The most misunderstood line in an EOS Level 10 Meeting is the one everyone reads out loud and rarely executes.
7:52 on a Monday. A tech named Maria holds a shaking rescue mutt while her manager mentions a new intake policy she has never seen. A client is watching. Her stomach drops because she looks like she does not know her own clinic.
That policy was decided nine days earlier. Different building. People Maria will never meet.
World-famous vet clinic in NYC. One location grew to eight. Great leadership team, clean meetings.
And they were “Hitting the Ceiling.”
Everything at the top looked right. But walk the floor and you felt it. Eight locations, eight slightly different clinics. The rumor mill louder than the leadership team, because it always is when the real message goes quiet.
We went back to the Five Leadership Abilities.
- Simplify
- Delegate and Elevate
- Predict
- Systemize the predictable, humanize the exceptional
- Structure the right people in the right seats
Then we stopped on the one line on the Level 10 Agenda every team skips. Cascading Messages.
Most teams treat it as the exit. “Anything to Cascade? Nope.” Ninety seconds gone. That is the gap Maria fell into.
So we made it a discipline. Five questions, every time:
- Who is affected?
- What is the one message we all share, same words?
- Who communicates it? All of us.
- How? In person.
- When? As soon as possible.
Then one more move. The team was cascading by announcing. We flipped it to a conversation.
The practice manager sits with Maria before the doors open.
“Starting Monday, every new patient gets a five minute triage. What do you think?”
“Honestly? It backs up the lobby at 8 a.m.”
“Say more. What concerns you?”
“Mondays we run three deep. We are underwater by nine.”
Now the manager has something real. Either way Maria carries the decision instead of getting run over.
Be clear on what these two questions do. They do not reopen the decision. In the book Fight Less, Win More, we say Vision Drives Decision, and the vision already drove this one. The questions let your people own the cascade. They are not an invitation to complain about corporate.
Maria answers them no matter what. Your only choice is whether she answers with you or without you.
Patrick Lencioni says:
The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it happened.
The cascade you skipped is a conversation that never took place. Your people still feel it.
Stay Curious,
JBS