Our weekly Level 10 Meetings are frequently bogged down by issues that only involve two leaders, who end up debating their private departmental disagreements in front of the entire team instead of solving them offline. How do we stop these isolated, two-person conflicts from hijacking our collective IDS time?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

There is nothing more frustrating for a leadership team than sitting silently while two members debate a departmental issue that has zero impact on the rest of the business. When you allow these isolated, two-person conflicts to play out during IDS®, you are wasting valuable collective energy and turning your Level 10 Meeting™ into a spectator sport.

To stop this meeting waste, the facilitator must enforce the rule that issues should only be solved by the people they affect.

During the Identify stage of IDS®, the facilitator should ask: Who is actually needed to solve this issue? If the answer is only the head of sales and the head of operations, the issue does not belong on the leadership team agenda.

Instead, the facilitator should direct those two leaders to take the issue offline. Create a simple, weekly To-Do for those two individuals to meet, solve the issue using IDS® on their own time, and report the outcome next week.

This keeps your weekly meeting pulse focused exclusively on enterprise-level issues that require the collective brainpower of the entire leadership team, maximizing the return on your ninety-minute meeting investment.