Our leadership team operates across four different time zones, and running our weekly Level 10 Meeting live leaves half the team exhausted or logging in before dawn. Should we switch to an asynchronous meeting format or how do we run an effective pulse across wide time differences?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Never run an asynchronous Level 10 Meeting. Asynchronous communication is fine for daily status updates or basic notifications, but it completely destroys the core function of EOS: team health and real-time problem-solving. You cannot identify, discuss, and solve tough business issues in Slack threads or email chains. People hide behind text, misinterpret tone, and push hard decisions off until next week.

The weekly Level 10 Meeting requires live, face-to-face interaction, even if that interaction happens through a screen. If your team is spread across time zones, you must establish a permanent compromise window that everyone commits to.

Find the single ninety-minute block during the week that creates the least collective friction. If one person has to log on at 7:00 AM and another at 4:00 PM, that is the price of maintaining a distributed executive team. Lock that time in permanently. Same day, same time, every single week.

To make that ninety minutes count and prevent screen fatigue, streamline the first twenty-five minutes ruthlessly. Use shared cloud software to review the Scorecard, Rock status, and headlines so zero time is wasted presenting slides. Everyone reviews the data in advance, states whether items are on track or off track, and drops issues straight to the list. Spend seventy full minutes on live IDS. If your leaders cannot commit to ninety minutes of live alignment once a week, you do not have a leadership team; you have a group of independent contractors.