Our leadership team's overall to-do completion rate is hovering around seventy-five percent, and while nobody is failing individually, we collectively treat the ninety percent target as an aspirational suggestion rather than a hard boundary. How do we break this culture of acceptable mediocrity and hit ninety percent?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

An average weekly to-do completion rate below ninety percent is a clear indicator of a lack of discipline or poor planning. When your leadership team treats this target as an optional suggestion, it signals to the rest of the organization that commitments are soft.

To fix this, you must first change how you write and assign to-dos during IDS®. Every to-do captured must be a specific, realistic action that can be completed within seven days. If a task requires three weeks, it is not a weekly to-do; it is a mini-project that needs to be broken down into a single, immediate next step.

Second, enforce a strict rule during the weekly review. When a leader says a to-do is not done, it does not get excused because of operational fires. It stays on the list for one more week. If it is still not complete by the next meeting, it must immediately be pushed down to the Issues List. The team then uses IDS® to solve why the task was missed. Is it a lack of GWC™, a capacity constraint, or a priority conflict?

By treating incomplete tasks as operational issues rather than acceptable delays, you build a healthy culture of accountability. The goal is to make missing a weekly commitment feel uncomfortable, forcing your team to become more deliberate about what they promise to deliver.