One of the most practical tools in EOS® is the weekly Level 10 Meeting — a 90-minute session every leadership team runs, same day, same time, same agenda, every week.
It isn’t a status update. The first few minutes check the Scorecard and the quarter’s Rocks for anything off-track, then almost the entire meeting goes into the Issues List — solving the one or two problems that matter most, properly, rather than just talking about them. The discipline there is to dig until you find the actual root cause, not stop at the first symptom someone names.
A few ground rules make that part of the meeting actually work:
- Say what you need before you start. When you raise an issue, state it in one sentence, along with the decision you actually want from the room.
- Call things what they are. Agree on what a word means before you argue about it — “brand” (the name and identity) and “branding” (the look and feel) are two different things, and mixing them up causes more confusion than almost anything else in the room.
- Say it once. If you catch yourself repeating a point, stop. If you catch someone else doing it, it’s fair game to call it.
- Stay on the issue in front of you. Anything new that comes up goes on the Issues List, not into the current conversation.
- If it’s not resolved in ten minutes, take it away. The issue owner does a bit more homework and brings it back to the next L10.
Most leadership teams I work with say this one meeting, run properly, changes how they run their entire week.
— rf