Use Peer Pressure to Drive Performance

Well-designed team competitions can be a powerful motivator, leveraging positive peer pressure to ensure high performance across the entire group. When an individual's poor performance can jeopardize the team's collective reward, the group itself becomes a powerful enforcement mechanism.

Designing Competitions for Peer Pressure:

• Shared Fate: Structure the contest so that the entire team (e.g., the entire sales force) wins or loses together, or where a certain threshold of collective success must be met for anyone to receive the top prize.
• High Stakes, Appealing Reward: The reward must be significant and desirable enough (e.g., a trip to Tahiti) to make the collective effort worthwhile.
• Visibility: Ensure that individual and team progress is visible to everyone, so laggards can be identified and encouraged by their peers.

This "brutal" self-enforcement within the field can be more effective than top-down management pressure. It transforms a contest from a simple incentive into a collective mission, where everyone is accountable to their teammates. This can be a key tactic for achieving audacious goals.