Our weekly to-do completion rate has been stuck in the seventy percent range for months, and our leadership team blames a sudden spike in daily fire drills. How do we diagnose and fix this completion deficit without turning our Level 10 Meeting™ into an interrogation?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A consistent failure to hit the ninety percent to-do completion rate is a clear sign of poor discipline or bad delegation. When your team blames daily fire drills, they are admitting that the urgent is constantly crowding out the important. This is a leadership issue, not a time issue.

To fix this, stop accepting excuses during the to-do review. The review is a binary check. A to-do is either done or not done. If it is not done, it does not get a status report or an explanation. It gets dropped to the Issues List.

During the IDS® portion of the meeting, you must treat the low completion rate as a systemic issue. Do not interrogate individuals. Instead, look at the nature of the to-dos. You will often find two root causes. Either your leaders are writing multi-week projects as weekly tasks, or they do not have the capacity because they are trapped in the wrong seats on the Accountability Chart.

If a leader consistently fails to complete their weekly commitments, ask if they GWC™ their seat. If they do have the capacity, then the issue is personal discipline. Solve it during IDS® by helping them delegate their minor tasks so they can focus on their weekly commitments.