A writer for Fast Company once said, “How you treat project deadlines can speak volumes about your organization’s commitment to the work.” It has inspired these tough love tips to get things moving like a well-oiled machine.

A huge factor as to why so many organizations have so much trouble doing what they intend to do—on time—is because when they fail to meet a deadline, nothing happens. Businesses say they want to be more strategic and they want to execute better, but this simple failure to address missed deadlines keeps companies from making any real, strategic progress.

Here’s what it looks like:
A project is committed. The dates come and go—and then no one even talks about it. The result is that people who were on the hook either assume that they have been granted more time, or it wasn’t that important to begin with.

Then no new deadline is established—because no one is acknowledging the situation. So the strategic task takes an even lower priority over the more urgent tactical demands of the moment. You can’t let the date come and go, leave the failure totally unacknowledged and unexamined, and expect to make progress. This sends all the wrong messages and sets a very low standard of execution.

What you are communicating (by not communicating) is:

• It wasn’t that important after all
• It doesn’t matter that it didn’t get done
• There are no consequences for missing a deadline
• We’re not serious about meeting our commitments
• “Late” is okay in our organizational values
• The project was poorly planned
• An agreement wasn’t important, or at least not priority enough

Missing deadlines means that others who depended on you or need your work to do their own will have less time to complete theirs

There are four key reasons administrators fail to follow up on missed deadlines. They are either:

• Too busy to keep track
• Not personally good at keeping track
• Don’t like the conflict of keeping track
• Don’t know what consequences to impose when something is off track

The first two are really easy to fix. If you are not getting this done well yourself (or hate doing it), get someone who’s naturally good at this to help you. This will be a breakthrough for you, your team, and your business. Have a director of staff or project manager who helps you with the hard work and detail of tracking obligations. Having that type of person helping in many executive roles is a huge factor in the ability to lead a group that unfailingly delivers. Then next two; numbers 3 and 4, you can’t delegate. As an executive or manager, if these things make you uncomfortable you need to do them anyway.

Here is a suggestion on how to deal with the necessary struggle of missed deadlines without it being emotional or personal, so it’s much easier.

1. PRACTICE SMART GOALS: Be really clear up front about dates, owners, and measures, and create a dashboard to communicate the status of each key project at the beginning of the project when everything is still “green.” (No conflict yet.)
2. Use this dashboard to kick off the project. Also use it as your communication document to share status information on a regular schedule with all stakeholders before anything goes wrong. (Still, no conflict.)
3. The magic happens because everyone can see their name and accountability on the dashboard. And they know this dashboard is the communication document that will go to everyone who matters. Shame them into keeping on track with peer visibility. (Result: More work is finished on time—so less need for conflict.
4. Then when something is going wrong, going from green to yellow or red, it is not a personal conflict to bring it up with the person or the community. You can give them a chance to keep their line green on the dashboard. Then, if it still goes wrong, at least it is not a surprise. Everyone saw it coming. The person who failed to deliver had the chance to avoid it, and knew beforehand that it would be communicated and addressed.

Even if a missed deadline was not intended as a sign of disrespect, it can be interpreted that way by the people who are affected by the delay. But sometimes extenuating circumstances make meeting deadlines impossible, despite our best intentions. Communicating the importance of both the task and the course or job can go a long way to minimize any sense of disrespect that might develop.

By taking complete responsibility and accepting the consequence of their actions, they are demonstrating the importance of the interactions that emerge from deadlines.

What consequences to impose
Managers get confused and think, “Okay, the person missed a key deadline, how do I address it? It seems like overkill to just star thinking, “Do I need to fire the person?” Especially, if you don’t really want to lose the person. Unfortunately, the tendency is to just do nothing at all.

There are countless options between termination and nothing. You don’t need to fire someone every time a deadline is missed. If you don’t fire the person for missing a deadline, what do you do to enforce consequences?

You don’t need to be a bully. You do need to have a discussion. Three simple questions will work:

• “What happened?”
• “How to do you intend to recover? “
• “How do you intend to prevent this next time?”

Just having this conversation sends the message that it is not okay to miss a deadline. The conversation itself is a consequence. Especially compared to doing nothing.

Maintaining motivation
Many managers struggle with the motivation factor. They feel like if they have the conversation, they will be giving someone a hard time and the person may get demotivated, be less committed, or leave. In reality, when you address a missed deadline, the person actually feels a little good because this difficult conversation is reinforcing that their work really matters. You’ll also want to consider that stronger performers take a lot of ownership in those conversations and put even more pain on themselves then they feel like they are getting from you. Avoiding the conversation is equivalent to letting the person know that what they were working on wasn’t very important—which I think is always even more demotivating.

It should be uncomfortable

Sure it’s an uncomfortable conversation, but it should be! You missed a deadline. That should not be pleasant, comfortable news for anyone. It’s not about coming down hard on someone or being disrespectful or nasty. It’s about moving the business forward. Missed deadlines left unaddressed slow the business, and damage the trust, motivation, and commitment of the team.

Are you deadline challenged?
If you hate procrastination yet frequently find yourself in its grasps, implement the following strategy to experience a new sense of control and freedom from work pressure: When you are handed an assignment, decide to complete it within 75 percent of the allotted time. Decide your date and time for completion. Then, treat this earlier deadline as the real thing. Stoke your motivation by getting someone to whom you are accountable to inquire about your progress halfway through. This productivity strategy, ironically, will not generate the same type of anguish that you would otherwise experience with the real deadline. Relish the positive feelings of finishing early. Plan a reward—a golf game, a night out, or a mini celebration. Become more proactive and creative with deadlines and you’ll stay out of the grips of procrastination.

Are you dealing with the deadline challenged?
You probably feel like a jerk because your colleague is a nice person and you like him/her, and you’re about to provide information that’s going cause some discomfort for them.

And you’re probably a nice person yourself, and so that sucks.

You still have to do it, you need to speak up and loop in your manager. If this had just happened once, you could try working it out with your colleague directly. But it’s a long-running pattern, it’s causing real and ongoing problems, and the very reasonable steps that you’ve taken to try to address it haven’t solved the problem.

And it is a problem that needs to be solved, so that means that you need to escalate it.
At this point, I think you need to do two things:

1. Talk to your colleague about your concern. You shouldn’t have to do this — your colleague should already understand that there’s a pattern of him missing these deadlines and should be acknowledging it and coming up with a plan to fixed it — but since that’s not happening, you need to raise it. Say something like this: “I want to talk to you about the deadlines for the project X. I depend on you to get me the data in time twice every year, and it’s causing me real problems that the data is often late and contains mistakes, or doesn’t come in time to QA it. It’s become enough of a problem that I think I need to pull the manager and possibly the manager’s boss in on this because I really need the next set of data to be on time and accurate, but I wanted to give you a heads-up that I’m going to do that.”

You could change that last part to say that you’re going to bring the bosses in on it only if there are problems in the future, rather than moving straight to talking with them now. But that means accepting that there’s a pretty good chance that the next data set is going to be messed up too. Are you willing to accept that high likelihood in exchange for giving him one final chance to handle this on his own? Whether or not that makes sense to do depends on how much of an impact his mistakes will have if it happens again.

Whether you decide to do it now or wait until the next time there’s a problem, at some point, yes, you’ll need to talk with your own manager about what’s going on. You said that you’re hesitant to bring her a problem without a solution, but — while in general, yes, it’s good to propose solutions where you can — this is a problem where the solution isn’t within your control. The solution here is that your coworker’s boss needs to step in and talk with him (and probably more closely manage him for a while), and you can’t make that happen without escalating things.

2. Say something like this: “I want to loop you in to a problem I’ve been having with the data for X. I rely on him/her to supply me with the data for X, and it’s always late and often inaccurate.              I’ve tried checking in with him weeks in advance and making it really clear what I’ll need by when, but each time it’s late and I’ve been left scrambling at the last minute, without a chance to             QA it. At this point, I think I need to talk to his/her manager and get his help in resolving this. Does that sound right to you?”

In this example, you are bringing a solution — your proposed solution is talking with your colleague’s boss. But you might work somewhere where it would be more appropriate for your boss to be the one to do that, in which case you could change this wording to whatever’s appropriate in your organization, like “I wondered if you’d be willing to talk with the manager about how we can get what we need from his team” or whatever.)

Does it suck to have to escalate something when it’s about a coworker? YES! But this is impacting your work, it’s happened repeatedly, and your boss and your coworker’s boss would almost certainly want to know this is happening and have the chance to step in and resolve it.

This article originally appeared in the September/October edition of Private Lender magazine.  Subscribe for free here.