Goal Setting & Accountability with Brian Moran

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All right, Looks super cool to get to spend some time with you today. I want to talk with you about two really important things. And as a business owner, I've been struggling with these things, and the odds are you probably are too. Two things. One, goal setting. Like, I want to make sure that my team accomplishes our goals and that we do it in a timely manner. And the second thing is accountability. Like, I struggle with holding people accountable, I actually feel like people could be doing a lot more on a daily basis. I want their deadlines to be sooner, not later. And so there's always like a little undercurrent friction on how to hold people accountable to and on the bigger picture, how do we as a team accomplish our goals? Well, today I'm going to be joined by a dear friend, Brian P. Moran. Brian is a New York Times bestselling author for the 12 week year and his latest book, uncommon Accountability. It actually uncommonly sits as the only book on my nightstand right now. And coming up, after a few words, you're going to get to hear from Brian and we're going to go and talk about these two things, goal setting and accountability. And that's coming up after these words. This podcast is brought to you by the Wire Buzz Team. Now, if that name sounds familiar, it's because I've spent the past decade growing Wirebuzz into a digital marketing powerhouse designed to maximize clarity in complex sales processes so we can help accelerate revenue. And we do this in three phases. Phase one, we transform your website to function like your best salesperson and then also incorporate persuasive on demand sales videos. Now, your entire team is aligned on messaging and they're injecting massive clarity into your prospect's head. So your site looks great, but it also has engaging content that helps your team sell on demand 24. 7. The next phase. Phase two, we train your sales and marketing teams to sell remotely or in person to expand the impact of your sales team. And the third phase is we develop and run targeted ads to your prospects. Scale those ads to help you achieve more business results. Sign up for the Wirebuzz Company newsletter to learn more about effective and simple ways to improve your company messaging, attract more digital attention, and ultimately make more sales. All right, all right. Joining me right now is my dear friend, Brian Moran. What is up?

How you doing? It's great to be with you.

Okay, so in the interest of full disclosure, it's important you guys know that Brian is my neighbor and I see Brian several times throughout the week. I'm incredibly Fortunate. And the topic that Brian specializes in is also a topic that I'm struggling with. Goal setting and accountability. Dude, can we start like at the very beginning and just talk about accountability? And I'm sure if you ask any business leader, they struggle with the same damn thing.

Yeah, yeah, it's pretty common. It's pretty common. And I think because it's so misunderstood, not just for business owners, but for individuals alike in all walks of life. I mean, most people equate accountability with consequences because that's the way we experience it. I mean, think about that. Anywhere you hear that word in society, right? It's typically a few affiliated with bad behavior, poor performance, negative consequence. You go home, you watch the news tonight, someone's going to come out and someone did something they weren't supposed to do, and someone in authority is going to say, we're going to hold this person accountable. And then what happens? Well, they punish them. They find there are consequences, negative consequences. And so that's kind of the notion. You know, when people hear accountability, they immediately think how they've experienced it, which is negative consequences. And so they're synonymous. And that's not accountability. I mean, accountability is very different than consequences.

So are we looking at it just with the wrong context? Do we need to have a. Should there be like a positive spin on it? Wait a minute. Is this the politically correct way of looking at accountability?

Brian, you know me, I'm the least PC guy you've probably ever met. But there is a different way of thinking about accountability. And I think when you understand accountability for what it is, it's really the most empowering concept. You have to live your best life and to create the best organization. Because accountability is not consequences, it's ownership.

Ownership. Ownership and having the desire to not only own it, but be accountable for the delivery and the deadlines as like a statement of pride.

That's what I would call ownership. Yeah, right. It's, it's. I own the. So, so we work with groups. Some groups get to set their goals, some don't. Some groups, they're given their goal. And my question, the group is always, if you, if your goal is given to you. Yeah. Can you take ownership of it?

I think you can. I mean, I've always been, I've always been. Had an ownership mentality for every job, but I'm different.

Well, that's the entrepreneur in you. Yeah, yeah.

So can a non entrepreneur, a business leader or a role player on a team take ownership if they aren't the ones. Oh, I see. Where you're taking me right now. They need to be a part of the goal setting.

Well, even if they're not, even if the goal is given to you. Right. What are the choices? I can either own it or not. Now, what's the probability of me hitting it if I don't own it? Right, right. All my energy is going to be spent on why that goal is not right for me. My territory is different, I have different situation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, versus when I take ownership of it, it doesn't guarantee I'm going to hit it. But now my energy shifts. It shifts away from why this goal isn't right for me. And I start to spend my energy on how I make it happen. And it's not one of these things. You know, you got to climb to the top of Mount Crumpet and hey, I own this thing. It's just me saying, hey, this goal is mine. And I think, Todd, when you understand you don't control outcomes anyways, right. That it makes it easier to take ownership of an outcome in that sense.

Okay, so creating a culture of accountability is a big deal. Like, one of the things that I stew on is the lack of accountability at times. And I'm sure I'm not like a rare snowflake. I'm sure everybody has the same thing. How does that fit into an organization developing a culture that's like, all right, so we're going to have ownership on our goals, and each person involved is going to practice some type of uncommon accountability.

Yeah. So it starts with your thinking around accountability, your understanding if you think accountability's consequences. And as leaders, what do we do? We try and hold people accountable. In fact, that's what we've been taught to do. You just need to hold your team accountable.

Right.

Which is actually limiting the team. It's impeding their performance. Because if you think about accountability as ownership, well, what's that based on? It's based on the fact that we all have free will. Choice. Yep. No matter what situation you're in, you always, always, always have choice.

Right.

Now, I like to joke, you don't always like the choices you have. April 15th in the States. I don't like that you can pay your tax to go to prison. Don't like either one of those, but you have choice. And so that's where it starts is this recognition of accountability as choices, ownership. And then if once we see start to see accountability that way, then we act differently. As a leader, we don't lead with negative consequences. When people underperform Right. It's completely different scenario. So if you thought about accountability as ownership and you had an underperformer, how might you confront that?

Well, I would talk about the deliverables and the deadlines, and I would keep them focused on what the. The as an owner, what those prosperity opportunities are being missed. But I'm off track on it.

No, no, you're not. But here's the key. Here's the, here's the missing link for most people is you. You confront with choice. Okay. They don't have to do it.

Right.

They only have to do it if they want to be part of your team. Right. But. But to assume that and not have them state that is two different things. So some people, when they start, by.

The way, I've got a lot of people that are asked to be accountable for things that they didn't choose. It was given to them that this needs to be done for the mission.

But they've chosen to be part of the organization.

They sure did.

Yeah. And they can change that choice at any time.

Right.

That's the freedom you're confronting them with. Look, look, you don't have to work here. Doesn't make you a bad person. Makes you a bad fit. But if you're gonna work here, these are the standards. Don't ask me to lower the standards. Right, Right. This is how you contribute. If at any point you don't like that, you don't have to work here.

Right.

But. But I'm going to confront them with the choice. Because what happens is the consequences they experience are natural outgrowth of the choices they make.

Right.

And I want them to understand that. Otherwise what happens is as a manager, I'm the bad guy. Right. I'm just, I'm just mean or I'm angry or whatever. No, no, I. I interact with you based on the choices you make. You make productive choices. Guess what? I recognize you.

I praise you, I celebrate you. Right.

You make unproductive choices. Guess what? Things get really uncomfortable to the point where we don't work together anymore.

Right.

But it's important that each person understand that the consequences they experience, whether they're natural or whether they're applied like manager to subordinate, I'm choosing those. Now, there are cases where managers are. Are total a holes. And you know, the reality is you're in a bad situation. Get out of there.

Right.

But for the most part, life shows up for you based on your choices.

Well, one of the things I like about the way you're presenting it is it also gives the organization has its objectives that need to be accomplished and it's clear to the manager who has those ownership elements and that opens up the communication between the two. And now expectations are clear, which in I'm going to take a wild guess, but maybe 80% of companies expectations on deliverables are not clear.

Right? Yeah. If you think about a high performance organization, Todd, there's three structures you have to have regardless of what you value. Whether you value innovation, collaboration, customer service, doesn't matter. You need clarity of expectation.

Right.

At the vision level, at the goal level, but most importantly at the behavioral level. Okay. That's why, that's why plans got to be tactical. They can't be conceptual. That's a whole nother podcast. The second thing you need then is transparency with whether or not people are doing it. You have to have a way of measuring the execution. And the third thing is evidence. Is it doing what we want it to do? Okay. And, and so when we, you hit it earlier, when we let people get involved in participating in setting the vision, determining the goals, determining the actions, we automatically get greater ownership. Absolutely right. Anything we help create, we're less opposed to. So. So that's a no brainer.

Start taking pride in it.

Absolutely. And most of the time the team will step up more than you thought they were capable of. Right. But, but when they're not performing or they're falling off, there's a very different view. When I view accountability as choices, ownership, how I confront as a manager, I'm not coming in with negative consequences. I'm going to hammer him saying, hey, this has got to change or you're gone. I'm coming and saying, look, you know, let's talk about the situation, where we're at, how you're performing and what choices you have in that.

Okay, okay, I can, I can see that clearly now. How did you. I'm going to get into the 12 week year and we'll do that in a moment. But like how did this become part of your gurudomatic? Like how did accountability and goal setting be something that you just got like a spark of lightning and now you're sharing it on the biggest stages around the world for the largest companies. Dude, how did that get started?

Probably similar to how you got into this. Yeah, right. I first started as a student of it. I got promoted. I was attending MSU tragedy the other day there, but I was attending MSU working at ups. They promoted me in a part Time.

Management, a lot of acronyms for my audience. We don't normally really go this deep. I'm just joking with you. Michigan State University. I just know that.

Okay, could be Mississippi State, I guess or whatever. Right. Missouri State. Yeah, Michigan State. Anyways, so I got promoted into part time supervisory and they offered me a full time position. I went to California, got with PepsiCo, so. So I got into leadership. I was getting a degree in physiology to be a strength coach. I didn't know anybody in business. Business sounded boring to me. When I started to get into it, I loved it.

Yeah.

And so I started reading, studying and trying things. And one of the things that happened probably 10, 15 years into my career is this whole notion of accountability. I started to think deeply about because I had experienced the way most people did with someone holding me accountable, which all it did for me was piss me off, to be quite candid. Right, right.

Well, I don't need to be held accountable.

I'm not like a baby, you start making excuses. Yes, there's resentment. It destroys the relationship. And I thought, but wait a minute, isn't accountability a personal trait to success? And so there was this disconnect for me and I started to think about that deeply and dig into it. And that's when I started to realize accountability isn't a negative thing, it's a positive thing. But the way people engage with it makes it negative, especially in a manager's subordinate role. And so I started to think about, is there another way? How would I want to be treated? How, how do I. And then I started to work with that with my people and I realized I got totally different results with that.

So you had game changing, observation from people that they responded differently when you just presented it as what? Ownership.

When I confronted them with their choices. Okay, right. And I coached to ownership as opposed to compliance.

Yep, I gotcha.

Big, big difference.

Yeah, big difference. That the compliance is like the minimum standard. The ownership is how do we excel. So we all grow together.

The problem with negative consequences. And if you're, if you're a leader, write this down. You know, you'll never get discretionary effort with negative consequences. For you spellers, I can't even spell discretionary. But you'll never get. We can work on it.

Okay, not me, I'm dyslexic. But together we could have a committee, okay. We could figure it out.

All right? The fact of the matter is you get just enough to stop the consequences, which is kind of minimum performance. And that's what a lot of organizations. If you're holding your people accountable, believe it or not, no matter how great Your organization performing, that's the minimum level of performance. There's so much more they're capable of.

Well, I noticed this because this last year we've really been reconfiguring the company. I think it's an incredibly healthy thing for a company to do, to be, you know, optimizing its process and to be recognizing the changes that are happening in the marketplace. So that really happened the last year and now I started to notice that there are people that are flexing talents that I wasn't utilizing before. And instead of all the pressure coming into me.

Right.

And me being the primary revenue driver, other people in the company became revenue drivers that had never been in that kind of position before and they started to excel.

That a great thing.

That's ownership.

Oh yeah, that's ownership. That's ownership. But it's always, I mean, you'll get, you know, that high performer that comes to you, that, you know, 5% or whatever the population. Yeah, they're wired this way. The rest of them though, it's leader ladder. It doesn't happen at all.

Yeah, I'm abnormally wired this way. And every company that I went for, I was like, I felt like I owned the company.

Yeah.

To the point where it was obvious that I probably should open up my own company because even the leadership at the company with me didn't give an F as much. There's something wrong with that.

I care more than you do.

And I'm obsessive. Like, you know me, like weekends. My brain's thinking about how do I optimize something? It only makes sense for me to have some ownership in there. Now I want to talk with you about the 12 week year. But before we get into that, I noticed in the last quarter from the end of the year last year, my team was super productive. This is exactly the time that Wendy and I listened to your book on audio when we were driving to LA and we started laying out our goals. And the next thing I know is like we were a company all in a boat rowing the same direction for a goal. And that goal was, are you going to get time off at the end of the year? If we get this crap done right, those are the consequences that they had to own up to. So I was like, wow. I mean, this stuff like works, you know. And what I noticed was my organization would benefit tremendously to going into 12 week cycles instead of a full year. What is the first of all, talk to me about the 12 week year and then I'm going to peel it back A little.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're right on. That's one of the things. Michael. Michael Lennington my BUSINESS partner co AUTHOR that's one of the things we noticed is that there were two at two AHA's for us. The first was people didn't lack for knowledge, for strategies, for ideas, for resources. They had plenty of it. They needed to implement and they needed to not implement based on personal discipline. They need a system to help them execute. The second big aha was just what you said we looked at, and at certain times of the year, everybody implemented better. Well, what was in play there? Well, there was a hard line in the sand for most of us at the end of December. And as that deadline drew nearer. Right. Something shifted in our thinking which impacted our actions. All of a sudden we're pulling out the stops, trying to get over the finish line. And, you know, in many cases we do, but there's a cost. We noticed there was a huge cost. A lot of stress created in that. Sometimes we sacrifice holidays and family and we were. One of the things everyone was sacrificing, wasn't even aware of was all this capacity that was left on the table earlier in the year because you might catch up and hit the goal, but you can't go back and recapture capacity.

What was lost in February or lost in April is lost and never to be found again.

Right. Take your best month multiplied by 12, it'll be three, four, five times what you did.

Right.

Okay, maybe there are some exceptions. Take your third best month, it'll still be double. That's the capacity you have without learning anything new, without changing how you go to market or your new marketing funnel or anything else. It's just about being more consistent with the stuff that really matters. So. And we were experiencing that with our clients. We were experiencing that personally. And we said, you know what the barrier is the annual environment. Yet no one had ever questioned that. We just all did that. And you'll see companies that narrow it down to quarters and months, but it's still in the context of the annual environment. And if you think about it, in January, December looks a long way off. So it's really easy to put things.

Off and to coast a little bit.

And no big deal. Right? Right. I like to joke. It's rare you run into somebody in January and go, oh, yeah, this year's really gonna suck. It never happens in January, but you'll see individuals and companies that buy late August, early September have given up on the year. Yeah, Right. And so we said, look, man, there's got to be a way to get out of that environment. And we came across this athletic training process called periodization. And we looked at that and we took some of the fundamental tenets of that and moved it beyond athletics to work in business in a personal. And that's where the 12 week year was born.

That's so cool. What, what years? What, what are the years that you guys were starting to unravel this a.

Couple decades ago now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so what happened was we started working with the fundamentals of high performance in this context as 12 weeks as a year where there aren't four of those in the year, Todd. Right, right. That's annualized. There's just this 12 week or followed by the next. And we started to get phenomenal results. And so what happened was we thought, okay, how do we get this story out, how we tell this story? And so we wrote our first book and we wrote it in 12 weeks.

Yeah.

Which is really cool. Right. Because we were going to a conference and it just, it timed out where that conference was like 13 weeks off. So we wrote this thing, short format, left out all the fluff, and then we went down to Kinko's and self published and we printed 100 copies. We didn't know if we would print 50 or 100.

Yeah, right.

Because we didn't want to bring them back. Right. We didn't want to haul the boxes back, but we gambled, printed 100, sold most of them for 10 bucks, gave a few out, and the next year we sold like 100,000 copies of that book. And, and over the years we sold a couple hundred thousand copies. And then big publisher Wiley came along, wanted to publish it. And that's how, that's how the 12 week year exists today. But we literally wrote that thing in 12 weeks. But it was be. It was because we were documenting what we had done. We weren't two guys that sat in a room, came up with this theory and wrote about it and then set out to prove it.

Right.

We were just documenting what we found worked and it's been refined ever since.

And what kind of companies have you been implementing a 12 week year model into?

That's interesting. We've probably worked in just about every industry at every level.

Any companies, we would know a lot.

Of the financial services, Allstate, Mass Mutual, New York Life, ubs, all those guys, I mean, that was the niche we started in. We still do a ton of work there. Most of the real estate companies, people like Paycor, Home Builders, Like I can't even remember the names now. But yeah. So here's the deal. We've been international for years. Okay. And now we're intergalactical. Yes, that's my big claim.

What does that mean?

There's a company that's organizing to go to Asteroids to mine them for precious metals. And they use the 12 week here.

That's really cool.

So we got that going for us. I don't know how many people can say that, but we can say.

You could definitely say that.

Yeah. So we've worked in the travel industry. We've worked. I'm just thinking about, you know, so many different.

You're going through astroidal expansion.

You go, that sounds painful.

It's so funny. Okay, so if I implemented 12 week year into my business, what are some new paradigms that my team is going to have because we're using a 12 week methodology?

Well, the 12 week here is a system. So that's the first. Okay. Shift. Right. You're going to see components of the system that you're already applying to some degree. We want to leverage those further. But the big thing is we want to leverage it as a system because you know your systems guy, any systems, the sum of the holes exponentially greater than some of the parts. And that's, that's the key because what the tendency is, you pick the pieces you like and you'll get some benefit. When you apply it as a system, though, it literally is a self correcting system, meaning if you apply the different components, you get better. Every 12 weeks you get better. Might be 10%, might be 200, 300%, I don't know. But you will get better.

But over time, that is the ultimate goal of an organization is to polish and perfect. Right, Right.

Right. And then the marketplace shifts and you got to start over again. So. So the, the biggest thing is the mindset around, you know, embracing it, engaging with it as a system.

Yeah. Okay. Now if I did this in my company, which I'm like right on the fence. Okay. If I. He's smiling. If I did this in my company, could I get you to come across the street? If I gave you, if we did like a recap and I told you how it worked for us, would you be willing to cross the street?

I would, I would. I might even bring some of my people and you can teach them your stuff.

So there you go.

That'd be great. That'd be great.

Well, okay, so how long does it take for a company? His answer's like 12 weeks. How long does it take for a company?

It's great when you know the answer before you ask the question.

No doubt.

How awesome am I?

Awesome.

Yeah, I knew that.

How long does it take for a company to see results when they're implementing the 12 week.

Yeah, good question. It's, it's all over the board. Honestly. Some, some see amazing results in the first 12 weeks and we've had people do more in 12 weeks than they did in 12 months. That happens often. Sometimes that happens in the very first 12 weeks. Sometimes the first 12 weeks is really kind of getting your sea legs, getting the cadence of operating that way. Understand. Because this is a different way of operating. I mean right from the get go in that we're going to focus the plan. The plan is going to be tactical, not conceptual. I mean there's so many different elements to it that are, that are subtle but profoundly different that for some people it's really getting that whole methodology in place in the first 12 weeks also. What happens with that? It depends on the type of business you're in. Right, right. Is there a long gestation period between when you take action and when it bears fruit? Because the 12 week year isn't necessarily going to shorten that for you, but what it'll happen is you're going to be more consistent with the action. So once the results start, they keep getting better and better and better.

And this could make the sales team better and the marketing team better and whatever other team, the admin team.

Yeah, it affects every area. The only place the 12 week year isn't helpful is if you're not in control of your environment. In other words, if my job is to answer the phone right and all I do is transfer it right, I don't need any skill, I can't improve my skill. You don't need a 12 week year. But if there's an area you want to improve in, whether it's your health, your relationships, your business, in any area of the business, the 12 week year works really, really well. Oh, that's cool.

Well, I'm super excited to start rolling up my sleeves and implementing a 12 week year plan into our organization. I already know that it's going to impact us. The other thing I really like is whenever we've implemented a new strategy, for some reason part of this company's ethos is we respond really quickly and get freakish results like oh, that's awesome. It's just been our company history. So I'm excited to not only create some impactful results for my organization, but then come back and rave to you about how it's impacted us.

My new poster child in the making.

Right?

You got to put it out in the universe. Right?

You just watch it because I'll get you a poster for the back of your door in your office.

Todd's smiley face.

Hey, from my desk right here, I can open up the window because I work out of the house and I can see Brian and coming, coming and driving down the street. And often he. I snap photos from.

Hey, just. Where you going, bro?

Yeah, where are you going? I want to know and. All right, so what's coming up?

I'm not the only neighbor. He spies on folks. He's got, he's got binoculars and everything, by the way.

It's super creepy, but everybody's got to have a hobby. What's coming up in your world? Like, what's something on the horizon that you're working on right now that you're all fired up about?

Yeah, I appreciate you asking that. We are, you know, one of the things that, with the 12 week year, that's part of one of the elements called process control. The fact that when you're going it alone, you're stacking the odds against yourself. So we talk about the studies that have been done around peer support. You're eight times more likely to succeed with peer support than without it. And so we get all. We call. We call that concept a wham or weekly accountability meeting. And most.

I like the acronym.

Yeah, most people would cringe.

Accountability meeting, wham.

Right, Right. Most people would cringe if it was holding each other accountable. But that's not the deal. Deal. Right. It's. It's creating ownership and confronting the reality. But for years we've had people ask us, well, who can I wham with? And what. So we're kicking off a global wham within the next 30 days where. Yeah, people from around the world will tap in. We'll run it for 20, 30 minutes every Monday and a little mentoring once a month along with it. We're super excited.

Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah.

You know, when people get an opportunity to get to work with you one on one or to work with you in a group setting. And they've gone through the book and now they're involved in a community that's using it like that takes it to a whole nother level.

It's powerful. It's power. And we got a great community like, like yours. Right. They're givers, they're just, they're all dedicated to living their best life and having an impact. So it's great.

Isn't it interesting when you are coaching people that are already in this can I mentality of constant and never ending improvement. It's a whole different group of people. People instead of the person who's like lethargic and they're totally fine growing their midsection.

Yeah, that's right. Expanding, but not in the right ways. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Well, he's Brian Moran. For more information, you can go to the12WeekYear.com that's 12WeekGear.com and Brian, I look forward to having you back, talk to you about the results that my team's gonna have. And anyway, thank you so much for braving the street.

Yeah. To come over here and do it in the sunny weather. It was tough.

It was real tough. Thank you so much, Brian, for joining us. And for those of you, please remember to hit the subscribe button and we will look forward to connecting with you on the next episode of the Todcast. Yo. That was a powerful episode. And from what we just learned, it should be obvious how you can now implement these lessons in your life to get to the next level. Now, before you bounce, I just have three quick thoughts. First, thank you for taking me on your incredible life journey. Second, if you receive some value from me and you want to pay it forward, it would mean the world to me. If you left an honest rating and review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, I'd be incredibly grateful. And lastly, if you share this episode, whether it be a screenshot or a photo from where you're listening, anything via Instagram stories or LinkedIn, Facebook, or any of the social media sites, just tag me and the guest. I'll repost your content and I'll reply back in the comments because I love mixing it up. In fact, I'd love to share your shoutouts in my feed too. Not only are these shout outs really good for you and for me, but they also help us book more amazing guests because they'll be able to see the reach that you're helping to cultivate. This is a way for you to help contribute to the show. So thank you again for listening and I look forward to earning a regular spot inside that ear of yours. Let's grow.

It.