Meeting Pulse - How to have Great Meetings

Read time - 8 minutes

Most meetings are a complete waste of time.

Wrong agenda. Wrong attendees. Zero preparation. And what should be the most valuable hour of your week becomes an exercise in frustration - or worse, a room full of people talking about stuff without ever actually solving anything.

This is tragic for multiple reasons, but most importantly - bad meetings are expensive.

When you pull five business leaders out of productive work for an hour, you're burning serious money. If those meetings aren't generating real decisions and solving real problems, you're lighting that money on fire every single week.

I've been running and coaching the Level 10 meeting for over 10 years — first as an operator building companies from zero to 100 employees, now as an EOS Implementer coaching leadership teams. This meeting agenda has been proven across 26,000+ companies.

Here's how to do it right.

Why Most Meetings Fail

Before we get into the solution, it's worth understanding the root cause of bad meetings.

Most teams walk into a room without a clear agenda, discuss the same issues they discussed last week without resolving them, and leave without clear ownership of next steps. Everyone's busy, no one's accountable, and the cycle repeats.

The other failure mode is the opposite - over-engineered meetings with 20-item agendas that drag on for two hours while the real issues never get airtime.

The Level 10 solves both problems with structure, discipline, and a bias toward getting more done in less time.

The Setup

The Level 10 is a 90-minute weekly leadership meeting. Same time, same day, same people, same agenda — every week, no exceptions.

That predictability isn't just a logistical convenience. It's cultural. When everyone knows this meeting is happening every Monday at 8am and it's the most important 90 minutes of the week, they prepare for it differently. They protect it. They show up ready.

The 90-minute limit is also intentional. Long enough to do meaningful work. Short enough that everyone stays sharp and focused throughout.

Who Should Attend?

In privately held entrepreneurial organizations this is held at the leadership team level, and then it gets rolled out into every department in the company. So ultimately everyone in the company participated in at least one L10 meeting.

There’s a few caveats here though - Each department should choose their ideal cadence, e.g. weekly, biweekly. They should also choose their duration, meaning not all departments need 90 minutes.

This meeting is meant to be the foundational means of communicating and decisionmaking within the company, but is not the only meeting teams can have. If a department needs a daily standup, they should have a daily standup.

The Agenda

Segue (5 min) Start with a personal best and a business best from each person. This isn’t a waste of time - it's the transition into a focused team environment with humans you care about. Connecting briefly before diving into business makes everything that follows more productive.

Scorecard (5 min) Review your 5–15 weekly measurables. Each number gets called out as either on track or off track. If it's off track, it drops to the issues list - no lengthy discussion here. The scorecard gives you a pulse on the business in minutes, not hours. Great scorecards include a mix of leading indicators (like sales calls made) and lagging indicators (like revenue), so you can see what's coming, not just what happened.

Rock Review (5 min) Your company's 3–7 quarterly priorities get reported the same way. On track or off track. If a Rock is off track, it becomes an issue. This keeps your most important priorities visible every single week instead of disappearing into a slide deck that nobody looks at until the quarter ends.

It’s important to not get into a discussion here. This requires discipline and trust. If you want to discuss or get an update on someone’s rock - make it an issue.

Customer/Employee Headlines (5 min) What does everyone on the team need to know right now? What's happening with customers? What's happening with your people? This isn't a deep dive - it's a brief information transfer to keep everyone's circles connected. Assume this meeting is the only time the group talks all week. What needs to be said?

I recommend teams try to fill the whole 5 minutes here because there’s always information to share to eachother. But remember - we’re not diving into discussion here. If you want to discuss further - you guessed it. Make it an issue.

To-Do List (5 min) Last week's action items: done or not done. That's it. No explanations, no excuses. Great teams complete 90% of their to-dos every week. If your team is consistently below that, it's a culture issue that needs to go on the issues list.

IDS - Identify, Discuss, Solve (60 min) This is the engine of the entire meeting, and it's where the magic happens — or doesn't.

IDS stands for Identify, Discuss, Solve. It exists because even smart, well-intentioned teams have a tendency to talk about things endlessly without ever landing on a solution. They discuss, revisit, discuss again, run out of time, and table it for next week. Sound familiar?

Here's how IDS fixes that. Your team maintains an ongoing issues list throughout the week - challenges, obstacles, opportunities, anything that needs to be addressed. At the start of IDS, everyone nominates their top priorities from that list. You pick the top three and work through them one at a time.

For each issue: the person who raised it identifies it clearly. The team discusses briefly - not to repeat themselves, but to get to the root cause. And then you solve it. That means a clear to-do, a decision, or an action item with an owner.

Great teams get through 3, 6, 9 issues in this window every single week. Over a quarter, that's 40–70 problems solved that would have otherwise lingered, compounded, or killed momentum.

Conclude (5 min) Recap all the to-dos from the meeting. Identify any decisions that need to be communicated to the rest of the organization. Then rate the meeting 1–10. That rating matters - it creates accountability for the quality of the meeting itself and surfaces what needs to improve.

What Makes It Great: Preparation

The agenda is only as good as the people running it. The Level 10 doesn't work if people show up expecting the meeting to happen to them.

Here's what great preparation looks like. Before every meeting, EVERY attendee needs to prepare these items:

• Scorecard - Know your number, know if it's on or off track, and know why if it's struggling

• Rocks - Be actively working your Rock every week, not just thinking about it the morning of the meeting. And know for sure whether it’s on or off track

• To-Dos - Do the work. Show up with your action items complete

• Headlines - Come with something to share that's relevant to the team

• Issues - Know what you need help on, what's blocking you, what the team needs to solve. This meeting only works if everyone advocates for what they need

None of this requires hours of prep. It requires focus and intentionality heading into the meeting - treating it as the highest-leverage time of your week, because it is.

What Makes It Great: Intensity

Preparation gets you ready. Intensity is what happens in the room.

No side conversations. No phones. No passengers. Everyone engaged, everyone contributing, everyone pushing toward solutions rather than just discussion.

The teams I've seen transform their businesses with this structure are the ones who own it - who lean into the discomfort of direct conversations, hold each other accountable to their numbers and their commitments, and leave every week with clear next steps and real momentum.

Compounding Effects

I tell this to every team I coach - I ran at least one company at a time for 10 years using this meeting agenda. And on the very last meeting, I got just a little bit better at running the meetings.

Magic won’t happen in your first Level 10. The magic comes from consistently showing up, putting in the work, bringing the intensity, and striving to improve as a team.

You’ll have bad days, but if you strive for a 10 every day and push eachother, think about how much more you’ll get done as a team over a 90 day period, a year, 3 years.