Is your Meeting a 10?

How to Rate Your Level 10 Meetings

If you're in leadership, chances are you have meetings.  Sales meetings, operations meetings, leadership meetings, marketing meetings, finance meetings, holiday party committee meetings.. it never seems to end.  For you, if you are in leadership or management, having meetings IS your job.

Do you sometimes feel like you want to take up smoking again (even if you've never smoked?), while other meetings just feel awesome?

I've spent a lot of time talking about meetings, so this article isn't about why hold a meeting or how to run a meeting.  If you're looking for that, you can read about holding effective meetings and Level 10 meetings here.

This article is about how to know if it was a good meeting.

How can you put your finger on it?

The Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS) has a meeting process and agenda for effective meetings called a Level 10 Meeting™.  They are called "Level 10" because as the last item on the meeting agenda, each participant is asked to honestly rate the meeting 1-10, 10 being a perfect meeting.

Unfortunately, EOS doesn't have a suggestion on specifically how to rate a meeting to get to "10" - just that it is up to the individual to rate the meeting out loud to their peers, subjectively.  I can see that makes a lot of sense for many to do it that way.  Recently, however, I discovered that teams were constantly rating their meetings between a 7-9 just because of a "feeling", but couldn't pinpoint why verbally.

Worse, because within EOS 's Level 10 guidelines, it is suggested that if you rate an 8 or better, you don't get to say why you rated it that way.  An 8 or better is good enough and does not need an explanation.  This would make people say (and I quote several different clients here!):  "I give the meeting a 7.99 because I think it was really good, but we could work on several things to make it better".

That just makes me cringe a little.  Every meeting was being rated around an 8.

How can you quickly and effectively rate a meeting within seconds

After holding thousands of meetings and coaching leadership teams through hundreds of Level 10 Meetings™, I think I've discovered an answer for your consideration. I believe this is a way to rate the meetings and the team more accurately. Remember, the goal is to get a true rating to 10 (or at least an 8+).

Using five criteria, rate each criteria either a 0, a 1, or a 2 (0 is "heck, No!" and a 2 is "Yes, absolutely!")

1Did we come to the meeting prepared,
and did we follow the agenda?
0 -  1 -  2
2Were we Engaged?0 -  1 -  2
3Were we Open and Honest?0 -  1 -  2
4Did we solve a real issue forever?0 -  1 -  2
5Do we Have Clarity on Next Steps?0 -  1 -  2

Add them up, then share your number with the team.

That's it!