Team Up: Becoming Accountable to Your Dreams by Pete Mockaitis Book Review – Dreams, Goals, Accountability
Team Up: Becoming Accountable to Your Dreams
By Pete Mockaitis
Dreams, Goals, Accountability
“This book is about responding to the call to greatness each of us hears within ourselves.”
-Team Up: Becoming Accountable to Your Dreams
Who is Pete Mockaitis?
Pete is a national speaker whose work on teamwork and accountability has benefited Fortune 100 corporations, high-growth startups, major nonprofits, and student groups alike.
Pete’s first book, The Student Leader’s Field Guide was published in 2006 and was well-received by student leaders as well as members of the educational and leadership community, including Reg Weaver, President of the National Education Association, the single largest professional organization in the United States.
His second book Team Up: Becoming Accountable to Your Dreams was published in December 2009 and has earned the praise of, among others, David Allen, author of Getting Things Done.
One interesting thing I discovered when researching Pete is that he started his career as a consultant at Bain and Company, an acclaimed firm ranked as the #3 most desirable employer by MBA students, as surveyed by Fortune magazine. Bain and Company are consistently rated as one of the most prestigious consulting firms. Their former employees include the past and present CEOs of Ebay, American Express, Citigroup, Quiznos and Dell. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney was a partner at Bain and Company and briefly served as CEO in the 1990s.
Pete also worked with The Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit organization that is separate from, but works closely with Bain and Company. Their purpose is to help nonprofit and philanthropic leaders to develop strategies and build organizations that inspire and accelerate social change.
Pete brings that full background to Team Up, with a genuine desire to inspire and accelerate your own personal change. His analytical background come through in actionable advice, specific tips and an emphasis on strategies that have been proven to work.
Summary of Team Up: Becoming Accountable to Your Dreams
Team Up is a two part book. In the first half, Pete shares his story of “The Dudes” (Pete and his close friends) in their journey to be more productive during their college years. The Dudes start an accountability group, and we follow their thirteen week journey where we get to know each of the individuals in the group, and witness the types of real life interactions that occur during in an accountability group – sharing in their triumph, failures, disagreements and mutual support. During their experience, The Dudes slowly reach a new level of consistency in sticking to their goals and improve their lives – and along the way, strengthen their friendship.
If there is any criticism I have of Team Up, it is that I did find it a little hard to buy into the story initially due to the casual, free flowing dialogue in the opening chapters. In Pete’s defense, he is presenting a story of college students, and once I got past the first few chapters I enjoyed the story. The lessons in the story are not hampered by the medium in which their are presented, but it did take me a little getting used to.
The second half of the book contains actionable advice on how to start your own accountability group and discusses step by step how to get the most out of one. Pete covers the whole gamut of issues – from how to establish goals to tracking your performance, to sharing your commitments with your accountability partners. As I’ll discuss below, this was my favorite section of the book.
Finally, in the appendix Team Up contains information to help you get started with your own spreadsheet if you’d like to track your progress using Excel (or similar). Pete has also set up a website (http://www.petemockaitis.com/books/teamup) in conjunction with the book where you can download pre-made spreadsheets – and I am sure he will continue to add to it with his own as well as reader submitted spreadsheets.
My Favorite Chapters
My favorite part of this book hands down is the second half. I’m big on advice backed up by research. I enjoyed that Pete studied not just the accountability group he started with his friends, but in addition asked other people from accountability groups for their experience, and then collected the common tips, problems, solutions and strategies that were effectively used in real life situations.
I feel this bears emphasis. Very often I come across books where an author writes well intentioned advice, but is pulling from a limited well of only their personal experience (or worse, writing down what they logically assume would work – but have never experienced the situation they are providing advice for). Pete begins the book by discussing his personal journey, and provides some hints as to what worked and didn’t for his group. However, he doesn’t stop there, and I think the biggest value of the book comes in the chapter entitled “Accountability groups: top ten list” where he distills the ten key actions that were common across twenty four participants he surveyed in different accountability groups. He then expands on each of these actions, providing the reasons they are important – and different approaches to them, such as how to set ground rules for the accountability group.
Recommendation
I recommend Team Up if you are looking for a good introduction to accountability groups, and a way to accomplish your goals while strengthening relationships with close friends. You may still gain some value out of the book as an individual without an accountability group, by reading the chapters on establishing goals and tracking performance specifically.
As the name implies however, this book is about teaming up to achieve your dreams – and I think this book is most effective if you read it and share it with a friend (or two, or three), and use it as the basis to start your own accountability group. This is not a book about reading, thinking about abstract concepts and walking away a little more knowledgeable.
The power of this book is that it will inspire you to action – and then back that up with specific strategies you can use to put those feelings of inspiration to good use.
Team Up: Becoming Accountable to Your Dreams
By Pete Mockaitis
Dreams, Goals, Accountability
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