You Get What You Reward: Fixing the Incentives Quietly Working Against Your Team

Every January, you stand in front of the company and talk about teamwork. Collaboration is a core value — it's on the wall, it's in the onboarding deck, it's in every job posting. Then bonus season arrives, and the spreadsheet has columns only for individual results. Your people notice. They always notice. Management researcher Steven Kerr named this problem back in 1975 in a classic paper titled "On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B," and fifty years later, most organizations are still paying people to do the opposite of what they say they want.

You've seen the symptoms even if you haven't named the cause. Salespeople who guard their leads like state secrets while the team number slips. Engineers who ship fast because speed gets celebrated then quietly leave someone else to maintain what breaks. Managers who never surface problems because they look calm get promoted. None of this is a character flaw. It's a design flaw. Your team is doing exactly what your organization is rewarding — and no speech, poster, or offsite will outtalk a compensation plan.

First, Find Out What You're Actually Rewarding

The Rawe Adaptive Leadership Framework begins every engagement with a Discover phase, and with misaligned incentives, that means an honest audit of the full reward system — not just compensation. Money is only the loudest channel. We map who got promoted in the last two years and what they were doing when it happened. We look at what gets praised in meetings, whose projects get airtime with senior leaders, which mistakes get forgiven, and which get punished. Then we set that map next to the behaviors you say you want. The gap between the two is rarely subtle. Most leaders I work with can't unsee it once it's on paper — and that discomfort is exactly where the real work starts.

Name the Contradiction Out Loud

The second phase, Disrupt, asks something harder than analysis: it asks you to say the quiet part to your team. Not a vague commitment to "revisit our incentive structure," but a plain statement: "We've been rewarding individual wins while asking for teamwork, and that's on us, not you." This step matters more than most leaders expect. Your people already know the incentives are misaligned — they've been navigating them for years. What they don't know is whether you know. Naming the contradiction publicly does two things: it restores credibility, and it signals that the rules are genuinely about to change. Disruption also means an immediate stop to the most damaging rewards, even when it's awkward — including the moment your top individual performer wins big in a way that costs the team.

Redesign the Scoreboard

The Design phase rebuilds the reward system so the behavior you want is the behavior that pays. That can mean restructuring bonus criteria, but it usually goes further: shared metrics that two teams can only hit together, promotion criteria that require evidence of developing others, recognition rituals that spotlight the person who unblocked a colleague rather than only the one who closed the deal. We also redesign the informal economy — what you, personally, notice and mention. A leader's offhand praise is a powerful incentive, and it's usually given out of habit rather than intention. The Framework makes it deliberate.

Then Watch What People Do

The final phase, Demonstrate, exists because incentive changes look great in a slide deck and mean nothing until behavior moves. We build in structured check-ins at 30 and 90 days that look for observable evidence: Are leads being shared? Is the maintenance work getting picked up? Did anyone surface a problem early and get thanked for it instead of being quietly penalized? If the behavior hasn't shifted, we treat that as data, not failure — somewhere, an old reward is still alive and still winning. We find it and go again. That loop is what makes the change durable, rather than another initiative that fades by the third quarter.

Misaligned incentives are one of the most fixable problems in leadership, precisely because nobody is behaving irrationally — your people are responding sensibly to the system in front of them. Change the system, and you change the behavior, usually faster than you'd expect.

If some version of this is playing out on your team, I'd welcome a conversation. Visit williamcrawe.com to learn more about the Rawe Adaptive Leadership Framework, or reach out directly to talk through what an incentive audit would look like in your organization. The wall poster isn't the problem. The scoreboard is — and scoreboards can be rewritten.