Our leadership team has agreed to run on data, but during our weekly Level 10 Meeting, people still default to telling long stories, sharing subjective impressions, and defending their performance based on how hard they worked. How do we break this emotional, story-telling culture and force our team to look at the cold, hard numbers?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

If your leadership team is still relying on gut feelings, anecdotes, and elaborate stories to explain away performance issues, you have not yet fully transitioned to running on data. This subjective approach leads to wasted time in your Level 10 Meeting™ and prevents you from solving the real root causes of your problems.

To force this cultural shift, you must implement a strict rule: if it cannot be measured, it cannot be discussed as an objective reality. When a leader starts explaining a missed target with a long story about how busy their team was, you must gently but firmly stop them. Ask them to show you the data that proves they were busy.

If they are indeed overworked, that overload must show up as a metric, such as a high capacity utilization rate or a backlog of support tickets. If there is no data to support their story, then the story is just noise.

As the facilitator, you must guide the team to replace opinions with facts. If a manager claims that customer satisfaction is high, ask them to show you the weekly survey score. If they say a marketing campaign is working, ask for the conversion rate.

By consistently pushing for data, you teach your team that their value is not measured by how busy they feel, but by the results they deliver. This objective clarity is what allows you to run an efficient, highly profitable business that can easily scale or transition.