Many business leaders that I meet are real powerhouses of ideas. Their minds are constantly working in over drive and exploring different opportunities.

What is it that sets apart some business leaders and entrepreneurs from others?

You see one of the biggest problems many business leaders have to face is the ability to focus on outcomes and delivery of a project – particularly if they are running their own business. And this is supported by being accountable to deliver what you promise.

Consider it as the following equation for success:

Focus+Accountability = Success

If you were every employed in a large corporate, it is likley that you would have been accountable to deliver results because you had a board of directors to report to. And you would have been focused on completing the task in hand as you would have agreed objectives against which your performance would be measured and rewarded.

Running your own professional services firm, especially a small practice it is likely that you don’t have a board of directors or agreed performance metrics.

Let me share the story of a coach who was on a recent programme I led – her goal on te programme was to write a book.

Each week she would turn up with more and more questions and more and more ideas for her book. But each week she would not having moved forward in writing her book. The programme over the 90 days provided her with a structure fo accountability where she committed to her fellow paricipants the action she would take in the next week.

But accountability alone was not sufficient for this coach. In fact she never completed her own book. Way after the 90 days had ended all she had was a design for a cover of the book that she had created and which was less than professional and a series of ideas that were not collated into any structure.

She was still debating whether she should be creating an audio programme, a video or writing a book long after the programme had finished.

The reality was that she was not focused and did not deliver what she promised. In turn she created a perception amongst her colleagues for being disorganised and unprofessional. They would certainly not be refering clients to her. Yes she was an honest and good hearted person, but she did not deliver against her promises – even those promises she made to herself so they could not risk this being the case for clients they might have referred.

So if you are finding that you are not getting the results you desire consider the following:

• accountability – to whom are you accountable? How could you increase your level of accountability to support your success?
• focus – what projects and assignment are you focused on? If you find yourself with 101 ideas, ensure that you focus on just one idea until you have transformed that idea into delivering measurable results for you in your practice
• deliver what you promise – whether you promise something to your team, your clients or yourself, failing to deliver will result in damaging your reputation as a person people want to do business with.

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