Are you goal-ing it alone?

'The path from idea to results can be long and circuitous. Of course, many ideas make it no farther than the brain that first imagines them. Those ideas that are committed to paper are 42% more likely to be achieved and those that are shared with an accountability partner have a 65% chance of success. When you have a committed check-in with someone else who is tracking your goal with you, the chance of success rises to a whopping 95%! So how does one find the right accountability partner and what does that relationship look like?

We all have our go-to people when we are facing challenging problems, and often these partners change based upon the type of problem we are trying to solve and the subject matter expertise of each partner. When it comes to accountability partners, their technical strength and subject matter expertise become less important than their ability to be good listeners and their willingness to hold our feet to the fire. A good accountability partner listens to your goals and helps you to identify the proper steps to get you there. Even better, they hold you accountable for both realistic and optimistic goals and for achieving results as planned. For this to work, there needs to be a relationship of trust and respect.  

Once you have a sense of the type of person you are looking for, the question becomes where to look. Of course, one option is to find a friend or colleague who has the complementary strengths ideally suited to support you. Friends can provide an outside perspective while colleagues can provide a slightly different point of view but with minimal need for additional context sharing. These can be powerful accountability relationships and ideally will be reciprocal. We see these types of relationships throughout our everyday lives. When our goal is to get in better shape, we are most successful when we have a workout buddy.  When our goal is to read more, book clubs can be a great way to keep us on track. The examples are endless and the results speak for themselves.

When it comes to our professional lives, we may still find situations where we can leverage our friends or trusted colleagues as accountability partners, but we are also likely to find times when we need something more. A powerful concept known as the Mastermind, introduced by Napoleon Hill and brought to life in his classic book Think and Grow Rich, can be extremely effective when your need is significant. Effective Mastermind groups can bring together professionals from different companies or industries and members share their skills and knowledge to help each other. The most powerful element of the Mastermind is that members hold each other accountable to their goals under an umbrella of trust. Hill believed that these groups also increase the collective intelligence of the individual members. Beyond the shared accountability, individuals support each other, leaning on their previous experiences to help fellow members with their current challenges. As a business coach, I have led my share of Mastermind groups and have seen their power firsthand. 

Several years ago I led a Mastermind that included a business owner whose company was very successful but whose revenues had plateaued. Through the help of the Mastermind team, this owner was able to identify a strategy to grow his revenue by deepening his relationships with his existing client base. He started this work by simply checking in with the top 20% of his clients (Pareto Principle at it’s finest!) to see how things were going and suggesting additional services where appropriate. At each Mastermind session, the other members asked the owner to provide an update on how many client meetings he held and the results of those meetings. This strategy worked! Revenue growth resumed and the owner reported that it was the support and tenacity of the Mastermind team that helped him to get his business back on track.

A Mastermind can be a great tool for many business owners but for those who still prefer one on one support to bolster motivation, friends and colleagues with the right skill sets and perspectives may be difficult to come by. That is where a business coach can be a great solution. Business coaches work with their clients on a wide variety of leadership skills and key operational areas of their business. As a business coach, my role has run the gamut from helping early phase business owners to establish basic business structure to helping battle tested leaders rethink the practices they have established purely through will and skill. In either case, these leaders need to set goals and establish plans to achieve them and often their key to success is having an accountability partner.

I recently met a successful “battle tested” business owner who has endless ideas and limitless energy.  He reads voraciously and spent the first two hours with me talking about all of the self improvement efforts he has undertaken to improve both his business and himself. He was clear on where he wanted to be with his business and when I asked him why he was not already there, he told me it was because he just has the kind of personality that needs someone to hold him accountable. A-plus for him! Self awareness is the first step to success. But as with most journeys, a single step is just the beginning. In his case, he has realized he needs more formality and structure than a friend, a seminar, or a book can offer.  By engaging with me, he has set in motion the process of creating an accountability framework that will begin to corral that endless energy towards his true goals.

As you may have come to expect by this point, these options are far from mutually exclusive. We all have many goals in life and some are better suited to certain accountability partners than others. A friend of mine has two group chats with the same set of friends: one for general discussion and one dedicated exclusively to tracking exercise goals. Everyone on the thread has stepped up their routine since the second thread was started. The same friend meets monthly with a colleague to track business metrics looking retroactively and is thinking about adding a coach to the mix to set and track forward looking strategic goals.

Building an accountability framework that works for you may happen naturally or it may require effort. When you find yourself hungering for accountability and are ready for the increased motivation provided by a person over a pen and paper, taking some time to plan out your accountability partnerships will boost your chances of success. The results speak for themselves: 95% of people with accountability partners achieve their goals. Where would you rather be - in the top 95% or the bottom 5%? If you are ready for this discipline, December is the time to seek out the support you will need to blow out your goals next year. Who will be holding you accountable as we transition into 2021?