Are You Holding Yourself Accountable?
Curt Skene’s In2Win! Career Coaching Supplement.
While accountability may be considered an important attribute when you are working, just know it is the ultimate survival skill when you are not. For the first time no one else is holding you responsible. Making yourself accountable means you measure results not activity, because an activity doesn’t matter unless it leads you to the results you need.
Many executives still need structure in order to perform. One best practice is to make a contract with yourself and/or your partner that spells out your commitment to getting things done. Create a detailed performance scorecard and honestly measure yourself against it every week.
Just like you would in business, every one to two weeks hold a performance review that measures your progress and assesses what is working and what is not. Be prepared to take immediate corrective action. You may want to do this with another executive; just make sure he or she shares the same passion and energy that you do.
To avoid “time leaks” use a stop watch to measure every activity you do. A good habit to get into is to plan your day in fifteen minute increments as this will force you to be more precise in allocating and tracking your time. Another great idea is to use the timer on your cell phone to remind you when to bring coffee meetings and idle chit-chat sessions to an end.
Track the activity and results of your search. What you measure becomes easier to improve.
Why I Wrote This Page
Because for the first time in your career, no one else is measuring you. At work, someone else set the targets and reviewed your progress. In transition, if you don’t build that structure yourself, it simply doesn’t exist.
Self-accountability fails for a predictable reason: there’s no real consequence for skipping it. A boss’s disappointment is a consequence. Your own disappointment in yourself is easy to talk yourself out of by Thursday. That’s why the professionals who actually hold themselves accountable almost always do it with a witness, a coach, a partner, another professional in transition, someone who will actually ask how the week went.
Measuring activity isn’t enough either. Ten networking calls that go nowhere isn’t progress. The measurement that matters is whether your results are moving, not just your effort.
Action Steps
- Find one person who will ask you, every week, what you actually accomplished, and tell them in advance you want them to push back if the answer is vague.
- Build a simple weekly scorecard: not hours worked, but real outcomes, meetings booked, referrals gained, interviews landed.
- When a week comes up short, don’t just note it and move on. Name the specific reason it happened, so next week you can address the actual cause.
In2Win! Afterthought
Curt’s current observations and updated guidance will be added here.
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