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Navigating the business landscape can be challenging, with key priorities often getting lost in the daily hustle. The trick is tackling the work you do “in” the business while also finding time to work “on” the business, giving attention to important (but less urgent) opportunities.
That's why Rocks — the most critical objectives of a quarter — are an integral element of the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS).
Rocks support annual goals or fix processes and help us gain traction on our vision.
In this piece, we'll cover defining and designing Rocks that align with your 1-Year Plan, 3-Year Picture™, and beyond. We'll also share insights on crafting SMART Rocks, prioritizing them, and avoiding common pitfalls.
If you’re ready to gain traction and turn your business aspirations into reality, mastering how to design and build Rocks is a great place to start.
Stephen Covey is widely credited for creating the concept of Rocks with this famous metaphor: Imagine you have an empty jar or bucket. Your goal is to fill it with water, sand, pebbles, and a handful of rocks. How would you go about filling the bucket so the biggest items, the rocks, all fit?
As illustrated, it’s imperative to get the rocks placed in the bucket first, followed by the pebbles, then the sand, and then the water, because the rocks are the most important items to solve for. Everything else — representing to-dos, emails, calls, and so on — can fill in around them.
Rocks are the most critical objectives of a quarter, with the vast majority in support of longer-term goals, and they’re made SMART — specific, measurable, achievable , relevant, and timely — to provide the needed clarity for completion.
Rocks help the Senior Leadership Team (SLT) focus on what’s most important to keep the business thriving and moving forward. When setting Rocks, the key is to create focus and alignment. They’re about quality, not quantity.
Chunking out large goals into Rocks offers many advantages for businesses and organizations. To start with, day-to-day tasks and decisions are easier when they’re aligned with a compelling set of long-term goals.
Your typical Rock is a project that takes 90 days. This creates an easily digestible scope, especially when those Rocks' progress is measured by Milestones, or steps. After all, it’s human nature to focus on a shorter time frame, which is why quarterly Rocks, when thoughtfully developed, are highly achievable. Otherwise, we might lose sight of an important annual goal when in the trenches, grinding through the daily work and unexpected challenges that tend to crop up. But Rocks and their Milestones help us stay on track and keep us accountable.
Plus, since we share our Rocks and Milestones with colleagues, there’s a healthy level of social pressure to cement our commitment. The goal is to make sure the team is making progress so that by the end of the quarter, we have given everyone the support they need to say “This Rock is done!”
At the very root of EOS Rocks is a discipline that is almost essential if we want to achieve our annual company goals. It all starts with the Senior Leadership Team. Each quarter, they should set aside at least one day for a quarterly or annual meeting. During this session, the SLT will look at the company's 3-Year Picture and 1-Year Plan and decide on Rock candidates that help ensure the company achieves goals supporting their vision.
Company Rocks are set by reviewing the Rock candidates that came out of the 1-year goals review and the major Issues (problems and opportunities) on the Long-Term Issues list. Company Rocks are commitments that are shared with everyone in the company. They help ensure that the entire organization is aware of the company’s 90-day priorities.
If Rocks are critical quarterly objectives in an organization, everyone should be aware of not just the status of those Rocks but also who is accountable for bringing them to “Done!” To ensure accountability, each Rock has a specific owner who is accountable for the actions and decisions that drive the completion of the Rock.
Regular check-ins during the weekly Level 10 Meeting™ promote accountability and allow team members the chance to raise Issues or roadblocks. Open dialogue is the best way to keep those Rocks on track. Nobody should be surprised at the end of the quarter if the Rock was not completed.
That does not suggest, however, that all Rocks are completed. Completing 80% or more of your overall Rocks as a team is something that should be celebrated. And for all those Rocks we do complete, you’d better believe we’re celebrating them. These are significant steps we’ve accomplished, and they keep us on the path to major goals. Celebration is the kind of positive reinforcement that keeps everyone committed to doing all they can to get future Rocks done.
There are seven steps to building out Rocks:
When it comes to prioritizing your Rocks, the first thing to consider is how each Rock aligns with the long-term vision and objectives of the organization. This is what we’re supporting above and beyond anything else. If it doesn’t truly jive with the vision, it can be deprioritized or amended as appropriate. The key is to ask whether achieving the Rock supports or advances organizational goals.
Of course, there are other considerations, such as customer impact, urgency and timelines, risk, and more. These are valuable discussions to have when choosing which Rocks will have the greatest impact.
Now, the key to designing an attainable Rock is to make it SMART:
Here’s the thing about setting and managing Rocks: you want the Rock to be challenging, but not so much so that it becomes a futile exercise to achieve. We don’t want to design Rocks that we “hope to get done.” Because as we know, hope is not a winning strategy.
Here are a few common mistakes to watch out for to ensure you aren’t overcommitting a team or person tasked with managing a Rock:
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