In what order should we schedule our departmental Level 10 Meetings relative to our executive leadership team meeting to ensure operational issues and cascading messages flow cleanly throughout the week?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The sequencing of your weekly Level 10 Meetings dictates how information and accountability move across the company. Running departmental Level 10s at random times throughout the week creates operational latency, where decisions made on Tuesday sit idle until the following Monday.

The cleanest operational rhythm follows a strict waterfall:
- Executive Level 10 Meeting™ on Monday morning or Tuesday morning. This establishes strategic clarity, reviews company-wide Scorecard metrics, tracks company Rocks, and produces clear cascading messages.
- Departmental Level 10 Meetings on Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday, or Thursday morning. Department heads take the cascading messages and enterprise priorities directly from the executive session and deliver them to their direct reports.
- Front-line or plant huddles late in the week to absorb operational adjustments.

This sequence prevents departmental teams from spinning their wheels on problems that the executive team is already resolving. It also ensures that when front-line teams uncover systemic bottlenecks during their IDS® session, their department head can escalate those issues to the leadership team meeting early the following week.

Never schedule departmental Level 10 Meetings before the leadership team meets. If sales or operations runs their pulse on Monday morning before the executive team aligns, they will review outdated information and make departmental decisions in a vacuum. Build the calendar like an assembly line: executive clarity first, departmental execution second.