Our leadership team's overall weekly To-Do completion rate has slid below the ninety percent standard, and we have entered a dangerous phase where everyone is comfortable accepting this low performance. When the entire team is failing to hit the mark, how do we diagnose the systemic bottleneck and restore the ninety percent standard without the Integrator having to play principal?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When your team-wide To-Do completion rate drops below ninety percent and everyone seems fine with it, you have an accountability leak. Accepting incomplete tasks as the norm will quickly stall your entire company's execution. You must address this collectively without micromanaging.

First, run a diagnostic on the open To-Dos. Often, a drop in completion is due to poorly written tasks. A weekly To-Do must be specific, realistic, and achievable within seven days. If your To-Dos look like projects, such as research new CRM vendors, they will fail. Rewrite them to be bite-sized actions, like call three CRM vendors to schedule demos.

Second, look at the volume. Leaders should rarely have more than two or three To-Dos assigned to them per week. If people are leaving meetings with seven or eight tasks, they are overloaded, and your prioritization during IDS® is failing.

Third, change how the To-Do review is conducted. The Integrator must read each task and ask for a simple done or not done. No explanations are allowed during this section. If a task is not done, it stays on the list, and the facilitator asks if it needs to go to the Issues List.

Do not let people off the hook with excuses. If the rate is below ninety percent, the team must address the systemic cause during IDS®. Treat the low completion rate itself as the number-one issue to solve.