The Level 10 Meeting agenda is a fixed ninety-minute structure for a weekly leadership team meeting: same day, same time, same seven segments, same order, every week. Sixty of those ninety minutes go to solving problems. The other thirty exist to surface which problems are worth the sixty. If your leadership meeting currently runs long, wanders, and ends without decisions, the agenda below is the fix — and most of the value comes from refusing to reorder it.
The Level 10 Meeting™ is a tool of EOS Worldwide, LLC, and EOS® is their registered trademark. Trinity One is an independent practice, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or licensed by EOS Worldwide. What follows is our own description of the format and what we have learned running it with client leadership teams.
What Is a Level 10 Meeting?
A Level 10 Meeting — usually shortened to L10 — is the weekly operating meeting for a company's leadership team, typically five to seven people. The name comes from the closing ritual: everyone rates the meeting one to ten, and the target is a consistent ten.
Two things make it different from an ordinary weekly. First, the agenda never changes, so nobody spends the first ten minutes deciding what to discuss. Second, reporting and problem-solving are strictly separated. Status updates are capped and time-boxed; the bulk of the meeting is spent on a small number of issues that get resolved for good. Most leadership meetings invert this, which is why they feel busy and change nothing.
The L10 is the operating rhythm of the wider system described on our guide to the Entrepreneurial Operating System. Everything else — the quarterly priorities, the weekly numbers — feeds into this meeting or falls out of it.
The Level 10 Meeting Agenda, Segment by Segment
Ninety minutes, seven segments. The timings are not suggestions; they are the mechanism.
Segue — 5 minutes
Each person shares one personal and one professional good thing from the week. It sounds soft and it is the reason the meeting works. People arrive from seven different contexts; five minutes of deliberate transition means the first real issue gets a full room rather than a distracted one. Cut this segment and the first fifteen minutes of IDS become the warm-up instead.
Scorecard — 5 minutes
Read the weekly numbers. Five to fifteen measures, each with an owner and a goal, each either on track or off. No discussion, no explanation, no storytelling. Anything off-track becomes a line on the issues list and waits. Five minutes is enough for fifteen numbers if — and only if — you resist the urge to explain them here. Building a set of numbers worth reading is its own discipline; see the EOS Scorecard.
Rock Review — 5 minutes
Each person states whether their quarterly priorities are on track or off track. Two words, not a status report. Off-track goes to the issues list. If you find this taking fifteen minutes, the priorities were written too vaguely to be answered in two words — EOS Rocks covers how to shape them.
Customer and Employee Headlines — 5 minutes
Short, factual news the leadership team needs to know. A major client is unhappy. A key hire accepted. Headlines only — the moment one turns into a conversation, it belongs on the issues list.
To-Do List — 5 minutes
Review the seven-day commitments made in last week's meeting. Done or not done. A healthy team clears about ninety percent each week. Consistently below that and you have either an accountability problem or a habit of accepting to-dos that were actually projects.
IDS — 60 minutes
Identify, Discuss, Solve. Two-thirds of the meeting, and the only segment where the real work happens. Covered in detail below.
Conclude — 5 minutes
Three things: recap the to-dos created, decide what needs to be communicated to the wider company and by whom, and rate the meeting one to ten. The cascading message is the most-skipped and most-valuable part — it is what stops the leadership team from becoming the only group that knows what was decided.
The IDS Segment: Where the Real Work Happens
By the time you reach IDS you have an issues list built from everything that surfaced in the first thirty minutes. The team ranks it — not by whoever spoke loudest, but by actual importance — and takes the top item. Then the top item again. A good L10 solves three issues properly. A poor one touches eleven and closes none.
Identify is the part teams skip. The stated issue is almost never the real one. "Marketing isn't delivering leads" is a symptom; the issue underneath might be that nobody owns the definition of a qualified lead. Spending seven minutes getting to the real issue and eight solving it beats fifteen minutes solving the wrong thing.
Discuss should be short and is where discipline is hardest. Each person says their piece once. Repetition is a sign the room has already decided and is circling for comfort.
Solve means a decision plus a to-do with a name and a seven-day horizon. "We'll look into it" is not a solve. If the answer genuinely needs more information, the to-do is to get that information by next Thursday, owned by one named person.
Common Level 10 Meeting Mistakes
- Explaining the scorecard. The single most common failure. Fifteen minutes on why a number is red, and IDS loses a quarter of its time before it starts.
- Solving during Headlines. Same failure, different segment.
- Ranking issues by volume. Whoever is most frustrated is not necessarily holding the most important issue.
- Ending early because the list is short. A quiet week is the best time to take on the structural issue everyone has been avoiding for a quarter.
- Letting it drift to eight or ten people. Above seven, the meeting becomes a briefing. Somebody in the room stops contributing and starts attending.
- Rating every meeting a nine to be polite. The rating is a diagnostic. If it is always nine and nothing improves, the number is decorative.
Level 10 Meeting Agenda Template
Copy this into your calendar invite or meeting doc. The "done looks like" column is the part most templates omit and the part that keeps segments from expanding.
| Segment | Time | Who leads | Done looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Segue | 5 min | Rotate | Everyone has spoken once. No business discussed. |
| Scorecard | 5 min | Integrator | Every measure called on-track or off-track. Every off-track number on the issues list. Zero explanations given. |
| Rock Review | 5 min | Integrator | Every priority answered "on track" or "off track" in under ten seconds each. |
| Headlines | 5 min | Anyone | Customer and employee news stated as facts. Anything needing a decision moved to the list. |
| To-Do List | 5 min | Integrator | Last week's commitments marked done or not done. ~90% done. Not-done items either re-committed with a date or escalated. |
| IDS | 60 min | Integrator | Issues ranked. Top issues taken one at a time. Each closed with a decision and a named seven-day to-do. |
| Conclude | 5 min | Integrator | To-dos recapped. Cascading message agreed with an owner. Everyone has given a 1–10 rating. |
| Total | 90 min | Ends on time. Three issues genuinely closed. |
Making the L10 Stick
The first four weeks feel worse than the meeting you replaced. Segments overrun, IDS gets ten minutes, and somebody suggests the format is too rigid for your business. It is not — the rigidity is doing the work. Weeks five through eight are where a team either finds the rhythm or quietly reverts.
Three things predict which way it goes. Someone owns the clock and is willing to interrupt the CEO. The meeting happens the week it is inconvenient. And the issues list is genuinely allowed to contain hard things — if the uncomfortable structural problem never appears, the team is using the format to avoid the conversation rather than to have it.
That clock-owner is usually the Integrator seat, which is a real job rather than a facilitation role — see the EOS Accountability Chart for where it sits and why structure has to come before names.
Getting Help
Most teams can run this from the template above. If yours has tried and reverted twice, the problem is usually not the agenda — it is that nobody in the room has the standing to hold the format when the founder wants to reorder it. That is exactly the gap an EOS Implementer fills, and it is a solvable one.
Trinity One helps founder-led leadership teams install this rhythm and keep it. Book a discovery call and we will look at how your leadership meeting runs today.