Our weekly To-Do completion rate is consistently stuck at seventy-five percent, and the excuse we keep hearing is that unexpected operational fires popped up. How do we stop our leadership team from using daily firefighting as an acceptable excuse for missing their weekly commitments?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a leader consistently fails to hit their ninety percent weekly To-Do completion rate and blames unexpected operational fires, you have an accountability problem disguised as a capacity problem. In a healthy company running on EOS®, weekly commitments are not suggestions; they are the gears that turn your strategy into reality.

To fix this, stop accepting the fire drill excuse. During the To-Do review, if a task is not done, it remains on the list. Do not let the owner explain why it was missed during the review. Instead, if a leader misses their To-Dos for two consecutive weeks, that trend automatically becomes an issue that must be dropped to the weekly Issues List.

During the IDS® portion of the meeting, solve the root cause of this consistent failure. Is the leader sitting in too many seats on the Accountability Chart? Are they failing to delegate lower-value tasks? Or are they simply poor at time management?

By treating missed To-Dos as operational issues rather than personal failures, you take the emotion out of the discussion. The solution might involve reallocating resources, adjusting their workload, or coaching them on how to prioritize their weekly execution. The target is ninety percent, and if a team member cannot consistently hit that mark, they are holding back the entire organization.