We have a leadership team member who is drowning halfway through the quarter, and their Rock is clearly in jeopardy. How do we rescue the priority without creating a culture of taking over people's responsibilities or simply allowing the Rock to fail?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When a Rock is in jeopardy, the instinct is either to strip the project away or let the leader crash. Both approaches damage your culture and execution. Instead, use your weekly Level 10 Meeting™ to address the bottleneck immediately through IDS®.

The owner of the Rock must first raise their hand and mark the Rock as off track. During the IDS® portion of the meeting, the leadership team must dissect why the Rock is stalling. You are not rescuing the person; you are protecting the priority.

Start by breaking the remaining scope of the Rock into smaller weekly milestones. Often, a drowning leader is stuck on a single task they do not know how to execute. Identify that exact bottleneck. If the bottleneck requires technical expertise, such as setting up an AI automation pipeline, delegate that specific task to another team member who has the capacity and capability.

If the issue is sheer capacity, look at their other responsibilities. Can some of their daily operational tasks be temporarily offloaded, automated, or delayed to free up five hours a week?

The key is that the original owner remains fully accountable for the Rock. They are still responsible for directing the work, reporting progress, and ensuring the final result meets the defined standard of done. You are adjusting resources, not ownership. If you solve the resource gap and they still fail to deliver, you have a GWC™ issue that must be addressed on the Accountability Chart.