How to Run an L10 Meeting

Show Notes: Inside the 90™ Episode #18

Almost everyone running EOS has heard of an L10 meeting. Far fewer could explain what actually makes one work.

This episode breaks down the mechanics of the meeting itself — the agenda, the traps, and why a structured 90 minutes doesn't have to feel bureaucratic.

What an L10 Actually Is (and Why It Isn't Bureaucracy)

An L10 is a meeting with an agenda that starts on time, ends on time, and solves three issues — done well, that's the whole definition.

The name comes from the meeting pulse, one of EOS's five foundational tools. Annual planning sets the year, quarterly planning breaks that into 90-day rocks, and the weekly L10 is the checkpoint that keeps a team accountable to those rocks while surfacing whatever is getting in the way.

The "10" itself comes from a simple exercise: ask a team to rate their internal meetings on a scale of one to ten, and the honest answer is usually a two or three. The whole meeting is built around closing that gap.

The agenda is the size of the field you're playing on. The issues list is how you actually play the game — the structure never changes, but what gets solved is entirely up to the team.

The reason it doesn't feel bureaucratic in practice is that it strips emotion out of problem-solving. An issue is just an issue, not a referendum on a person, and having one dependable place to raise it every week takes the drama out of the business.

There are really only two acceptable reasons to miss one: vacation, or a death in the family. Everything else, including a client meeting, waits.

The Agenda: Segue, Scorecard, and Rock Review

The first 15 to 20 minutes of an L10 is peer reporting — and it's already building the issues list before the team ever gets there.

The segue opens the meeting with one business and one personal win from the past week. It does two things: it shifts everyone's mindset from tactical to strategic, and it builds team health by giving people a reason to actually know what's going on in each other's lives.

Scorecard review comes next. Each seat reports its measurables — leads and MQLs for marketing, conversion rate and proposals sent for sales — against a weekly goal, with a hard cap of fifteen measurables per team scorecard.

A measurable is what someone reports weekly into a team's scorecard in an L10.

A metric is a number that lives elsewhere, like a dashboard, and hasn't been built into that weekly reporting rhythm yet.

Anything off track gets dropped straight to the issues list rather than discussed in the moment, which keeps the scorecard review from turning into a 20-minute detour. A number off track three weeks running gets flagged automatically; off track for six weeks or more usually means the goal itself was wrong.

Rock review works the same way, but with more nuance than a flat on-track or off-track. A rock owner reporting on-track should also flag anything worth sharing, and a teammate who hasn't heard an update in a while has every right to ask for one on the spot.

The most underused tool here is Getting What You Want: naming the rock's actual outcome, then breaking it into milestones with real due dates, so "on track" means the next milestone actually moved rather than just repeating the same status for six weeks straight.

Customer and Employee Headlines: Brevity Is the Point

This section exists to keep the rest of the organization visible to a team that doesn't touch every client or every hire.

A quick core-value shoutout, a heads-up about vacations, a client win or a client issue that got handled well, a hiring update — all of it belongs here, and everyone should bring at least one, since even someone without client contact still works with employees.

The discipline is brevity: a headline, not the full article. If more detail is needed, the team will ask.

Interestingly, the first four sections of the meeting — segue, scorecard, rocks, and headlines — tend to be where a lack of buy-in shows up earliest. All four carry real accountability and clear expectations, and someone who resists engaging with any of them is often signaling something bigger than meeting fatigue.

Running the Issues List Without Becoming a Victim of It

By the time a team reaches the issues list, it's often sitting at fifteen or twenty items — and not prioritizing it is its own trap.

Left unchecked, a team just chases whatever's loudest that week instead of asking what's actually most important to solve. The fix is a quick gut-check before diving in: rank the top one, two, three, and work those first.

A long issues list isn't a red flag on its own — it's closer to the opposite. Every unresolved item is an open file sitting in someone's head, and writing it down and naming it clearly closes that file, even before it's solved.

Who, who, one sentence: identify who raised the issue, who they're really talking to, and whether they can state it in a single clear sentence — clarity here is already halfway to a solve.

A whiteboard helps here too. Writing out the issue as it's actually being solved — and adding a second or third line the moment a nested issue surfaces — makes it visible to the whole team exactly what's really being tackled.

One habit worth adopting for hybrid teams: if even one person is joining remotely, everyone joins by video. Splitting a room with a whiteboard and one remote observer creates two different meetings, not one.

It's also worth watching for a to-do that's secretly a rock. A four-week action item added mid-meeting doesn't belong on next week's to-do list — it belongs on the long-term issues list, to be considered as a real rock candidate at the next quarterly.

Most issues fall into one of three buckets: a problem to solve, an FYI, or a need for clarity or input. Naming which one it is up front makes the discussion faster.

Closing the Meeting: Recap, Cascade, Rate

The last five minutes matter as much as the first eighty-five.

Closing has three parts: each person recaps their own to-dos out loud, the team flags anything that needs to cascade to another team, and everyone rates the meeting from one to ten.

The rating isn't about the facilitator — it's about the team: did the group stick to the agenda, run IDS well, and stay open and honest with each other. Asking the question out loud, every week, is what keeps two people from quietly complaining about a bad meeting at lunch instead of saying so in the room.

A team that's honestly hitting a ten deserves to say so. What matters more is that a six comes with a reason — if it doesn't, and someone privately felt like it was a six anyway, that's a trust issue worth paying attention to.

Final Takeaway: Give It 90 Days

It typically takes about a quarter to feel like the mechanics have actually clicked. The advice for anyone still finding their footing is simple: keep the muscle moving, and don't skip one.

After a decade of running L10s, there's still more to learn in the room every single week.