The Level 10 Meeting Agenda: How to Run an L10, Section by Section

Your weekly meeting isn’t broken because you meet too little. It’s broken because it has no agenda.

Most leadership teams meet plenty. They just meet randomly. A check-in here, a fire drill there, a decision made in a hallway that half the team never hears about.

The Level 10 Meeting fixes that with one fixed agenda. It comes from EOS® (the Entrepreneurial Operating System®), described in the book Traction®, and a lot of owners know it simply as the L10. Same day, same time, same seven sections, 90 minutes, every week.

Think of it like a team that runs the same play every week. Good teams don’t invent a new play on every snap. They run the play, they get better at running it, and the reps are where the improvement comes from. The L10 agenda is the play. Skip a week and you pay for it in issues that pile up and decisions that drift.

Here’s the agenda, section by section: what happens in each one, what good looks like and where it usually breaks.

Alignment leaks. The agenda plugs the leak every week, on a schedule.

You can run a great offsite, leave with a shared plan, and drift right back to chasing different things three weeks later. Reality just keeps happening: new fires, new deals, new information. Without a rhythm to renew it, the shared picture evaporates and you’re the only one holding the whole thing in your head.

So be honest about your current meeting:

• Does it start on time, or when the last person wanders in?
• Do you leave with decisions, or with a longer list of things to talk about next week?
• Does anyone check whether last week’s commitments got done?
• Could your team run it without you in the room?

If those answers made you wince, the problem isn’t your people. It’s the meeting. This matters more as you grow. At a small size you keep everyone aligned by walking around. Once you hit the growth wall, walking around stops scaling, and the L10 is how you replace it with something that does. It’s the weekly beat of a full operating cadence.

The Level 10 Meeting agenda, at a glance.

Here’s the standard EOS® agenda with its standard time blocks. Copy it, paste it into your calendar invite and print it for the room. The first five sections are reporting. They should take 25 minutes. The other hour is where the real work happens.

• Segue (five minutes): one personal and one professional best from the past week.
• Scorecard (five minutes): each weekly number read as on track or off track.
• Rock review (five minutes): each Rock reported as on track or off track.
• Customer and employee headlines (five minutes): one-sentence good or bad news.
• To-Do list (five minutes): last week’s to-dos, done or not done.
• IDS: Identify, Discuss, Solve (60 minutes): work the Issues List, most important first.
• Conclude (five minutes): recap to-dos, agree on cascading messages, rate the meeting 1 to 10.

Three rules hold it together. Start on time. End on time. Anything that turns into a discussion during the first 25 minutes gets dropped onto the Issues List and solved later, in IDS.

Report fast, flag everything and save the talking for later.

Segue. Everyone shares one personal and one professional best from the past week. It sounds soft. It isn’t. It moves people out of the work they just walked away from and into working on the business together. Common failure: it turns into a 15-minute story hour. Keep each person to about 30 seconds.

Scorecard. Read your weekly scorecard: a short list of numbers, each with one owner and a goal. The owner says “on track” or “off track.” Off track goes straight to the Issues List, with no explanation yet. Common failure: the owner of a red number starts defending it, and the meeting’s lost 10 minutes on one number.

Rock review. Each leader reports on their quarterly Rocks, about one to three per leader, scaled to the size of your team. Again, only two words are allowed: on track or off track. An off-track Rock becomes an issue.

Customer and employee headlines. One sentence each. “The school renovation closed out ahead of schedule.” “Our best estimator gave notice.” Good news gets a moment. Bad news goes to the Issues List. Common failure: the headline becomes the discussion.

To-Do list. Every to-do from last week gets a “done” or “not done.” To-dos are seven-day commitments, and the EOS® standard is 90% or better completed each week. A to-do that misses twice goes to the Issues List, because something’s in the way. Common failure: quietly rolling misses forward, week after week, until the list means nothing.

What to do. Put a facilitator in charge of the clock, not the owner. Their one job in this block is to say “Drop it to the list” every time someone starts to discuss. If the first 25 minutes regularly runs to 40, the facilitator’s being too polite.

IDS is the meeting. Everything else is setup.

Now you’ve got an Issues List. Before you touch it, pick the three most important issues on it. Not the oldest. Not the easiest. The three that matter most. Start with number one and work down.

• Identify. Name the real issue, which is usually a layer or two below the one on the list. The symptom is what got written down. Keep asking why until the room agrees on the cause.
• Discuss. Everyone says what they think once. No speeches, no repeating a point to win. If the discussion starts circling, it’s done.
• Solve. Make a decision. It leaves as a to-do with one owner and a seven-day date. Then move to the next issue.

Picture a home services company running 20 trucks. “Callbacks are up” lands on the list off the Scorecard. Identify takes five minutes, and the real issue isn’t the techs. It’s that install crews keep leaving for jobs without the right parts, because the warehouse pulls the next day’s parts after the crews have already loaded up. Discuss takes five more. Solve: the warehouse manager moves the cutoff to 3 p.m. and reports back next week. That’s one issue, solved, with an owner.

Don’t try to clear the whole list. A team that solves three real issues a week will outrun a team that talks about 12. Whatever doesn’t get solved stays on the list for next week. Common failure: discussing an issue for 40 minutes and walking out without a decision. That’s not solving. That’s a debate club. If this is where your team gets stuck, read about why decision velocity sets your pace.

What to do. Protect the 60 minutes like payroll. If the reporting sections keep eating into IDS, the fix is tighter reporting, never a shorter IDS.

Close the loop before anyone leaves the room.

Recap the to-dos. Read every new to-do out loud, with the owner’s name. If someone hears their name and looks surprised, the to-do wasn’t clear. Fix it now, not next week.

Cascading messages. Decide what the rest of the company needs to hear from this meeting, who tells them and by when. Without this step, the leadership team leaves with one story and the company hears five.

Rate the meeting. Everyone rates it from 1 to 10. The target is an 8 or better. Anyone who rates below an 8 says why, in one sentence.

Then end on time. A meeting that ends on time every week earns the right to keep everyone’s full attention for 90 minutes.

What to do. Track the average rating and the to-do completion rate every week. Two numbers tell you whether the L10 is working.

Start imperfect, protect the time and let it earn trust.

Don’t wait for the meeting to be great before you start it. It gets good through reps.

• Put it on the calendar weekly and treat it as immovable: same day, same time, 90 minutes, leadership team only. The fastest way to kill a cadence is to cancel it the first busy week.
• Build a rough scorecard to open it. The numbers give the meeting a spine, so it doesn’t drift into status theater.
• Keep an Issues List all week and actually close items in IDS. A meeting where issues go to die teaches your team to stop bringing them.
• End with owned to-dos and open the next meeting by checking them. That’s the accountability loop.

Across more than 1,000 on-site sessions, we’ve seen the same thing kill the L10 again and again. It rots into a status ritual: everyone shows up, recites updates and nothing gets solved. That’s worse than no meeting, because it costs the time and produces nothing. Guard the IDS block. That’s where the value lives.

Boring is the point.

The business gets a pulse you can trust.

Run a real L10 for a quarter and the change is hard to miss. Issues get solved while they’re still small. Decisions stick, because the whole team was in the room when they were made. Commitments get checked out loud every week, which is how you hold a leadership team accountable without chasing anyone.

You stop being the switchboard every question routes through. There’s a known place and a known time where things get worked out, without you driving each one. From structure comes freedom.

And one Thursday you’re sitting in the stands at your kid’s game at 4 p.m. Your phone hasn’t buzzed, because everything that needed a decision got one on Tuesday.

Find out whether the meeting is the problem, or the symptom.

If you’re looking for a meeting that keeps everyone comfortable, the L10 isn’t it. It surfaces hard issues on purpose, every week, in front of the whole team. If your team can’t handle that yet, the agenda won’t fix it by itself.

No weekly rhythm at all is usually a Design problem: the systems that keep a team aligned haven’t kept up with your size. A meeting that exists and still doesn’t solve anything usually points to Dynamic: the trust to put hard issues on the table isn’t there yet. The fix for each is different.

Take the 3D Self-Diagnostic. It’s a free online assessment that takes about 10 minutes, and it scores your Direction, Design and Dynamic to show which side is weakest right now. If you’d rather have a coach help you install an L10 that holds, book a call with our team.