the actual meeting structure. How do we force them to rate the meeting process, not their mood?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Rating the Level 10 Meeting™ is not an emotional exit poll or a temperature check on how the company is doing. It is an objective evaluation of how well the team maximized their ninety minutes together. When team members give a low rating because of a bad sales week, they are misusing the rating system.

To correct this, the facilitator must redefine what a ten out of ten actually means before every rating session. A ten means three specific things:
- The meeting started and ended on time.
- The Scorecard, Rocks, and to-dos were updated before the meeting.
- We spent sixty full minutes in IDS® and solved our most critical issues.

If the company is in a crisis but the leadership team spent their meeting laser-focused on the right issues and walked away with clear, actionable to-dos, that meeting is a ten. Conversely, if the company is booming but you spent forty minutes gossiping and solved zero root-cause issues, that meeting is a four.

When a team member gives a low rating, ask them which part of the meeting structure broke down. If they say nothing broke, just that they are stressed about operations, remind them of the criteria. Force them to separate the state of the business from the effectiveness of the meeting engine.