How to Shorten Your L10 Meetings While Increasing Your Impact

Learn how to transform your L10 meetings into efficient and solutions-oriented sessions.

I used to think that the purpose of meetings was to share important information and boost accountability. Participants highlighted what they achieved and learned; we reviewed stop-light charts and metrics to assess progress and compliance. I grew up participating in such meetings, which seemed normal and practical.

Years later, I looked around the room during a staff meeting. We had around 30 attendees. I listened as they read the PowerPoint bullets from their slides, highlighted the numbers on their charts, and explained any discrepancies.

Why was I having intelligent people read out loud to other intelligent people looking at the same charts? 

A staff member suggested we share the charts in advance and create an agenda focused on solving problems and coordinating solutions. Brilliant! I could free people to do their jobs. We accomplished more in half the time. People saw meetings as valuable instead of soul-sucking. 

EOS L10 meetings suffer from the same problems I was inflicting on my teams.

EOS’s weekly L10 meeting envisions 90 minutes per session. That’s 78 hours of L10 meetings in a year. If you and the ten people in the meeting make an average of $100 per hour, that’s $780,000 invested in these meetings.

What if you cut that number in half? What could you do with 39 hours of additional time?

Cutting that time in half is easy once you take my staff officer’s advice. Use shared documents to convey information and devote your meeting time to making decisions and coordinating solutions. Reading slides or information bullets out loud insults everyone’s intelligence. 

Breaking Down L10 Meetings to Reduce Wasted Time: 4 Steps

Here’s how to break down your typical L10 meeting to reduce wasted time:

Step 1: Gather information asynchronously into a shared document or dashboard.

1. Weekly Scorecard Metrics. Perfect for a dashboard. Periodically assess them to avoid metric mayhem.
2. Rock Updates (Rock is EOS jargon for quarterly goals). See above.
3. To-Do List Updates. Mark completed tasks and provide short comments on any delays in a shared task management tool (e.g., Asana, Trello, or a shared spreadsheet).
4. Customer and Employee Headlines. Flag items requiring discussion.

Step 2: Prepare the meeting agenda and prioritize the issues for discussion and resolution. Give participants 24 hours to review the agenda and the read-ahead materials.

Step 3: Use the meeting to tackle your top 3 cross-cutting issues. Identify the problem you want to solve, discuss options, and decide. Work on individualized issues separately. Keep the meeting to 45 minutes or less. 

Step 4: Make Commitments. I learned this approach from Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence. Review each item on the to-do list and ask the responsible individual if they can accomplish the task by the deadline. That simple public commitment, Cialdini says, increases compliance dramatically. 

Let me know how this approach works by hitting reply and sending me a quick note. 

About Author

Chris Kolenda

I work with leaders who want to build unshakeable business endurance.

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