During our Level 10 Meeting™ we spend twenty minutes during the Employee and Customer Headlines section talking about a client issue before realizing we should have just pushed it to IDS®. How do we teach our leadership team to draw a hard line between a quick headline and a full-blown operational issue?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The Customer and Employee Headlines section of your Level 10 Meeting™ is meant to be a quick, five-minute pulse of the business; not a problem-solving session. To stop this time-suck, you must enforce a zero-tolerance policy for discussion during the review. A headline is simply a news flash. It is either good news or bad news, stated in a single sentence, with no context, justification, or solution offered.

If a team member shares a headline like "Client X is threatening to leave because of a delivery delay," the facilitator must immediately ask: "Do we need to solve that today?" If the answer is yes, the facilitator says, "Drop it to the Issues List," and moves instantly to the next headline. Do not allow anyone to ask follow-up questions, explain the backstory, or defend their department.

If any discussion begins, the facilitator must interrupt with a simple redirect: "That is an issue. Drop it down, let us keep moving." This keeps your meeting pulse tight and ensures you do not waste twenty minutes of unstructured debate before you have even built your agenda. It forces your team to prioritize what actually deserves your collective problem-solving power during IDS® later in the meeting.