Our leadership team members are constantly pulled into daily client crises and operational firefighting, causing us to miss our quarterly Rocks. How do we protect our Rock progress when the daily business demands our immediate attention?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

If your daily operations are consistently killing your Rocks, you have an Accountability Chart™ problem, not a time management problem. Your people are sitting in seats where they are required to do both strategic work and tactical firefighting, and the tactical always wins. To fix this, you must run your Rocks through the lens of GWC™. Does the person owning the Rock actually have the capacity to deliver it alongside their daily seat requirements? If they do not, you must delegate. Use the Delegate and Elevate™ tool to identify the tasks that are keeping your leaders in the weeds. If a leader is spending twenty hours a week handling client escalations, you need to build a system or elevate another team member to handle those escalations. During your weekly Level 10 Meeting™, do not just ask if a Rock is on track or off track. If a Rock is off track for two consecutive weeks, it must be dropped down to the Issues List. Use IDS® to solve the capacity bottleneck. Do not accept the excuse of being too busy. Either solve the resource constraint, split the Rock into smaller milestones, or reassign it to someone who has the capacity. A healthy company gets eighty percent of its Rocks done every single quarter. If you are consistently missing that mark, you are ignoring your capacity constraints.