Our leadership team regularly agrees to quarterly Rocks, but we constantly struggle to cross the finish line because we fail to break them down into weekly milestones. How do we structure Rock tracking to guarantee they get done?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

The secret to finishing quarterly Rocks is to stop treating them as ninety-day tasks and start treating them as thirteen weekly milestones. When you set a Rock during your quarterly planning, you must immediately define what done looks like with absolute clarity. Then, the Rock owner must break that Rock down into weekly deliverables. In your weekly Level 10 Meeting™, when you review the Rock sheet, the answer can only be on track or off track. There is no such thing as working on it or almost done. If a Rock is off track for two consecutive weeks, it must immediately be dropped down to the IDS® list. This prevents the team from hiding behind excuses until week twelve. Utilize conative screening like the Kolbe Index to understand how your team approaches task completion. A leader with a low Follow Thru might need help structuring their milestone plan, while a high Fact Finder might get bogged down in over-researching instead of executing. By forcing a weekly milestone check and immediately addressing off-track status using IDS®, you protect your Rocks from being swallowed by daily operations.