My New Accountability Partner Is My Son

We were in the back of a Lyft on the way to practice, and I was reading a book on kind accountability by Michael Bungay Stanier.

That part is funny on its own.

I already knew I wanted more accountability for the things I am working on. I had even landed on public accountability as the way to do it. Some kind of scoreboard people could see, so the follow through would have witnesses.

I was looking for a system.

The system was sitting next to me, asking questions.

It started with one deal. My son kept asking me about it, and I kept brushing him off.

I told him, "I'm busy. I'm working on this one deal. I can't talk right now."

Then I caught myself, and I started explaining the deal to him instead, so he could understand what business is actually like.

He listened. And then he kept asking.

Days later he would bring it back up and ask what happened with it.

Then he would ask again.

At first I treated it like a kid being curious. Then I noticed what was actually happening.

He was remembering what I said I was going to do, and he was checking whether I did it.

That is the whole job of an accountability partner. I just had never hired one who lives in my house and has no filter.

Every time he asked about that deal, I had to notice something: whether I had actually followed up, or whether I had just thought about following up and counted that as work.

Thinking about it felt like progress.

It was not progress.

He could tell, because he kept asking, and my answer kept sounding the same.

So I made it official. He is my accountability partner now.

We have a whiteboard at home where he helps me track my deals, so the questions have a scoreboard to point at.

If I tell him about something, he gets to ask me about it until it is done, or I have a real answer for why it ended.

The data says this is not a cute idea. It is a mechanism.

Dr. Gail Matthews at Dominican University studied 267 people working on real goals.

The group that only thought about their goals got about 43 percent of the way there.

The group that wrote their goals down, shared them with a friend, and sent that friend weekly progress reports hit 76 percent.

Same people. Same goals. The difference was a witness with a recurring question.

A larger review of the research (Harkin and colleagues, 2016, covering 138 studies and nearly 20,000 people) found the same shape: monitoring your progress improves whether you reach the goal, and it works better when the progress gets recorded and reported to someone else.

Here is the part nobody leads with: none of that research says the friend has to be an expert.

Your accountability partner does not need to coach you, grade you, or fix anything. The job is smaller and harder than that.

Remember what the person said. Ask about it again.

Mine is eight years old. He cannot run a business, and he does not have to. He has the only two qualifications that matter: he remembers what I told him, and he is not afraid to ask twice.

Most of us pick accountability partners who accept our explanations. We pick people who understand when we get busy.

He does not accept the long explanation. He just asks the question again, like it is still open.

Because it is.

The check on this one was simple. Is following up on the deal hard, or is it wrong?

It is hard. It takes a few minutes and a little nerve. Nothing about it is wrong.

Hard is not a reason to stall. It is just the price of the follow up.

Find someone who will ask you twice. Then tell them the thing, out loud, with a date on it.

This week's card

PERSONAL · FIND AN ACCOUNTABILITY PARTNER

Tell one person the thing you keep saying you will do. Out loud, with a date on it. Their only job is to ask you about it again.

Done when: They know the thing, and the date.