Our leadership team consistently rates our Level 10 Meetings™ an eight or nine out of ten during the wrap-up, but we are still missing our quarterly Rocks and our To-Do completion is mediocre. How do we stop this rating inflation and get our team to score the meetings honestly based on actual execution?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Meeting rating inflation happens when a leadership team values politeness over performance. If your weekly To-Do completion is below ninety percent and you are missing your quarterly Rocks, your meetings are not an eight or a nine. Scoring them that high is a sign of artificial harmony, which prevents real improvement.

To fix this, the facilitator must redefine what a ten out of ten actually means for your Level 10 Meeting. Establish a clear, objective standard for the scoring. A true ten means the meeting started on time, ended on time, followed the agenda exactly, achieved a ninety percent To-Do completion rate, and solved your most critical issues permanently.

During the wrap-up, if someone rates the meeting an eight or higher despite poor metrics, the facilitator should gently challenge the score. You can ask, we missed our To-Do target and spent twenty minutes on a minor issue, what kept this from being a ten for you today?

Encourage the team to use the rating scale honestly. A score of seven is not a failure; it is an honest assessment that points to a specific area of improvement. When your team realizes that an honest six or seven is the path to a better meeting next week, the rating inflation will stop and execution will improve.