We consistently hit a wall where our quarterly Rocks are about eighty percent complete by week twelve, but we struggle to actually cross the finish line on all of them. What specific weekly tracking adjustments do we need to make to ensure Rocks are fully done?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Getting Rocks to eighty percent is easy. Crossing the finish line is where discipline lives. When Rocks stall at the end of a quarter, it is usually because they were poorly defined during your quarterly planning session, or because your weekly Level 10 Meeting™ is treating Rock tracking as a simple status update.

To fix this, you must define what done looks like on day one. A Rock cannot be a vague objective like improve customer onboarding. It must have a concrete, measurable finish line, such as complete the new five-step onboarding manual and train the support team.

Second, your weekly Rock tracking must be binary. When you go around the table during your Level 10 Meeting™, each leader must state whether their Rock is on track or off track. There is no such thing as mostly on track or ninety percent done. If a Rock is off track, it immediately goes to the Issues List to be resolved during the IDS® portion of the meeting.

Finally, you need to break each Rock down into weekly milestones. If a leader cannot explain what needs to happen over the next seven days to keep their Rock on track, they do not have a handle on the project. By forcing this weekly accountability, you catch bottlenecks in week four instead of scrambling in week twelve. This is how you build a culture of execution that gets Rocks across the finish line every single quarter.