Helping you to fulfill your commitments

People I work with know how strongly I promote the idea of commitment to self development as a leader.  It is, in fact, our best predictor of leadership success.  If you are perceived to have a strong commitment to your own self development as a leader, you are much more likely to succeed in your current leadership role and as a leader over the span of your career.

The most important aspect of this commitment is to make your leadership development a priority as opposed to a preference.  The distinction I’d draw between the two is that a priority is something you’re willing to sacrifice to achieve.  You’ll put some skin in the game and this stake makes you more likely to make progress.  I think most of this has to come from inside but I ran across a site that offers to help you make and keep commitments.  

The site is called Stickk and can be found at www.stickk.com.  It works by asking you to set a goal and then putting up some wager or stake in the game.  Let’s say you pick more delegation on your team by February 1st, 2008.  You enter the goal at the Stikk site and select a schedule for the accomplishment of that goal.  You can appoint a referee or agree to report out your own progress.  You can select some amount of money to put at stake or not.  If you select to put up a stake, the service will ask you who you would like that money to go to in the case of default — failure to stick to your selected commitment.  You can pick a charity you support, a charity you normally wouldn’t (Stikk calls this an anti-charity) a friend or a foe.  You then agree to update Stikk with progress against your goal (increased delegation, in this case).  If you make the amount of progress you commit to, there are no penalties.  If you don’t the amount you’ve put up goes to the parties you’ve selected.

I like the idea and would love to hear your thoughts on this.  Would this work for you and what would be the best way to set it up?  If this appeals to you, you might want to give it a try.