Secret Benchmarking for Accountability

Accountability: anything or anyone that helps you gain mental leverage to achieve the results you desire. — The Accountability Stop

Freshman year at engineering school, I took my first test in calculus class and got a respectable 86%. Respectable, that is, until the teaching assistant announced that someone else in the class got 100%. Up until that moment I had resolved to learn the material of my engineering curriculum rather than repeat the high school rat race to have the best academic record. After that moment? I regressed to my high school pettiness, shifted into overdrive, and aced nearly every test I took until I graduated. All because I was spiteful that one other person got a better grade than me.

I was benchmarking my performance against others. But my main motive was far from a morally pure and magnanimous “why.” It was unsullied jealousy and egotism. 

My benchmarking did, on the other hand, give me mental leverage to complete five grueling years of studying. This approach may not win a good-attitude award. Benchmarking still goes on the list of practical accountability methods. So if you’re not afraid of using the whole spectrum of human emotions for motivation, read on.

Here are some ways we can benchmark for accountability:

• Making sure to get to work before a colleague and leaving after them.
• Hitting our daily quota at work before anyone else.
• Having the fewest complaints about our work product.
• Posting more often than another blogger in our niche. 
• Studying twice as hard to make sure we get the best grade (my selfish example).
• Checking who’s at the gym at our regular time. Staying on the same schedule to see the same people. They could be workout buddies, if we’re open to that as well. (Do NOT benchmark your weight lifted against someone else. That’s a fast track to injure yourself.)

Is it important to keep our benchmarking a secret? Not at all. We can benchmark against others openly. But to me that becomes a different kind of accountability. It would be accountability buddies or a friendly team competition. 

Why does it work?

Secret benchmarking works for those with the right personality. If you have a natural tendency for jealousy or envy, it takes that personality trait and uses it to your advantage. If you’re shy or an introvert, it gives you a way to competitively compare yourself to others without engaging.

Benchmarking in History

Here are some famous examples of achievements driven to some degree by secrecy and subterfuge. 

The space race between the USA and the USSR in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s was fought in both the secrecy of laboratories and on the headlines of newspapers around the globe. Theoretically the space race was about exploration and discovery. In reality, the competing projects were more about national pride and political/strategic advantage.

At the end of the 1920s, real estate developers in New York were racing to see who could build the tallest structure in the world. In particular, the Chrysler Building, 40 Wall Street, and the Empire State Building were all on similar construction schedules. Each building made multiple adjustments to plans to announce in the press that they would be the tallest structure in the world when complete. Apparently realizing that announcing their eventual height would simply keep upping the ante, William Van Alen, the architect for the Chrysler Building, devised a secret 125 ft spire that was erected in 90 minutes on October 23, 1929 to make the Chrysler building the tallest in the world, taller than the contemporaneous plans for the Empire State Building. Unfortunately for Van Alen and Chrysler, the stock market crashed on October 24, 1929. The wind was out of the sails for the dramatic architectural finish. (The Empire State building project changed their plans to include several more floors and a spire as well, so that it surpassed the Chrysler Building.)

In 1998, Antz from Dreamworks and A Bug’s Life from Pixar were released within 49 days of each other at theaters. It wasn’t an accident. Jeffrey Katzenberg was with Disney when he heard an “army ants” based story pitch. When Katzenberg moved to Dreamworks, that seed of a story went with him and turned into Antz. The same story seed made its way to Pixar through Disney and became A Bug’s Life. The studios had a friendly rivalry to premier their film first. But reportedly Katzenberg had specifically required that the animation studio purchased to make his movie commit to a schedule that would release Antz before Pixar’s A Bug’s Life.

In 2024, we’re in the middle of another technological race as OpenAI, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple vie for market position in the emerging trillion dollar Artificial Intelligence industry. Many tech leaders involved in the race have expressed misgivings of how this new technology might impact the world—the pursuit has a relatively strong “anti-why.” But the benchmarking and competition accountability is too strong for tech behemoths to be left behind.

Secret benchmarking isn’t for everyone. It’s morally wobbly. Under the right circumstances, it might be the most effective accountability technique you can use.

What’s Your Account?

Have you ever succumbed to an instinct to one-up someone? Do you have a project you want to finish that could use this technique?