One of the clearest ways to see whether a leadership team is genuinely on the same page is to watch what happens when you ask them to set their Rocks for the next quarter.
During Quarterly Planning, I ask each person to work individually & write down the three to seven priorities they believe the business must focus on over the next 90 days. These should be the things that will genuinely move the business towards its One-Year Plan & Three-Year Picture.
I always tell teams that three is ideal. Once everybody starts coming up with five, six or seven priorities each, things can get ridiculous very quickly.
Recently, I worked with one leadership team where every person completed this exercise separately. When we put all their ideas together, there were just four potential Company Rocks.
Four.
Not four after hours of debating, combining & negotiating. Four in total.
Although they had worked independently, they had all identified essentially the same priorities. They were incredibly clear about what the business needed to achieve next.
That clarity showed in their execution too. In the previous quarter, they had completed three of their four Company Rocks & made strong progress on the fourth.
Around the same time, I worked with another leadership team of a similar size, in a similar industry, that had been running EOS® for roughly the same length of time.
We followed exactly the same process.
This time, the initial list of potential Rocks ran well into double figures. These were not simply different ways of describing the same few priorities. They represented genuinely different views about what the business needed to focus on next.
That team had also struggled badly with Rock completion in the previous quarter.
The difference between the two teams was not intelligence, effort or commitment.
It was alignment.
Rock Setting Does Not Create Misalignment. It Reveals It
When a leadership team is genuinely aligned around its Vision, One-Year Plan & Three-Year Picture, deciding what matters over the next 90 days becomes much easier.
There will still be debate, & there should be. Good leadership teams challenge one another.
But the debate tends to be about sequencing, ownership & how the work gets done, rather than which direction the business is actually heading.
When a team is not aligned, everyone naturally starts looking at the quarter through the lens of their own seat. Sales brings what Sales needs. Operations brings what Operations needs. Finance brings what Finance needs.
Everybody may be right from the perspective of their own function, but that does not automatically make those things the priorities of the business as a whole.
Before long, you do not really have a list of Company Rocks.
You have a collection of departmental wish lists.
Combining Rocks Does Not Make the Problem Disappear
When teams create too many potential Rocks, there is often a temptation to tidy things up by combining them.
Three separate priorities become one Rock with several parts. Other priorities get pushed down into departmental Rocks. On paper, suddenly the list looks much more sensible.
But putting several separate pieces of work underneath one heading does not magically turn them into one priority.
Sometimes all we have done is take a long list of Rocks & pretend it is a short one.
That might make the planning document look cleaner, but it will not improve execution if the underlying problem is that the leadership team still cannot agree on what matters most.
If you struggled to complete your Rocks last quarter, adding another ambitious collection of priorities is unlikely to fix the problem.
Sometimes the answer really is to do less.
Not Everything Important Is a Rock
This is where leadership teams often get themselves into trouble.
Plenty of things matter in a business, but that does not mean everything needs to become a Company Rock.
Some work is simply business as usual. Some priorities belong at departmental level. Some are To-Dos. Some are Issues that need to be solved through IDS®. Others are perfectly good ideas that simply do not belong in this quarter.
A Rock should earn its place.
I want leadership teams asking themselves: if this does not happen during the next 90 days, will it materially affect our ability to achieve the One-Year Plan?
If the answer is no, it may still matter. It just may not be one of the most important things to focus additional energy on right now.
That distinction is important because adding another Rock does not create additional capacity.
Everyone still has a day job. Customers still need looking after. People still need managing. Problems still appear & the normal work of running the business does not conveniently stop because Quarterly Planning happened last Tuesday.
Fewer, clearer priorities give people a much better chance of actually finishing what they start.
Prioritising Means Choosing What You Will Not Do
This is often the uncomfortable part.
Prioritising is not simply deciding what you are going to do.
It is deciding what you are not going to do right now.
That can be difficult for entrepreneurial leadership teams because there are usually plenty of good ideas on the table. Somebody wants a new system. Somebody else sees a market opportunity. Operations has a problem that needs fixing. The Visionary has had six new ideas since breakfast.
All of them may have merit.
But the leadership team’s job is not to keep everybody happy by squeezing every good idea into the quarter.
The job is to make choices.
I often ask teams:
Which three or four things, if they do not happen this quarter, put our One-Year Plan at risk?
That question tends to cut through a lot of noise.
It forces people to think about the business as a whole rather than protecting the priorities from their individual seats.
Your Rock List Is a Diagnostic Tool
I think this is one of the most useful ways to look at Rock setting.
Your Rock list tells you something about the health & alignment of your leadership team.
If people work separately & independently identify the same few priorities, that tells you the vision is probably very clear.
If everybody arrives with completely different ideas about what matters most, that tells you something too.
Do not rush to hide that information by combining everything until the list looks manageable.
Stop & have the conversation.
- Why are we seeing the next 90 days so differently?
- Are we genuinely clear about where the business is going?
- Do we agree about what must be achieved this year?
- Are we prioritising for the whole business, or from our individual seats?
- What are we prepared to leave until later?
That is the real work.
Because the issue may not be Rock setting at all.
It may be alignment.
Fewer Rocks Create Greater Focus
When leadership teams are aligned, fewer priorities do not feel restrictive.
They feel clarifying.
Everybody knows what matters most. Ownership becomes clearer. Weekly conversations become sharper & it becomes much easier to see whether the company is actually moving towards its goals.
That is why I would much rather see a leadership team commit to three genuinely important Rocks™ & complete them than create seven impressive-looking priorities & carry half of them into the next quarter.
Clarity creates confidence.
It also creates focus, accountability & a much better chance of actually finishing what you started.
So, if your Quarterly Planning session keeps producing too many priorities, overloaded Rocks & disappointing completion rates, do not automatically assume you have an execution problem.
You may have an alignment problem.
And that is a far more useful conversation to have.