The Right Rocks

Choosing the "Right" Rock

I was recently fortunate to sit in on a quarterly pulse meeting with an Implementer colleague.  He asked a great question after the team’s rocks were set: “If these things get done, will it have been a great quarter?”

When Rocks do not get done in a given quarter, the Leadership Team understandably may question whether they set the “right” Rocks.   What could have gone wrong for the Rocks to be left undone?

Here are some reasons and examples from our experience.


First: any given individual has too many Rocks to complete in the time s/he has to allocate in the quarter.  This is to be expected when the group first starts to set Rocks as most people think they can do more than they can in any given length of time.  It is easy to forget that “normal” work also needs to get done, and as much as we want to prioritize a lot of important things, we need to keep the train on the rails over the period as well.  In our experience, after about two quarters, the Leadership Team should be experienced and functional enough to hold each other fully accountable¹ when discussing if the quantity of Rocks is realistic and experienced enough to prioritize what is essential.  For example, if the business is seasonal and an especially busy quarter is looming; it may not be the time to set multiple Rocks per person.


Second: the Rock owner does not disclose to the Leadership Team that s/he is “Off” on a Rock until it is too late.  We worked with a Leadership Team member who came into L10s each week claiming that Rocks were “on,” but when it came down to the second to last week of the quarter, a few Rocks were “off” and there was not enough time to complete them by the quarter’s end.  This caused the rest of the Leadership Team to wonder whether Rocks were really that important.  One possible remedy for this is to allow a single sentence “update” with the Rock “On/Off” status to provide information that helps the team understand truly if the Rock is progressing or not.  Managers can set the example to hold their direct reports accountable, because others can see when someone is being let off the hook.  If the manager does not hold his/her direct report accountable, others may not feel comfortable doing so either, and may begin to mistrust the team member, the manager, and the possibly entire EOS system as well.


Third: the entire Leadership Team allows Rocks to drop mid-quarter because those are not really the most important things the company needs to do that quarter.  In this case, it is possible that Leadership Team members do not trust each other enough to question the Rocks they are setting in the Quarterly Pulse Meeting.  We have seen when Rocks are assigned to people who really do not have enough time in their normal workload to complete them, and there was no move on the company’s part to free enough time for the assignees to complete the Rocks.  The team decided midway through the quarter to cancel a few of the Rocks.  What is more, the team was actively prioritizing work on other initiatives that were not called out as Rocks at all.  Did the team set the “right” Rocks? Unlikely.


All of these issues need to be discussed openly and regularly by the team.  If team members do not trust each other and/or fear retribution for bringing up uncomfortable concerns, that is the most fundamental problem of all¹.  Team leaders – the Visionary and the Integrator especially – must encourage and themselves demonstrate open and honest dialogue every time the team meets.  When that happens consistently, the team can move forward with confidence that they will consistently set the “right” Rocks and it will be a great quarter!

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1. For more on developing functional Teams, we recommend reading (or listening to) Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team.