If you want to influence how people act at work, don’t spend time on motivational Slack posts or new processes. The real lever is incentives. Most of us like to think we’re guided by logic or team spirit, but the truth is our behaviour follows what’s rewarded explicitly or quietly in the system we operate in.
Teams talk about “raising the bar”, “shifting culture” or “driving accountability”. But none of it sticks if incentives aren’t aligned to the new direction.
Want engineers to care about quality? Reward shipping stable code, not just shipping fast. Need more documentation? Make it visible, tracked, and something leadership highlights in reviews. You get what you measure, but in reality you get what you reward.
Changing incentives doesn’t mean dangling a bonus or adding a new target to the end-of-year review. The best shifts are subtle: moving recognition, freeing up slack for the work you want to see, letting teams own their wins. People are smart, they read between the lines. If the fastest path to a promotion is heroics in the last hours before a launch, that’s what you’ll get. If it’s mentoring, refactoring, or cross-team work, you’ll see more of that.
The lesson: if you want new behaviour, start by re-examining what you actually incentivise. Culture change follows incentives, not the other way round.
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