Lessons from EO Part 1 of 5: Accountability
February 2, 2009 by dr. lam
I attended moderator training all day Friday at the Crescent Hotel in preparation for my being moderator of my Entrepreneur’s Organization (EO) Forum group. I was mesmerized by how much I learned, thinking I knew it all before going into it. The famed Ellie Byrd led the all-day session and stimulated fruitful thinking on topics I needed to know despite my waning energies in the late afternoon. ”Forum”, for those who are not aware of it, describes a small discussion group of the same 8 to 10 business owners that meet each month to go over business and personal topics of concern to them. I meet every month for 4 to 5 hours with the same group of individuals to help each other grow personally and professionally and whatever happens behind closed doors is held to the strictest level of confidentiality so that there is an impregnable safe haven for discussion and sharing. Forum has been affectionately referred to as “AA” for business owners, which I agree wholeheartedly with that appellation.
I have learned a tremendous amount from Forum, but I cannot share any stories from within our group based on the aforementioned confidentiality agreement. Nevertheless, the training that I received on Friday helped me define certain universal truths that can help individuals whether they are interested in personal growth or as business owners. I asked Ellie permission to write these blogs, and she graciously consented…so onward with our first topic.
I would like to think of accountability as a much more forceful and meaningful version of a “New Year’s resolution”. A New Year’s resolution almost carries a pejorative connotation in that most people fail in their endeavors in a relatively short timeframe. I myself am hoping for this failure in my fellow spin-class attendees so that I can more easily secure a bike without having to be there an hour before class time! However, a New Year’s resolution only is made to yourself once a year and usually over 1 or 2 items that have no definable metrics or external accountability. I am now reading Leadership Gold by John Maxwell, which will be the topic of either next week or the week after’s blogs, in which he says accountability means not trusting yourself but trusting someone else to be there to keep you honest.
What is accountability more specifically? Basically, it means that there is another individual holding you to your defined goals using measurable parameters on a more frequent basis than once a year. I myself have set forth 3 goals for 2009: 1. to be a more present CEO of all my businesses, 2. to move toward personal growth and self-awareness, 3. to continue to improve my personal health and body. Although these goals are not as definable as say, “hit a sales goal of 5 million dollars” or something like that, they work for me. Hey, I am very right-brained and work with less number targeted goals than some of my left-brained colleagues. Each month I report back to my Forum group as to my current action step, past action step, and how I have completed the step.
This is one level of accountability. Monthly goals are fantastic but to be very serious about accountability, we have to have defined metrics every single week that can be measurable and punished if not completed. One thing I learned from Ellie is that accountability cannot be forced across the board. Individuals who resist this second tier of accountability will not submit to it and will resent those who compel them to follow this level of accountability. Also accountability groups have been studied for optimal effectiveness, and Byrd found that a group of 3 to 4 members can create an optimal environment for personal responsibility, whereas 2 members or 5 members simply did not function as well. By allowing those willingly to subscribe to a deeper level of accountability permits the motivated to achieve more rigorous goals without inflaming the rest of the group who might not be as interested. This is interesting to me because I will be presenting this option next month on my EO retreat to my forum group as an option for accountability for us in 2009.
Outside of my forum, I shall be starting a weekly accountability group with my spa leaders, Linda and Phillip, looking for growth targets as I see that the newest of my businesses needs the most of my presence, and we are meeting today for our first accountability meeting. So for those of my readership out there who are interested in being serious about their own level of accountability for personal or professional growth, consider finding an “accountability group” that can push one another on shorter time intervals toward defined goals with measurable fines for those who fall short of the target. Obviously, you can adjust the time interval of accountability, fines, group size, and goals based on one’s own desire for accountability. Preferably you don’t just declare an abstruse New Year’s Resolution in your mind that you soon forget by February 1.
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“AA for business owners”–that is funny, but makes sense. (Have business owners in my family, I understand.) In re: resolutions: Offer those spinners some of your Botox-they may jump right off those bikes.
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Thanks!
thanks for sharing!