The most expensive recurring meeting in any company is the weekly leadership meeting. Six to eight people. An hour and a half. Every week, forever. And in most companies, that meeting decides almost nothing.
The diagnosis
When I sit in on a new client's weekly meeting before we adopt EOS, the pattern is almost always the same: someone runs through the agenda, the loudest voice in the room talks the most, the same three issues come up they came up last week, and everyone leaves vaguely frustrated. Nobody actually said no to anything. Nobody owns a next step. Two days later, the same conversations are happening in hallway whispers.
The Level 10 Meeting™
The Level 10 Meeting™ is one of the five foundational tools in EOS. It's a 90-minute, same-day, same-time, same-agenda weekly meeting with seven sections that always run in the same order:
- Segue (5 min)
- Scorecard (5 min)
- Rock review (5 min)
- Customer/employee headlines (5 min)
- To-do list (5 min)
- IDS — Identify, Discuss, Solve (60 min)
- Conclude (5 min)
That's it. The magic isn't in the agenda — it's in what the agenda forces. It forces you to spend 60 minutes solving issues at the root, not symptoms at the surface. It forces accountability on everything you said you'd do last week. It forces the team to rate the meeting at the end on a 1–10 scale, so you actually improve over time.
What to do this week
Don't try to install the full L10 from a blog post. But this week, try one thing: at your next leadership meeting, take the last 15 minutes and write down every recurring issue your team has discussed in the last 90 days. You'll find the same five items. That list is your IDS backlog — and it's the most valuable artifact your leadership team owns.
Want help installing the full system? That's what the 90-Minute Meeting is for.