Why the same agenda every week
Most leadership meetings drift. Someone has an update, the update becomes a discussion, the discussion eats the hour, and the real problems never get touched. The Level 10 Meeting fixes this by refusing to improvise. Same day, same time, same 90 minutes, same order of business. The team stops negotiating what the meeting is for and starts using it.
The rigidity is the feature. When the agenda cannot move, a leadership team learns to bring issues to the meeting instead of solving them in hallway conversations that leave everyone else out. Within a few weeks the meeting becomes the place where the company actually gets run.
The agenda, minute by minute
The first five minutes are a segue: each person shares one personal and one professional piece of good news. It sounds soft and it is not; it forces the team to arrive as people before arriving as roles. The next five minutes review the Scorecard, the handful of weekly numbers the business runs on. Numbers are on track or off track, nothing more. Any number that is off gets dropped to the issues list rather than discussed on the spot.
Five minutes on Rocks, the quarterly priorities, with the same on-track or off-track discipline. Five minutes on customer and employee headlines, good and bad, again dropped to issues if they need action. Five minutes on the to-do list from last week, where the standard is that at least 90 percent of to-dos are done. Then the heart of the meeting: 60 minutes of solving issues using a method called IDS, which stands for Identify, Discuss, Solve. The team ranks the three most important issues, takes them one at a time, gets to the real root, and leaves with a to-do or a decision.
The last five minutes recap the to-dos, decide what needs to be communicated to the rest of the company, and rate the meeting. Anyone rating below an eight says why.
Who attends
The leadership team only, which in an EOS company means the people in the seats on the Accountability Chart's top rows: typically the Visionary, the Integrator, and the heads of sales, operations, and finance. Departments run their own Level 10 Meetings with the same agenda, so the format cascades through the business. A guest is fine when an issue needs them; a standing invitation to everyone is how the meeting stops being useful.
The mistakes that make a Level 10 a six
Discussing during reporting. The first thirty minutes exist to surface issues, not solve them, and a team that debates a Scorecard number in minute eight never reaches minute sixty with anything left. Solving the wrong issue. Teams grab the loudest problem instead of the most important one; ranking the list first is the fix. Skipping the rating. The score is how the team catches itself drifting, and a team that stops rating stops improving. And letting the Integrator run every part of it. The Integrator owns the meeting, but IDS works best when the person closest to an issue leads the discussion of it.
Level 10 Meetings and other systems
Scaling Up companies run a comparable weekly meeting with a more layered rhythm around it, including a daily huddle. Pinnacle and System & Soul companies usually keep a weekly leadership meeting in the same spirit and tailor the agenda. The idea common to all of them: one fixed weekly meeting where the leadership team solves problems, and a culture that treats that meeting as the most important 90 minutes of the week.
Common questions
How long is a Level 10 Meeting?
Ninety minutes, every week, at the same time. Teams that shorten it usually cut the issue-solving block, which is the part that matters.
Who runs the Level 10 Meeting?
The Integrator runs it and keeps the agenda on time. Anyone can lead the discussion of a specific issue.
What does IDS mean?
Identify, Discuss, Solve: name the real issue, discuss it once without circling, and leave with a decision or a to-do.
Can a company run Level 10 Meetings without an EOS Implementer?
Yes. Many self-implementing companies do. An implementer's value is in the harder parts of the system, like accountability and people decisions, not in the meeting agenda itself.