EOS® tutorial: how to run weekly L10 meetings
Meetings are very expensive, yet teams need some effective way of weekly planning. EOS® proposes 90 minutes of what they call a Level 10 meeting. This article is a tutorial to implement it.
Usual problems with meetings
1. Meetings are expensive. Management meetings are even more!
It’s estimated that approximately $37 billion is spent on unnecessary meetings in the US every year. In addition, studies indicate that having face-to-face meetings can cause up to 60% in productivity loss from employees.
While some meetings are unavoidable, it’s important to your company’s bottom line to ensure that the time your employees spend in meetings is productive time. What exactly makes a meeting an unproductive one?
2. Off topic discussions
Failing to properly plan your meeting via the use of a detailed agenda that is sent out to attendees ahead of time can cause meetings to veer off topic. It also leads to rambling about irrelevant information and off-topic side discussions. An agenda containing everything that is to be talked about and giving floor time to the appropriate people is the best way of ensuring that you stay on task during your meetings.
3. Too long. People get bored and disengage.
Studies indicate that the average length of a meeting is 90 minutes. This is a huge chunk of time out of a workday. Look for ways to trim meeting times down. Agendas are helpful for this, as is carefully considering what topics are best covered during the meeting. Any side topics or other information that may be tangentially related to your meeting can be presented via an alternative, asynchronous communication tool.
4. Poor planning
Usually, the person sending invites does not have an agenda for the meeting. This poor planning makes meetings ineffective, since attendees have to improvise.
Plus as there is no agenda with time constraints for each topic, discussions tend to be vague and long. And without a desired output explicitly explained by the meeting host, attendees will have different ideas of what needs to be produced as an output of the meeting.
In case you don’t know what EOS is
Before continuing to the tutorial, I want to briefly mention that EOS is a complete methodology to run companies. If you are interested in learning more, you can find the rest of the articles I wrote in the EOS collection.
EOS: The Regular Meeting Pulse
The EOS process defines three main meetings that are held regularly, each with a set agenda and timescale:
- Annual Company Planning Session — a 2 day meeting once a year to plan the year ahead, set the company goals, review the company values, look at the whole team and review any changes to the accountability chart
- Quarterly Company Planning Session — a 1 day meeting every quarter to plan the next 3 months, set the 90 day rocks and keep everyone on track with the 12 month plan
- Weekly Level 10 meeting — a 90 minute meeting held every week to keep everyone on track with the rocks, tick off the weekly to-do’s, review the company scorecard and solve any immediate issues right there and then.
For the rest of the article, I’ll focus in the Weekly Level 10 meeting.
Meet the Level 10 meeting
The name of the meeting derives from the score you should be aiming for at the end of the meeting i.e. It should be a 10 out of 10! The objective of the meeting is to help you keep on track with any quarterly goals (Rocks) you’ve set, keep an eye on the company health, agree any to-dos for the week ahead and solve any short term issues you need to get out of the way.
The following are the five earmarks of a great Level 10 meeting
- Same day
- Same time
- Same agenda
- Starts on time
- Ends on time
The Level 10 agenda
Segue — 5 Minutes
- Welcome chat, get out of the mindset of the daily project grind and into the mood for sorting out the business
Company Scorecard — 5 Minutes
- Review the scorecard (no discussion, if anyone has any issues, make a note and drop it on the issues list to discuss in IDS)
Rock Review — 5 Minutes
- On-track or Not On-track.(one word answers, no discussion, drop any issues onto the issues list to discuss in IDS)
Customer/Employee Headlines — 5 Minutes
- Go round the table, each person has to say 1 client and 1 employee headline
To-Do List — 5 Minutes
- Review ‘to-dos’ — are they done or not (one word answer, no discussion, drop any issues onto the issues list to discuss in IDS)
IDS — 60 Minutes
- First 5 mins prioritize the Issue List — Pick the top 3 highest priority items that the team think needs to be solved in the next 60 mins.
- If any to-do’s come out of them, add them to the To-Do list
- If you solve the first 3 items, then do another round of prioritisation and solve the next highest priority
Conclude — 5 mins
- Recap and agree To-Do List
- Agree on any cascading messages that need to be filtered down to other teams
- Meeting Rating (1–10)
Tools to track TODOs and Issues: Google Keep
The EOS process provides a number of out-of-the-box management tools and templates you can use for the various parts of the system, one of them being the Level 10 meeting agenda.
We at Mighty Block use Google Keep which solves our needs perfectly well.
Trello is another option. We’ve kept it pretty simple for now with just the essential columns, but it’s worked really well and gives us a central tool to work from during the week and also a focus for discussion during the meeting moving from column to column as we progress through the agenda.
I also came across this empty version created by Adam Shallcross with sample cards in case anyone is interested in using Trello.
Some important aspects to consider
1. Staying focused
As we all know it’s really easy to become side tracked in meetings. One of the key issues the Level 10 meeting tries to solve is keeping everyone on track and focussed on the meeting agenda. There is nothing worse than sitting in meetings that have no point or relevance, drift along with no agenda, have no defined outcome or agreed deliverable when the meeting has finished. It’s just a waste of an hour or more of peoples lives that they can never get back!
So, the Level 10 agenda is time boxed to keep you on track and as a team you are actively encouraged to vocally call out anyone who starts a diversion away from the agenda by shouting out ‘TANGENT ALERT!’. You of course do need a fairly strong chairperson to keep everyone on track.
The format so far has worked really well. It took 2–3 weeks to get into the swing of things, but I think we’ve pretty much got used to it now, however there is always room for improvement
2. Choose a weekly day and time wisely
I started doing L10s on Mondays at 9am, just to start the week with the planning in place so the team could focus for the rest of the week.
After four L10s, I realized Mondays were difficult days for 90 minute meetings because a) I was living in Argentina were most non-working days are Mondays and b) Mondays are very busy days for my team.
So we changed to Tuesday 9am and the performance of the team increased significantly. So pick your L10 day and time wisely!
3. Pick up the three main issues before the meeting
If your team is looking at the issues list when the IDS time comes, you’ll all lose time trying to prioritize issues.
It my experience, it’s much better to send reminders to the team so they can review the issues list before the meeting and have their three most critical issues selected. Some additional tips to implement this correctly:
- The Integrator should eliminate duplicates from the list and erase issues that are not relevant any more
- Have each issue numbered so it’s easy to reference them
- Send an automatic Slack notification a couple of hours before the meeting to all team members. We use a notification in a Slack Channel:
4. Rating the L10
A common problem I have faced after holding hundreds of Level 10 Meetings™, is that scoring the meeting can be vague. What is a nine for some attendees could be a seven for others, if you don’t have a clear way of scoring.
I believe there is a way to rate the meetings and the team more accurately. Remember, the goal is to get a true rating to 10 (or at least an 8+).
Using five criteria, rate each criteria either a 0, a 1, or a 2 (0 is “heck, No!” and a 2 is “Yes, absolutely!”)
Add them up, then share your total number with the team.
Final thoughts
I hope this short tutorial gets many teams to try and do their first L10 meeting. If you are interested in learning more about EOS, you can find the rest of the articles I wrote in the EOS collection.
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