Our leadership team starts the quarter with clear Rocks, but by week six everyone gets buried in firefighting and execution stalls. How do we build weekly accountability so Rocks actually finish?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Teams fail to complete Rocks because they treat the weekly Level 10 Meeting as an update session instead of an exception report. When you do the Rock review in your Level 10 Meeting, the owner must say only two words: on track or off track.

The moment a leader starts explaining why a Rock is delayed, cut them off. An explanation during the reporting section turns a five-minute review into a thirty-minute debate. If a Rock is off track, it immediately drops to the Issues List. You do not fix it on the fly during the agenda review. You prioritize it during the IDS portion of the meeting and dissect the roadblock as a team.

Most mid-quarter stalls happen because leaders keep claiming a Rock is on track until week eight, when it is suddenly impossible to rescue. Build a rule that any Rock missing an internal milestone is automatically marked off track. Being off track in week four or five is not a personal failure; it is an early warning system.

If a Rock requires work from another department, both seat holders must agree on handoff deadlines during quarterly planning. When functional silos wait until week nine to request engineering or marketing support, the Rock dies. Treat Rocks as company commitments that require proactive cross-departmental coordination from day one, not private side projects done in isolation.