I see a lot of leadership teams who tell me they do not have enough time to work on the business.
They do not have time to improve their Core Processes. They do not have time to solve recurring people issues. They do not have time to think strategically or deal with the bigger Issues holding the business back.
Yet those same teams are spending 90 minutes together every week in their leadership team Level 10 Meeting®.
So where is the time going?
Often, it is disappearing into operational detail.
Individual customers. Individual jobs. Individual staff issues. Scheduling problems. Delivery delays. Updates about what happened during the week.
None of those things is necessarily unimportant.
But that does not mean they belong in the leadership team meeting.
A Level 10 Meeting® Is Not an Update Meeting
The reporting sections of a Level 10 Meeting® should give the leadership team a quick pulse on the business.
You review the Scorecard, Rocks, Customer & Employee Headlines & To-Dos. If something is off track or requires discussion, it drops to the Issues List.
You do not solve it during the update.
You IDS® it during the IDS section of the meeting.
That discipline matters because the majority of the leadership team’s time should be spent identifying, discussing & solving the most important Issues in the business.
If the first half of the meeting disappears into lengthy explanations of what everybody has been doing, something has gone wrong.
Updates that could have been shared through Slack, Teams or another communication platform do not need six or eight senior people sitting around a table listening to them.
If your leadership meeting has become a series of departmental reports, you are not really having a leadership meeting.
You are having a very expensive operations meeting.
What an Overly Operational Meeting Looks Like
I have sat in leadership meetings where 20 minutes disappeared into a discussion about whether one particular customer received the right order.
I have seen Customer & Employee Headlines become long stories about individual people.
I have watched Scorecard numbers get explained & justified instead of simply being called on track or off track.
I have seen Rock Reviews turn into detailed descriptions of everything somebody has done that quarter.
And I have watched departmental leaders bring messy problems straight to the leadership team without first understanding what has happened, what has already been tried or what they actually need from the wider team.
Again, the problems themselves may matter.
The question is whether they belong at leadership team level.
What Actually Belongs at the Leadership Table?
A problem does not become a leadership Issue simply because it is urgent, frustrating or expensive.
It belongs at leadership level when it affects the wider business, crosses functions, requires a significant leadership decision or exposes a deeper Issue that cannot reasonably be solved within one department.
For example, one late customer delivery is probably an operational Issue.
Repeated late deliveries across multiple customers may indicate a bigger problem with capacity, process, accountability, resourcing or promises being made by Sales that Operations cannot fulfil.
One struggling employee is generally an Issue for their manager.
Repeated performance problems across a team may point to poor leadership, unclear expectations, weak recruitment, inadequate training or the wrong structure.
One incorrect invoice is operational.
A pattern of incorrect invoices may reveal a broken process, unclear ownership or a system that no longer supports the business properly.
The leadership team’s job is to look beyond the incident & identify the pattern.
- What is the real Issue?
- What is causing it?
- Where is accountability unclear?
- What needs to change across the business?
That is leadership-level IDS®.
Do Not Bring a Messy Problem & Drop It on the Table
This does not mean departments should hide substantial Issues.
It means leaders should do some thinking before bringing them to the leadership team.
By the time an Issue reaches the leadership table, the relevant leader should be able to explain what is actually happening, whether it is isolated or recurring, what has already been tried & why the Issue cannot be properly solved within their own function.
Most importantly, they should be clear about what they need from the leadership team.
A decision?
Input from another function?
More authority?
A structural change?
A bigger business-wide Issue solved?
The leadership team should not need to start from scratch every time someone raises a problem.
The leader bringing the Issue should bring clarity, not simply drop a mess in everybody else’s lap.
The Meeting May Not Be the Real Problem
If your Level 10 Meeting® is consistently too operational, telling everyone to “be more strategic” probably will not fix it.
The meeting may simply be exposing a deeper problem.
Start with your Accountability Chart®.
- Have you created the right structure for where the business is going over the next six to 12 months?
- Does each major function have one person who genuinely owns it?
- Are responsibilities clear?
- Does everyone understand which decisions they have the authority to make?
- Or do decisions keep rising to the leadership team because nobody is quite sure who owns them?
When accountability is unclear, Issues bounce around the business.
Two people think they own the same decision.
Or nobody owns it.
Departments blame one another.
People wait for the founder, Visionary or Integrator to step in.
Before long, the Level 10 Meeting® becomes the place where every important decision gets made.
That is not leadership.
It is a bottleneck.
A strong Accountability Chart® allows operational decisions to be made close to where the work is actually happening.
Look at the Meeting Rhythm Below the Leadership Team
There is another question worth asking.
Are effective meetings happening below the leadership team?
Do departments have a regular rhythm for reviewing performance, solving their own Issues & holding one another accountable?
Or is the leadership team Level 10 Meeting® the only place in the organisation where any of that happens?
If there is no effective meeting rhythm below the leadership team, operational problems will inevitably climb upwards.
The answer is not to create another collection of random meetings.
Most businesses already have enough of those.
The answer is to create clear meeting discipline at the right levels.
Departmental Issues should normally be solved within departments.
Leadership Issues should be solved by the leadership team.
Issues should move upwards when they genuinely require broader input or authority, while leadership decisions should be cascaded clearly back through the organisation.
Without that rhythm, everything eventually lands at the top.
Do You Have Leaders or Departmental Reporters?
Once you have looked at the structure & meeting rhythm, there is a more uncomfortable question.
Do you have the right people sitting around the leadership table?
Someone can be very good at managing their department without yet being able to lead at a whole-of-business level.
Managers naturally focus on the work in front of them. They think about today’s jobs, today’s staffing problem & what needs to happen next.
That matters.
But somebody sitting on the leadership team also needs to lift their head.
They need to see beyond their own function, recognise patterns, understand the impact of their decisions across the business & make choices for the good of the whole organisation.
They should arrive representing their function, but thinking as a leader of the entire business.
If someone repeatedly drags the leadership meeting down into the detail of their own department, ask why.
Perhaps they do not trust the people beneath them.
Perhaps they have not delegated enough.
Perhaps there is nobody capable beneath them to take ownership.
Perhaps they do not understand what is expected from them at leadership level.
Or perhaps they are an excellent manager sitting in a seat that now requires something different.
That is where the GWC® questions become useful.
Do they genuinely Get it, Want it & have the Capacity to do it?
Activity Is Not Accountability
One warning sign I regularly see is somebody arriving at the meeting ready to report on activity rather than take accountability for outcomes.
They explain how busy the department has been.
They list everything that got in the way.
They explain why the number is off track.
They describe the problem in enormous detail.
But they do not identify the root cause, own the result or recommend what needs to change.
Being busy is not the same as leading.
A stronger contribution sounds more like:
“This number is off track. Here is the real Issue. Here is what we have already done within the department. Here is why it now needs to be solved at leadership team level.”
That is leadership.
What Happens When You Get This Wrong?
When the leadership team spends its weekly meeting operating the business, the bigger Issues remain untouched.
Processes stay inefficient.
Accountability remains unclear.
The same Issues come back week after week.
Rocks fall behind because urgent operational work keeps taking priority.
Departments remain in silos.
The company becomes increasingly dependent on a handful of senior people.
Everyone feels incredibly busy, but surprisingly little meaningful change happens.
And the business owner starts wondering why the leadership team cannot get out of the weeds.
Often, the answer is that the business has never created the structure, accountability & meeting discipline that would allow them to.
Look at Your Next Three Meetings
A useful exercise is to review the notes from your last three leadership team Level 10 Meetings®.
Look at the substantial conversations & ask whether each one was genuinely a leadership-level Issue or whether it could reasonably have been owned & solved within one function.
Then look at where the time went.
- How much was spent on individual jobs, customers, employees or transactions?
- How much was spent giving updates that could have been communicated another way?
- How many Issues arrived at the leadership table before they had been properly understood?
- How many conversations focused on symptoms rather than root causes?
- How many Issues have come back more than once because they were discussed but never truly solved?
Then ask the harder questions.
- Do we have the right structure?
- Is every major function clearly owned?
- Is our meeting rhythm working throughout the organisation?
- Do we have the right people in the right seats?
- And are the people sitting around the leadership table genuinely thinking like leaders of the whole business?
Those questions may create a carefrontational conversation.
They may also create exactly the conversation your business needs.
Because if your leadership team spends 90 minutes every week giving updates & running the operations, nobody is actually leading the business.