As I shared yesterday, for the past few weeks, I’ve been working with entrepreneurs to set up an accountability group. Once a month for a few hours. The expectation is high commitment and open sharing so they can learn from one another and solve their individual problems faster. Think EO or YPO forums.

One of the things we’re working on is setting up an accountability structure. Each person chooses two or three things (a mix of business and personal) they want to be held accountable for. At each month’s meeting, they’ll report on each item and explain why it is or isn’t moving in the desired direction. The idea is that no one wants to tell their peers they didn’t do what they said they were going to do.

One thing I’ve noticed from talking with several founders is that many of them think in terms of goals. I want to increase revenue by X percent by the end of the year, or I want to weigh X pounds by the end of the year. But we can’t really track that every month. And achieving a goal isn’t 100% within the entrepreneur’s control: they can do everything right and still not realize the desired outcome.

What I’ve settled on is that each person defines the goals or outcomes they want for the year (e.g., I want to weigh 150 pounds) and then identifies the actions they can do every month to move toward them (e.g., 16 cardio sessions a month). They can easily quantify and report to the other group members how many cardio sessions they did in a given month. If they didn’t meet their metric of 16, they have to explain why, and what they’ll do to get things back on track for the next 30 days.

Defining the desired outcome and pinpointing the actions they should be held accountable for feels like the right approach to accountability. Can’t wait to see this in action.