Our CEO has a rule he follows for meetings.
For every minute he’s late to a meeting, he has to do 50 jumps with a 4 LB jump rope. If you’ve never tried a weighted jump rope before, it’s no joke 💪.
So why would he do this to himself?
It starts with a story.
Quick backstory
Our team at Crossrope scaled quickly over the past couple of years. And with the addition of every new team member, scheduling got a little more complex. What used to be a handful of meetings each week suddenly turned into back-to-back-to-backs. And it hit our CEO the hardest as he had his pulse on everything.
As soon as one meeting ran over time, the rest of the dominos toppled and rippled their way through the rest of the day. Eventually, it became the norm and it made it difficult for him and others to stick to schedules.
So he came up with a plan. A contract of sorts. For every minute he was late to a meeting, he would face a penalty: 50 jumps with the 4 LB monster.
And you know what? It kind of worked.
How to use commitment contracts to improve your effectiveness
Imagine you’re trying to lose weight, so you set a goal to lose 15 lbs over the next 3 months. You start off like a rocket 🚀.
Then, motivation begins to dwindle, you skip a few workouts, and before you know it the goal is abandoned. Wouldn’t be the first time.
Now imagine instead you put $1,000 on the line. Or $5,000 💰.
If you achieve your goal within the 3 months, you’ll get your money back. If you don’t, that money automatically gets wired to a charity that supports something you really, really despise and there’s nothing you can do about it.
What are the chances of you successfully completing this goal? My guess is much, much higher. That’s the power of commitment contracts.
(Btw – there’s an app called Stikk that does exactly what I described above.)
There are a couple of reasons commitment contracts work so well:
- They leverage loss aversion – this bias says we feel the pain of loss twice as much as the equivalent pleasure of gain. So when we’ve got something on the line, we’re more inclined to follow through to ensure we don’t lose it.
- They add a layer of accountability – while publicly sharing your goals may work against you at times, having an accountability partner drastically increases your chances of sticking to your commitment.
“A Commitment Contract is a binding agreement you sign with yourself to ensure you follow through with your intentions—and it does this by utilizing the psychological power of loss aversion and accountability to drive behavior change.”
StikK
So how can you use commitment contracts to be more effective?
Here’s how I’m thinking about it:
- Identify an area of improvement – what are you looking to improve? What specific behavior change are you looking to make? Identify it.
- Make a commitment to your team – share the commitment with your team so they can help keep you accountable.
- Put something on the line – when you raise the stakes, you increase your chances of success. Decide what happens if you break your commitment. Come up with a penalty that’s painful enough to want to avoid but not so painful that it becomes unreasonable. You can make it about money or make it something more fun and on brand with your culture (like jumping rope with a 4 LB rope).
Don’t underestimate the power of these little commitment contracts. We humans will do whatever it takes to avoid losing something that’s on the line. Use this to your advantage to drive the behavior change you want.
As for our CEO, he still shows up a few minutes late every now and then, but the jumps are keeping him honest and forcing him to decide if adding that last point in a meeting is more valuable than a few hundred jumps. And hey, sometimes it is.
I encourage you to consider creating commitment contracts for yourself or your team and see if it makes a difference. Just make sure to have some fun in the process.
😉✌
