Recently I was on a podcast and the host asked me what my favorite tool from EOS® was. Without hesitation, my answer was “the Level 10 Meeting™” (or L10 Meeting for short).
I’ve used the L10 meeting™ while running my companies for over 7 years now and I think it’s the absolute best way to run not only my team meetings, but any meeting. Previous to being introduced to EOS® and this tool, I remember having the most chaotic team meetings and ones where it felt like I had to come up with a new agenda every week. I knew we had to meet, but I always struggled with format and cadence and what was recurring vs. what was one off. That annoying overhead of what should be in a team meeting vs. what should be discussed between two people? Plus I loathed wasting my own time or anyone else’s so the pressure was always high in those pre-L10 meetings. Fortunately that anxiety and chaos turned to calm once we implemented and got the hang of weekly L10s.
Now when new hires join Strety, they quickly notice how calmly we run things at here and how productive our meetings are versus wherever they came from. It still amazes me that most companies run chaotically, and when you double click on what that means, it ends up meaning that meetings are chaotic and many a waste of time.
To be frank, I really dislike meetings. I think nearly all meetings in corporate America are a waste of time and could be an email. But I’m a true believer in this L10 Meeting™ and it’s the only regularly scheduled meeting on my calendar weekly. I’m on two teams and therefore I have 2 L10s weekly… yes… only 2 regularly scheduled meetings weekly. Productivity bliss!
1:1 meetings with L10™ agendas
I love this format and agenda so much that I (and our team) now use L10 Meeting Agendas for all our 1:1 meetings with Direct Reports as well. Although the L10™ agenda seems geared toward teams only, when you start using it with people, you’ll realize it works just as well. And it keeps us all using the same language when prepping for any type of regularly scheduled meetings. Note, I don’t have 1:1s every week with every direct report but when I do meet 1:1, it’s this agenda .
Which brings me to my next point… we do customize our L10 Meetings a little bit. But I’ll quickly walk you through the L10 Meeting agenda™.
The beautiful OG Level 10 Meeting™
If you’re familiar with the L10 Meeting™, you know it’s a very structured agenda. It looks exactly like this:
The L10 Meeting Agenda in Strety.
I won’t go to deep into each of the agenda items but essentially you have a moment to segue (transition into the meeting) to review numbers and goals for the quarter (scorecards and rocks) discuss announcement type items (headlines), and then dig into the details why you are all in a room (to solve problems… Issues). The purpose is to spend a majority of the time solving issues and not get distracted with anything else. So there are allotted times per each agenda item.
If someone goes off on a tangent, you get to call them out on it. In Strety, we make this passive aggressively easy by having a Tangent button that pops up a customized GIF. So even if the boss starts going off the rails, someone can anonymously push the button and everyone sees the Tangent was called. Easy peasy! 😉 It looks like this in our app and we rotate the GIF used.
At the end of every L10™, everyone ranks the meeting so you can get a sense of how productive everyone felt the meeting was. EOS® will tell you never to go more than an hour and half (we never make it to an hour) and always meet at the same time and day weekly so there is continuity (we honor that).
It’s a beautiful agenda but we do customize ours a bit now that we’re 7 years into this.
How I customize my L10s
My friends at EOS Worldwide would surely push me to run L10™ meetings purely as instructed… and I agree if we were just starting out. But we’re old veterans now… we know what we’re doing (at least I hope!). So we customize it slightly by adding a custom agenda item in each of our two main teams. We customize it further for our 1x1s too.
For my Growth Team meeting, we slide in an Agenda Item that goes over recent Product Updates. And for my Product Team meeting, we have a custom agenda item that covers “Gooser of the Week”… or recognition for the person who crushed the previous week.
These both could be “Headlines” but since they are recurring every week, we split it out and created them as their own agenda items. This way they are as prominent as the main EOS core tools. It looks like the below!
We differ from EOS in that we let our Segues run longer than 5 minutes as we use that for some more long winded bonding and catching up (we’re a remote team) and we really breeze through Rocks & Metrics. We’re also not great with everyone having a rock and everyone having a number. I’ve tried it before: to force everyone into having a number and a rock and it just hasn’t worked well for me. For instance, our software developers don’t have a number, nor do they have rocks that aren’t directly linked to projects. I think that’s ok and it works for us. Again, this would be different if you are just starting out.
Issues & Headlines are where the rubber meets the road and where EOS® really shines in my opinion. Over the years we’ve gotten really good at what the difference is between what should be a Headline vs. Issue. Essentially we say a Headline is just an announcement (no discussion needed) and an Issue needs some discussion, that simple. Not all our issues need a deep resolution but they just need to be talked about in the meeting. Sometimes they feel like just “Topics” or “Agenda Items” themselves where the rest of the L10™ tools are just reviewing things.
Lastly, we’re a remote company and therefore we work and communicate asynchronously quite a bit. So in Strety, all our items (To-Dos, Rocks, Headlines, Issues, etc) have the ability to comment and have a threaded discussion. Many times, there will be async discussions ahead of the meeting that make the meeting go much faster (we rarely run out of time). This does stink for those folks that aren’t as strong at async communication but I see that as a them problem, not a meeting problem. Everyone should come prepared for the meeting therefore should have read through all issues ahead of time.
Like I’ve said, I don’t run things necessarily with pure EOS®. But that’s ok. This is just how we run my favorite tool of EOS®.
I do love other tools EOS® has to offer and I can break down how we use them in future posts. But I wanted to share this top of mind since that podcast host hit me with that question.
Curious what you think about this and if everyone runs PURE EOS®/Level 10™ meetings unlike me.
