Have you ever heard of HIIT (high-intensity interval training)? Recently, I thought about the parallels between a good HIIT routine and a great Level 10 Meeting. HIIT workouts let you achieve fitness and health benefits similar to longer workouts but in a shorter amount of time. Level 10 Meetings let you achieve team health benefits and solve more issues in a shorter time than a bad meeting or, even worse, multiple meetings. And they definitely beat taking on issues in a haphazard way throughout the week.
Warming Up
In a HIIT class, you don’t just walk in and immediately start going all-out. You start exercising for a few minutes at a light pace just to warm up, get your muscles loose, and get your blood flowing. Great Level 10 Meetings start with a positive focus to get the flow of the meeting started and some good brain chemistry happening.
Short Bursts
With everyone warmed up in HIIT class, you do some short bursts to begin to bring your heart rate up. This reminds me of the reporting section of a Level 10 Meeting. We review our important Scorecard, Rocks, and Customer and Employee Headlines, but we keep these to short, 5-minute bursts. The way things go in the reporting section “warms us up” to truly address the issues we discover. We begin to get our heads around the intensity about to come.
Give It All You’ve Got!
To get the true benefits of a HIIT workout, you have to maintain a truly high intensity. Your heart rate goes up, and you feel the conflict of painful exertion as you give it everything you’ve got. But you commit to the process. Then before you know it, you can rest for a few seconds before you hit it again. You’ll do this six to eight times in the course of the workout.
During a Level 10 Meeting, the high-intensity moments – and central focus of the agenda – occur when we process issues together. Like a HIIT workout, a Level 10 Meeting takes a strong heart. We must have the courage to put the real issues on the table. And we must trust that as a team we can work through the pain and discomfort of healthy conflict to find a solution. We must commit to active listening, thinking, and innovation.
Repeat
Like a good HIIT workout, a good Identify, Discuss, and Solve (IDS™) segment of your Level 10 Meeting feels like intense work! We push hard to find a solution. Then, as we spell out our To-Dos, we bring our heart rates down for a moment. Before you know it, we repeat the same methodology and dive into another issue with the same intensity. We might solve six to eight issues in a high-intensity Level 10 Meeting.
Cool Down
As HIIT class ends, you spend the last 7 to 10 minutes cooling down, making sure to decrease your heart rate, flush lactate out of your muscles, and stretch. In a Level 10 Meeting, we cool down by repeating the To-Dos that will “move the needle” to solve the discussed issues.
We stretch and ask ourselves what decisions need to be shared with, or “cascaded” to, others. And we give the meeting a rating on a scale of 1 to 10. Like finishing a good HIIT workout, we leave an L10 stronger and better prepared for the intense week to come!
What’s Next?
Ready to save some time and have the most productive team meetings of your life? Let me teach you how to get your leadership team following the high-intensity routine of the Level 10 Meeting Agenda. Run the right way, every meeting builds team health and helps you achieve amazing results in less time!
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