Most leadership team meetings are just status update theatre.
Everyone sits around the table, earnestly explaining how unbelievably busy they’ve been—as if that somehow excuses the fact that the one thing they said was critical last week didn’t happen.
And the best part? Everyone nods along. No challenge. No pushback. Just mutual understanding: You cover for me, I’ll cover for you.
It’s what Andrew McAfee, in The Geek Way, calls the Executive Liar’s Club. Not because they’re lying maliciously—but because they’re lying by omission. No one’s saying what needs to be said: we’ve normalised not doing the most important work.
Most founder-CEOs hit a wall at around 70 people—not because they’ve run out of ambition, but because the leadership style that got them this far starts to quietly sabotage them.
Leadership teams like this don’t need more meetings. They need fewer excuses and at least one person willing to say:
“We said this mattered. It didn’t get done. Why?”
Then actually shut up and wait for an answer that isn’t fluff.
Let me start by showing you the level 10 meeting—and then walk you through how to run executive team meetings out in the real world.
Think of it as the moment your leadership team stops acting busy and actually starts driving the business where it needs to go.
How Level 10 MeetingsTM work (and why they’re different)
Level 10 meetings get their name from one key habit: at the end, everyone rates the meeting out of 10. Simple. Brutal. Revealing.
The first time I do this with a team, I usually get a chorus of 7s — the classic “safe” answer. Not great, not awful. Just… meh. That’s when I ask: What did you actually do to make it a 10? Usually, the answer is nothing. They’ve sat through 90 minutes like passengers, then blamed the meeting. Sorry, but if it was shit, it’s because you let it be.
Level 10 meetings were born out of EOS, but the format works no matter what framework you swear by. The magic isn’t the brand — it’s the discipline. A repeatable structure that forces leadership teams to actually hold each other accountable
The fix? Own the room. Next week, show up differently — or stop pretending you care about better meetings.
How you run meetings is how you run your business
If you tolerate sloppy meetings, you’re tolerating sloppy execution. Show up late? Expect the same from everyone else. Waste time? Don’t be shocked when your team checks out.
Culture isn’t posters on the wall — it’s the worst behaviour you let slide.
The Level 10 Meeting agenda
The 90-minute weekly exec team meeting agenda
- Segue (5 minutes): Start human. One personal win, one professional win. It’s not small talk, it’s how you stop the leadership team turning into strangers. Keeps the room warm so the harder conversations don’t freeze up.
- Scorecard (5 minutes): Numbers on the table. On track or off track — no backstory, no excuses. If it’s red, park it for later. This is how you stop drowning in anecdotes and start running the business on facts.
- Rocks / Objectives (5 minutes): Quarterly big bets. Again, on track or off track. If it’s slipping, it goes on the issues list. This is what stops “quarterly goals” becoming “quarterly wish lists.”
- Customer & Employee Headlines (5 minutes): One insight each from outside your function. A client conversation, staff feedback, something raw and unfiltered. It drags reality into the room so you don’t end up leading in a bubble.
- To-do Review (5 minutes): Last week’s commitments. Done or not done. No excuses, no “it was complicated.” You’re either building a culture where promises stick or one where they slide.
- Deep Work (60 minutes): This is the meat. Call it IDS (Identify, Discuss, Solve) or a Strategic Deep Dive. Doesn’t matter. Pick the most important issues or opportunities and beat them into decisions with clear owners.
- Wrap-up (5 minutes): Lock down accountability. Beginners use WWW (Who, What, When). I prefer the 5-W diagnosticTM — Who, What, When, Way, Why Not — because it closes every loophole where accountability leaks. Then decide what needs cascading to the wider business and end with a quick “rate the meeting.” If it’s not at least an 8, fix it.
The strategic intervention that matters most
The genius of the level 10 meeting isn’t the agenda itself—it’s how each piece deliberately tackles the leadership challenges founder-CEOs face once the business hits scale. What feels like process is actually scaffolding for a bigger transition: moving from a personality-driven business to an institution that can run without the founder in every decision.
The Segue: replacing instinct with systematic connection
When you’re 10 or 20 people, relationships are effortless. You know what’s happening in people’s lives because you sit next to them. By 60 or 100, that falls apart. The Segue creates a ritualised five minutes of personal and professional check-in, which keeps relationships human even as the org chart gets colder. It’s not small talk—it’s insurance against leadership drift.
The Scorecard: shifting from founder instinct to hard data
Early-stage founders run the company off memory and gut. But as the business scales, that turns into a bottleneck. The Scorecard is the bridge—from “the founder knows everything” to “the business tells us what’s happening.” It forces leaders to own the numbers, not just the narrative. No long stories, just on track or off track. Off-track items get pushed down to IDS.
Rock / Objective Review: keeping focus beyond firefighting
Scaling means fires everywhere. Quarterly Rocks (or OKRs, if that’s your preference) are the antidote—they force the team to keep sight of longer-term priorities. The review is brutal in its simplicity: on track or off track. If it’s red, it goes to IDS. If it’s green, move on. It’s how you stop quarterly goals turning into quarterly wish lists.
Customer & Employee Headlines: protecting the founder’s line of sight
One of the first casualties of scale is direct contact. Founders stop hearing from customers and employees first-hand, and reality gets filtered. This slot reintroduces raw intelligence into the room. Each leader brings one headline from a customer and one from an employee, every week. It ensures decisions aren’t made in a bubble—and that the leadership team never drifts too far from the front line.
To-Do Review: building real accountability
Founders often complain their team “isn’t accountable.” The truth is, the system never forced it. The To-Do review fixes that. Last week’s commitments are read out. Done or not done—no excuses, no backstory. You’re either building a culture where promises stick, or one where they slide.
IDS: creating an institutional brain
This is the beating heart of the level 10. Instead of every tough decision rolling back to the founder, IDS trains the team to identify, discuss, and solve problems collectively. It’s the slow, sometimes painful process of building an institutional problem-solving muscle. Without it, the founder remains the bottleneck. With it, the business starts thinking for itself.
Conclude: closing the loop
The final five minutes matter more than people think. Recap the new to-dos. Agree what needs to cascade to the rest of the company. Then rate the meeting. It sounds trivial, but this is how the system learns. If the meeting isn’t an 8 or better, fix it.
The level 10 isn’t just a meeting format—it’s a leadership intervention. Each piece is designed to loosen the founder’s grip and replace it with systems, data, and collective intelligence. It’s the first step in shifting from a heroic founder-led company to a scale-up that can actually run itself.
When to evolve beyond Level 10 Meetings
The level 10 is brilliant for installing discipline—it gets you out of chaos, builds accountability, and stops leadership meetings from dissolving into waffle. But it has limits. It’s tactical by design. You leave with to‑dos ticked off, but little space for deeper, strategic conversation.
EOS works when you’re small, but once you pass 60 people the challenge shifts: execution isn’t the problem anymore—direction is. You can nail today’s fires and still drift if no one’s talking about tomorrow.
Here’s the key difference: EOS doesn’t include a daily rhythm. Scaling Up does. Its daily huddles flush out the tactical stuff every single morning. That means by the time you sit in the weekly, you don’t waste an hour rehashing fires—you can go straight to the bigger, strategic calls. The weekly becomes less about clearing weeds and more about steering the business.
Think of it this way: EOS is brilliant up to around 40 people. Beyond 60, the cracks start to show. That’s when you need Scaling Up—the daily rhythm, the strategic depth, and the ability to steer, not just execute.
That’s where Scaling Up’s weekly meeting changes the game.
The advanced weekly meeting format (for scaling companies)
Warm-Up (25 minutes):
- Good news (5 minutes): Quick personal and professional wins to set the tone.
- Priorities & metrics review (10 minutes): Snapshot check on quarterly priorities and critical KPIs—exceptions only, no deep dives.
- Customer & employee feedback (10 minutes): Headlines from the front line—patterns, trends, and themes that leadership needs to hear.
Strategic Deep Dive (50 minutes):
- One or two pivotal topics debated in depth.
- Could be a competitor move, a big opportunity, or a systemic bottleneck.
- Pre-read materials circulated beforehand so meeting time is used for debate and decision, not updates.
Wrap-Up (15 minutes):
- Confirm commitments using the 5-W DiagnosticTM (Who, What, When, Way, Why Not) for bulletproof accountability.
- Capture “cascading messages” for the wider organisation.
- One-phrase close: each person sums up their takeaway or reaction, surfacing alignment (or misalignment) before leaving the room.
Scaling Up weekly agenda (contrast to L10)
The Warm‑Up: bringing reality into the room
Instead of diving straight into scorecards, Scaling Up starts with intelligence gathering—customer feedback, employee sentiment, key metrics, quarterly objectives. The point isn’t to report; it’s to create a shared picture of the battlefield so the strategic debate isn’t happening in a vacuum.
The Strategic Deep Dive: trading status updates for hard decisions
Where L10 spends 60 minutes IDS‑ing tactical issues, Scaling Up protects that same time for one or two pivotal topics. Competitor moves. Market shifts. Big bets. The conversations founders used to hold in their heads now happen out loud, with the whole leadership team contributing.
The Wrap-Up: locking decisions with the 5-W Framework
Traditional Scaling Up WWW (Who/What/When) is a good start. To make accountability bomb‑proof, upgrade to the 5‑W Diagnostic—a tool I created to prevent the midweek fade‑out:
- Who — a single owner. Not two owners, not a committee—one name. If everyone is accountable, no one is.
- What — define “done”. Be painfully specific about the deliverable or metric so there’s no wriggle room later.
- When — an explicit date and time, written down and visible. “ASAP” and “end of day” are where commitments go to die.
- Way — the method, constraints or standard. No micromanaging, but confirm there’s a viable plan and remove blockers early.
- Why Not — pre‑mortem the risks. Ask what could stop this getting done and turn potential excuses into actions (support, sequence, resources).
Close with a one‑phrase readout from each person to test alignment. If someone’s biting their tongue, it surfaces before they leave the room.
The Scaling Up weekly meeting is less about tidying up loose ends and more about steering the ship. Paired with the 5‑W close, it ensures decisions don’t just get made—they actually get delivered.
How long should a Level 10 Meeting last
Ninety minutes. That’s the sweet spot. Long enough to cover the essentials, short enough to stop energy leaking out of the room. The first 20–25 minutes should be for check-ins, scorecards, priorities, and headlines, leaving the rest for real problem-solving and a clean wrap-up.
Key roles in a Level 10 Meeting
Timekeeper: Start on time, finish on time. Someone needs to watch the clock and keep the pace up. Nothing kills credibility faster than leaders who can’t run their own meetings to schedule.
Facilitator: Running a good meeting takes skill. You need someone who can keep the group on track, rein in the over-talkers, and make sure quieter voices are heard. Rotate the role so everyone builds the muscle.
Note-taker: Use a live system (Google Docs, Notion, MGS—take your pick) so commitments appear on screen as they’re made. That way there’s no ambiguity, no “I’ll write it up later,” and no forgetting who owns what.
How many people should attend a Level 10 Meeting
Seven is about the maximum for an effective weekly exec meeting. Once you creep past that, the quality of debate drops and social loafing creeps in—people start coasting because someone else will speak up. At the other extreme, fewer than four voices usually feels too thin; you miss perspective. In practice, six or seven gives you enough diversity without slowing everything down.
Why these meetings work
Because when they’re done right, everyone shows up as an owner, not a passenger. The structure forces participation, so people stop hiding behind updates and start solving problems together. Weekly cadence means issues don’t smoulder for months—they’re surfaced and dealt with before they flare. And because the conversation always swings back to top priorities, the meeting doubles as a weekly reminder of the bigger picture. It’s less about “another meeting” and more about building the engine that keeps strategy and execution moving in sync.
When you run your weekly exec meeting properly, the BS dries up, momentum kicks in, and strategy stops living in slide decks and starts showing up in results.
Three ways out of meeting hell
(Ranked by how fast they work — and how bold you’re feeling):
1. Book a strategy call
One call to tear down your broken meeting culture and rebuild it properly. Custom L10 meeting system, zero fluff.
If you’re serious, start here.
2. Download my L10 meeting template and user guide
My exact agenda, timings, and facilitation tips. Battle-tested, no hand-holding.
Perfect if you want structure without the call.
3. Join the weekly newsletter
Tactical leadership insights, field-tested frameworks, and the truth corporate won’t say out loud.
No Zoom. Just strategy that works.