Angela Duckworth: Peer accountability beats management every time

On Masters of Scale, psychologist and author Angela Duckworth tells host Jeff Berman why top-down accountability rarely works. She points to a high school football team’s ‘commitment card’ ritual as proof that peer accountability, not authority, is what drives elite performance.

Transcript

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You can tell people what to do, and you can try to keep the people who report to you accountable by the force of your authority, but it doesn't work very well. There is no higher court than the court of peer opinion. Coach Ladd, he had this commitment card idea. You take a three by five blank index card, you as a player write down your goals. You end by saying, I commit to, and then you name another player, and you exchange cards, and for those next seven days, your teammate keeps you accountable. They watch you in the weight room. They watch you at practice, and they watch you on game day, and the following week, your partner stands up, and they read out your goals to the whole team who's watching in reverent silence, and they'll say, failed, succeeded. I was astonished. I have never seen, in all of my years of studying companies, a culture where unvarnished negative feedback was taken with such maturity and even enthusiasm, and I think if you can develop a culture where it's not only that you're accountable to your boss or your manager, but you have the esprit de corps and the formal rituals and structures to be accountable to another person who is at your peer level, I think that is the magic of the De La Salle Spartans.