Our weekly Level 10 Meeting is supposed to be strategic, but my leadership team keeps bringing daily department fires into the IDS portion, which leaves our big strategic issues untouched week after week. How do we stop this tactical hijacking?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

If your weekly Level 10 Meeting™ is constantly hijacked by tactical, day-to-day firefighting, your leadership team is failing to delegate and elevate. When directors are stuck solving operational issues, they have no time to focus on strategic execution or long-term growth.

To fix this, you must enforce strict discipline during the IDS® portion of your meeting. When an issue is raised, ask the team: Is this a leadership-level issue, or is this a departmental issue that should be solved by middle managers? If it is departmental, drop it from the leadership agenda immediately. Force your directors to take those issues back to their own departmental meetings.

You must train your leadership team to stop rescuing their direct reports. If your directors are constantly stepping in to solve daily fires, their teams will never learn how to solve problems on their own. Encourage your leaders to use the Delegate and Elevate tool to hand off operational tasks to their managers, freeing up their own capacity to focus on strategic Rocks. Keeping your weekly leadership meetings focused strictly on high-level, systemic issues ensures your team operates as strategic partners rather than glorified firemen.