When our leadership team consistently struggles with the 90 percent To-Do completion benchmark, people start creating trivial, low-effort tasks just to keep their stats green. How do we prevent this sandbagging and maintain meaningful accountability?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Gaming the 90 percent metric happens when the room fears accountability more than it values execution. If leaders are logging tasks like sending a routine email or reviewing a brief document to artificially inflate their numbers, your Level 10 Meeting has lost its teeth.

The Integrator must set a strict threshold for what qualifies as an executive To-Do. A valid Level 10 To-Do is an action item produced directly during IDS that moves a Rock forward, permanently eliminates a root cause, or establishes an operational process. Routine operational habits belonging to someone's core role belong in their daily workflow, not on the leadership board.

To eliminate sandbagging, apply three rules during the To-Do recap:

- Every To-Do must trace directly to an issue solved in IDS. If it was not born from solving an issue or unblocking a Rock, it does not get logged.
- The action item must be framed as a decisive milestone, not an activity. Drafting an updated pricing model is a real To-Do; thinking about pricing is not.
- If a leader shows 100 percent completion for three weeks straight but their departmental Scorecard metrics are red and their Rocks are off track, challenge the substance of their tasks publicly.

Holding the 90 percent standard is not about hitting an arbitrary number. It is about proving that decisions made in the room translate into measurable change in seven days. If a leader cannot hit 90 percent on high-impact actions, the problem is either poor time management, failure to delegate, or lack of GWC. Address the real constraint instead of letting them lower the bar.