When Leadership Teams Choose the Wrong Rocks
I have seen leadership teams walk out of a quarterly planning session feeling great about what they accomplished.
They had good conversations. They solved some important issues. Everyone agreed on the priorities for the next 90 days. The team left the room feeling focused and confident.
Then 90 days later, they look at those priorities again and realize something frustrating.
A lot of them did not get done.
The natural reaction is to assume there is an execution problem. Maybe people did not work hard enough. Maybe there was not enough accountability. Maybe the team simply got too busy.
Those things can certainly happen, but I think there is another problem that gets overlooked.
Sometimes the team chose the wrong Rocks in the first place.
In EOS Implementation, Rocks are the most important priorities that need to be completed during the next 90 days. The concept is intentionally simple. A leadership team decides what matters most, assigns clear ownership, and focuses on getting those priorities done during the quarter.
The problem starts when Rocks turn into another to do list.
I see why this happens. Business owners and leadership teams have a lot they want to accomplish. There are problems they want fixed, opportunities they want to pursue, people they need to hire, systems they want to improve, and projects that have been sitting around for months.
When it comes time to set quarterly priorities, everything starts to feel important.
So instead of making difficult choices, the team keeps adding Rocks.
That feels productive in the planning session, but it usually creates the opposite result over the next 90 days.
If everything is a priority, nothing is really a priority.
The purpose of quarterly Rocks is not to capture everything you would like to accomplish. The purpose is to force a decision about what deserves your limited time and attention right now.
That distinction is important.
When I am working with a leadership team on 90 day business priorities, I want them to think about what would create the most meaningful progress if they could only accomplish a few things this quarter.
Maybe the company needs to hire a key leadership position. Maybe it needs to fix a major operational issue that is negatively impacting customers. Maybe the sales process needs to be documented and implemented. Maybe there is a profitability issue that has been discussed for months but never really addressed.
Those can be good Rocks because completing them changes something meaningful about the business.
“Improve sales,” on the other hand, is not a very good Rock.
Neither is “work on employee engagement” or “improve our marketing.”
Those may be important goals, but they are too vague.
A good Rock should have a finish line.
At the end of the 90 days, the leadership team should be able to look at it and answer a simple question: Is it done or not done?
That clarity is an important part of business accountability.
If the Rock is to implement a new sales process, what does implemented mean? Has the process been documented? Has the sales team been trained? Is it being used? Are the appropriate numbers being measured?
The clearer you are when setting the Rock, the easier it becomes to determine whether you actually accomplished it.
There is another mistake I see leadership teams make. They choose Rocks that are really just part of someone’s normal job.
There is a difference between doing your job well and completing a major quarterly priority.
If your sales leader is responsible for hitting the monthly sales goal, hitting that goal is generally not a Rock. It belongs on the Scorecard as an ongoing measure of performance.
A Rock should usually represent something that needs to be created, changed, solved, or completed.
That distinction helps prevent your list of Rocks from becoming overloaded with things the team should already be doing.
The next challenge is choosing fewer.
This is often where the real work happens.
It is relatively easy for a leadership team to identify ten important things. It is much harder to decide which three or four matter most.
But that conversation is exactly what creates leadership team alignment.
Choosing a Rock means you are also choosing what is not going to be a Rock this quarter.
That does not mean the other ideas disappear. They may become priorities next quarter. They may get delegated. They may remain on the Issues List until the right time.
But they do not all deserve equal attention today.
Once the right Rocks are established, the discipline continues every week.
In an EOS company, the leadership team reviews its Rocks during the weekly Level 10 Meeting. Each Rock is either on track or off track.
There should not be a long explanation or a percentage complete debate. The purpose is to quickly identify where things stand.
If a Rock is off track, the team can identify the issue and solve it while there is still time to do something about it.
That weekly rhythm is one of the reasons EOS Rocks can be so effective. You are not setting goals in January and hoping someone remembers them in March. The most important priorities in the business stay visible every single week.
Over time, this also creates a stronger culture of execution.
People get better at estimating what can realistically be accomplished. Rocks become clearer. Ownership improves. Teams become more comfortable saying no to things that can wait.
Most importantly, people begin to understand that setting priorities is not about making a longer list.
It is about making better decisions.
When I see a leadership team consistently complete the right Rocks, it is usually not because they suddenly found more hours in the week. They became more disciplined about where those hours went.
They chose fewer priorities. They made the finish lines clear. They assigned ownership. And they kept those priorities visible every week until they were done.
That is how business execution improves.
Real progress does not come from trying to do everything.
It comes from deciding what matters most and having the discipline to finish it.
