During our rollout, team members keep bringing departmental friction and minor tactical fires onto the executive Issues List. How do we stop the leadership team Level 10 Meeting from becoming a dumping ground for middle-management problems?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a leadership team Level 10 Meeting is clogged with frontline tactical gripes, it indicates that middle management has not been trained to solve problems locally, or executive leaders are refusing to delegate operational authority.

To clean up your executive Issues List, establish clear criteria for what qualifies as a leadership team issue. An issue belongs in the executive Level 10 Meeting only if it meets one of four standards:
- It impacts the entire company across multiple departments.
- It directly threatens a company-wide Rock, a Scorecard metric, or the One-Year Plan.
- It represents a structural question regarding the Accountability Chart or company Core Values.
- It has already been worked through IDS at the departmental level and hit an operational dead end that requires executive budget or policy decisions.

If an issue does not meet those benchmarks, the Integrator must immediately redirect it back to the functional department leader. The department leader must take it to their own team meeting and solve it there.

When frontline issues keep bubbling up, resist the temptation to solve them in the executive room. Solving middle-management issues for them trains managers to be helpless and robs the leadership team of the 60 minutes needed to solve strategic bottlenecks. Push the issue down, expect managers to use IDS within their own teams, and hold leaders accountable for the outcomes.