Accountability Partners
Have you shared your plan with anyone else?  There’s nothing more motivating to actually achieve your goals than telling others who will pay attention, and you will have to face on a regular basis.  Tell your spouse, your neighbor, your customers (so long as your goals are consistent with delivering greater value to them!). 

However, many of those people either won’t be interested in, or shouldn’t be subjected to the nitty gritty of your progress.  A great technique to keep you focused and inspired is to form a partnership with one or more similarly motivated leaders.  Call it a mastermind group, an accountability partnership, an “I’ll kick your butt if you kick mine” pact…whatever you like. 

The key!
Here’s the key that only recently came to light for me.  Your team, your partners, are not there to beat you up over missing your goals or falling behind.  Stuff happens to get in your way.  Your group is there to hold you accountable to tracking your own progress and focusing on what YOU said was important.  I am part of a great group of leaders that meet twice per month.  We hold each other accountable for attending our meetings, share are successes and setbacks, and help one another stay focused and productive. 

So your accountability team is not there to ridicule you for falling down; they’re there to remind you to get back up.  The fact that you have associated them with how much you will pay attention to your commitments is what makes it work. 

Want to do a better job “working your plan?”  Find a couple of like-minded, success-oriented friends or colleagues and commit to sharing your goals, developing a list of daily/weekly actions that will get your closer to your goals, and report to one another regularly.

You can’t tack a 3″ binder to the company bulletin board, or review it with your team in your monthly meetings.  That would be about as feasible as lugging your desktop computer on to BART just so you could keep an eye on email during your 45 minute commute.  You wouldn’t do that — that’s what PDAs are for. 

Having a concise way to articulate your business vision, mission, goals and plans brings your strategy into the everyday work life of you and your team.  How cool is that?  What good is documenting your strategy and translating it into plans if it only gets looked at once a year?

I have become a huge fan of the One Page Business Plan.  While I am not affiliated with the organziation, there are good examples to work from on their web site [Sample Plans].