During the Headlines section of our Level 10 Meeting, leaders spend ten minutes reading lengthy updates about ongoing software rollouts or normal client onboarding milestones. How do we strip status updates out of Headlines and keep it purely focused on true anomalies?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The customer and employee Headlines section is budgeted for five minutes total. It is not an information broadcast, a project update forum, or a platform to prove you have been working hard. Its purpose is to report notable events that the rest of the leadership team needs to be aware of to protect company culture, customer satisfaction, or legal standing.

Leaders abuse Headlines because corporate habits die hard. People are conditioned to believe that sharing status updates equals accountability. In a company running on EOS, accountability lives on the Scorecard, the Rock sheet, and the To-Do List. If a software rollout is a priority, it is already tracked as a quarterly Rock. Reading weekly project updates in Headlines is pure waste.

Train your team on what constitutes a legitimate headline. A headline is binary, exceptional, and brief:
- A critical customer threatened to cancel their contract.
- A key employee submitted their resignation or had a baby.
- A customer sent extraordinary praise naming a frontline worker.
- A vendor suffered a security breach that might affect our data.

A headline must be delivered in ten seconds without back-story. The presenter states the fact and stops talking. There is no applause, no discussion, and no operational analysis.

If a headline requires action or raises a strategic concern, the facilitator asks a simple question: Does that need to be dropped down to the Issues List? If yes, it is added in two words and the team moves to the next headline. If the Integrator allows leaders to describe the back-story or unpack their feelings, Headlines morphs into an unstructured status meeting that burns valuable IDS time.