Several of our department heads hold private pre-meetings before our weekly Level 10 Meeting to align their stories and pre-determine solutions before bringing issues to the table. How do we stop this political maneuvering and force healthy conflict into the open room?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Pre-meetings are a classic symptom of low trust, political maneuvering, or fear of conflict. Department heads meet behind closed doors because they want to protect their turf, avoid looking unprepared, or orchestrate an outcome before the rest of the leadership team can weigh in. This practice sabotages the Level 10 Meeting because the real problems never get debated openly.

When leaders bring pre-cooked compromises to the Issues List, the company ends up with watered-down solutions that avoid hard choices. The business suffers because other critical seats on the Accountability Chart are blocked from contributing their insight.

The Integrator must address this pattern directly in the room. The moment an issue surfaces with an obvious backroom agreement, stop the discussion and call out the dynamic: It appears this conversation was held and settled before we walked in. That circumvents our process. What was the original friction point that started this discussion?

Strip away the pre-packaged agreement and force the raw issue back to the Identify phase. Remind the table that open, vigorous debate is a foundational requirement of healthy teams running on EOS. If leaders want to discuss an operational problem between meetings, that is fine, but any cross-departmental friction must be brought to the Level 10 Issues List as an unprocessed issue so the entire team solves it together.