Why Most Meetings Fail – and How EOS Level 10 Meetings Fix That

Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth.

Most meetings are a waste of time. Most meetings are a waste of time, and if you want to know how to improve meetings with EOS, you’re already asking the right question.

It’s not because people are lazy. Not because leaders don’t care. But because meetings have quietly become places where nothing really happens – and EOS Level 10 meetings exist to change exactly that.

We all recognise the signs. The meeting starts late. As a result, half the attendees are already distracted before the first sentence is finished. There’s a vague agenda, if there’s one at all. People talk around issues rather than about them. Someone raises a problem, someone notes it, and the group moves on. The same topic comes back next week. And the week after that.

Eventually, people stop engaging – not out of apathy, but out of experience. They’ve learned that speaking up doesn’t change anything, as the dominant voices in the room barrel over all other opinions. We’ve all been there.

The Real Reason Meetings Go Nowhere

Understanding how to improve meetings with EOS starts with understanding why they fail. When meetings fail, it’s rarely a process issue. It’s a human one.

The thinking behind The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is particularly helpful here. Strip away the theory and it comes down to something very simple: teams struggle when they don’t trust each other enough to be honest.

In dysfunctional meetings, people don’t say what they really think. They soften feedback. They avoid tension. They choose harmony over progress. As a result, nothing meaningful gets decided.

You see it most clearly when people issues come up – or are gracefully avoided by reframing them as process issues.

Someone hints that a team member isn’t pulling their weight. Another alludes to “communication problems” between departments. There’s an awkward pause. The conversation drifts somewhere safer. The real issue — the one everyone knows is there — remains untouched.

And that’s the moment the meeting stops being useful.

The Cost of Avoiding People Issues

People issues are uncomfortable. They involve emotion, ego, history, and relationships. So most teams avoid them in favour of operational topics: numbers, projects, and tactics.

However, here’s the irony.

Unresolved people issues derail execution far more than any missed KPI.

You can have the best strategy in the world. But if two leaders don’t trust each other, progress slows. If a high performer is toxic and no one addresses it, standards slip. If accountability is fuzzy, resentment builds quietly until it explodes, or people simply leave in silence.

When people avoid people issues, those issues don’t disappear. Instead, they leak into everything else: missed deadlines, passive resistance, disengagement, and poor results.

In addition, meetings become the place where those tensions quietly fester.

The Ranto-Meter: Our Internal Warning System

In our own business, we developed a simple personal alerting system to help identify people issues early.

It works like this: if you find yourself ranting internally about the quality of someone else’s work or decision-making, you have the beginning of a problem. We call it the Ranto-Meter. If you’re at a 6 or above, you have an issue you need to share – either you haven’t clearly explained your expectations to a team member, or they simply don’t understand where you’re trying to go. As a result, they’ll never get there. Clarity, goal setting, and communication are central to getting on the same page.

One of the most common drivers of this frustration is that colleagues may not fully understand, or be able to achieve, their deliverables. This is particularly true when staff are what we call “functionally dirty”: partially responsible for several roles, without the ability to deliver on any with real focus. In our experience, role specialisation with clear accountability and KPIs is the only way to break this pattern.

When We Realised Our Meetings Were the Problem

For a long time, we thought our meetings were “fine.” We ran our EOS Traction meetings and made some progress. We then moved to a facilitated quarterly meeting, which helped with goal setting — but the core issues remained.

Our meetings were regular. Well-attended. Polite.

They just didn’t change anything.

The same problems came up repeatedly. Decisions were revisited. No one owned accountability clearly. And perhaps most telling of all, the energy in the room was flat.

The business wasn’t failing, but it wasn’t progressing at the rate we knew was possible. We were stuck in that frustrating middle ground where everyone is busy, yet progress feels slow and fragile.

It was only when we encountered EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, delivered with the right facilitation through Traction, that we realised the problem wasn’t effort or intent.

It was how we were running the business. And at the centre of that was how we conducted meetings and held each other to account.

The Discipline of EOS Level 10 Meetings

EOS introduced a concept that sounds deceptively simple: the Level 10 meeting.

At first glance, it looks like a structured weekly leadership meeting — same time, same agenda, same cadence. However, the power isn’t in the agenda itself. It’s in what the structure forces you to do. This is the core of how to improve meetings with EOS, structure that forces resolution.

Level 10 meetings create a space where issues are not just raised, but actually resolved. Where numbers tell the truth. Where priorities are either on track or they aren’t. And crucially, where people issues are addressed head-on instead of danced around.

This is where IDS comes in.

Why IDS Is the Heart of the Meeting

IDS stands for Identify, Discuss, Solve.

It sounds obvious – but it isn’t. The discipline is deceptively hard to get right.

Most meetings skip straight from “identify” to “talk about it vaguely” and then move on. IDS is different. It insists on discipline, focus, and courage.

Identify: Name the Real Issue

The first step – Identify, is about getting the real issue on the table. Not the symptom. Not the safe version. The actual root problem.

This is especially important with people issues.

For example, a team might identify the issue as “missed deadlines.” However, once you dig deeper, the real issue might be that one leader doesn’t trust another to deliver – so they micromanage, which creates resentment, which slows everything down.

Until you name that, nothing changes.

Discuss: Have the Conversation Everyone Is Avoiding

The Discuss phase is where most teams struggle and where the real value lies.

This is not about debate for the sake of it. Instead, it’s about allowing honest, respectful tension into the room.

We’ve all experienced the opposite: the meeting where the loudest voices declare the solution before discussion even takes place. To break this cycle, we insist that the quietest people in the room speak first. As a result, louder voices get the opportunity to hear other perspectives and the situation where everyone nods along, counting down to the end, becomes far less common.

In a healthy IDS discussion, the important conversations happen in the room. People challenge assumptions. They share perspectives. They say, “Here’s what I’m seeing,” or “Here’s how this is impacting me.” It can feel uncomfortable, especially at first. However, that discomfort is often the sound of progress being made.

Over time, something important happens: trust increases. Because people realise that honesty doesn’t lead to punishment — it leads to clarity.

Solve: Decide, Don’t Park

The final step — Solve — is where meetings either earn their keep or don’t.

Solving doesn’t mean finding the perfect answer. It means deciding on a clear next step that moves the issue forward. Someone owns it. A deadline exists. The group agrees.

This is especially powerful with people issues, which are often left open-ended. For example, instead of vaguely agreeing that “communication needs to improve,” the team might decide that two leaders will meet weekly for the next month, with a specific agenda, and report back. Or that expectations for a role will be clarified and documented by a specific date.

Small, concrete actions. Clear ownership. No ambiguity.

And if it doesn’t work? It comes back into IDS next week. No drama — just discipline. IDS is the practical answer to how to improve meetings with EOS on a week-by-week basis.

What Happens When You Tackle People Issues First

One of the biggest shifts we made was prioritising people issues in IDS instead of avoiding them. This was, by a country mile, the hardest part of our journey through Traction. The people and skillsets that had brought us to where we were, were simply not enough for our next stage of development. Positional status and egos were getting in the way of progress. These are standard growing pains for any business as it jumps from one stage of development to the next. Understanding and acting on that required very well-defined roles with clear expectations.

At first, digging into the Solve track slowed meetings down. Conversations were harder. Old frustrations came into the light. However, then something changed.

Hard decisions were made. Space opened up for new thinking. Execution sped up.

Once the underlying tensions were addressed, decisions stuck. Collaboration improved. Accountability became less personal and more factual. People stopped taking issues home with them — and thankfully, the Ranto-Meter was running at an all-time low.

Meetings became genuinely energising, consistently scoring high marks, with egos left firmly at the door. (Level 10 meetings are named that because each member rates the meeting out of 10 at the end — and we were finally hitting those numbers.)

People left the room knowing what had been decided, who owned what, and what mattered most that week.

From Stagnation to Scale: Our Results

Before implementing EOS and Level 10 meetings, our business had plateaued. We were competent and experienced — but we were suffering operational issues, not growing, and frustrated.

After committing to the discipline — and it is a discipline — everything changed.

Over the following five years, the business tripled in size, with profitability increasing fivefold. Not through heroic effort or endless firefighting, but through consistency. In fact, if anything, the business seemed to glide. Everyone had clear priorities, honest conversations were the norm, and real accountability existed at every level.

Ultimately, we built a business strong enough to sell — not because everything was perfect, but because it was well run and performed in the top 15% of Managed IT Service Providers worldwide.

And it all started with fixing how we met, and what drove those meetings.

Meetings as a Competitive Advantage

Most organisations accept bad meetings as inevitable. They’re not.

When meetings work, everything else gets easier. Problems surface earlier. Decisions happen faster. People feel heard. And as a result, momentum builds quietly — week after week.

The difference isn’t charisma or clever facilitation. It’s having a system that creates clarity, trust, and accountability — especially when conversations are uncomfortable. Because those are usually the ones that matter most.

And we really have all been there.

Ready to Remove These Blockers?

If you’re interested in removing these roadblocks from your own business, we have a recorded interview with Simon Vella of the Prospero Group — a specialist EOS and ISO certification consultancy, and the company that helped us unlock our full potential ahead of sale.