Our weekly leadership meetings constantly run over time, sometimes stretching past two hours because we get bogged down in status updates. How do we run a Level 10 Meeting™ that stays strictly under ninety minutes while still solving our biggest issues?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

If your Level 10 Meeting™ is running over ninety minutes, you are breaking the core rules of the meeting agenda. The agenda is designed to keep you focused on solving problems, not sharing updates.

The first forty minutes of the meeting are purely informational and must be kept brief. The scorecard review, Rock review, customer and employee headlines, and to-do list review should take less than twenty five minutes combined. There is absolutely no discussing, defending, or explaining allowed during this portion. If a number is off, or a Rock is off track, or a headline needs discussion, do not talk about it then. Simply say drop it and put it on the Issues List.

This preserves a full sixty minutes for the IDS® portion of the meeting, where you identify, discuss, and solve issues.

To keep IDS® on track, the Integrator must ruthlessly manage the discussion. Do not let team members tell long, meandering stories or repeat points that have already been made. Once an issue has been clearly identified and discussed, move immediately to creating a specific, actionable to-do.

Remember that the meeting must start on time and end on time, every single week, regardless of who is late or what is left on the list. When the team knows the clock will stop exactly at ninety minutes, they will naturally prioritize the most critical issues first.