Designing for Unwanted Behaviors
How implicit incentives shape culture and outcomes
Photo by Jisang Jung on Unsplash
One of my younger brothers is in B2B sales. He’s really good at it and is often recruited by Fortune 100 companies that want to throw him ungodly amounts of money. He has a gift for turning relationships into revenue without it being gross. I joke with him that if I had his skills in making money with my knack for saving it, I’d have a chance at being wealthy.
For people in sales like my brother, including for many senior executive roles, it’s typical to incentivize top talent with financial bonuses, revenue share, profit share, and more. Providing financial incentives is a smart way to keep people motivated, contributing to what matters, and increasing the right employee retention. When done well, it also helps organizations navigate labor costs (pay the best, better) and set aligned goals. There is ample research suggesting that financial incentives significantly affect motivation and performance.
But for companies and teams that don’t provide these financial bonus options, and the nonprofits that are reluctant to think this way, the incentives start to look radically different. Even in sales-centric cultures with financial incentive packages, these alone do not ensure meaningful alignment or shared success. While helpful tools like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), Management by Objectives (MBOs), and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), among others, bring clarity and focus, they do not solve for incentives.
Like you and me, the Antagonist likes incentives. When behavior is rewarded, more of that behavior will continue. We didn’t need Ivan Pavlov’s dog to teach us that, but we know what to call it.
Take a look at the apps on your phone. Most of them are designed not to minimize how much time you spend using them, but to increase your usage. Doom scrolling is not a flaw; it’s a feature. The app developers, and financial systems behind them, are incentivized to monetize your attention. But you knew that.
As with most Antagonists, when it comes to incentives, it’s what’s under the surface that needs a better look. The answer isn’t misalignment versus alignment, individualism versus culture, or motivation versus values. The Antagonist for incentives is implicit ****incentives: the rewards that go unnamed but everyone responds to.
Organizations have two incentive systems. The first is the formal one: compensation plans, bonus structures, performance reviews, MBOs, OKRs, KPIs. This is the system you can point to, document, and defend. The second is the real one. The real incentive system answers different questions like:
Who matters?
Who gets promoted or protected?
Who shapes where we’re going?
Who defines what success looks like?
Who can fail safely?
Who gets labeled “difficult,” “not a team player,” or “high maintenance”?
These incentives aren’t showing up on the employee intranet that everyone forgot how to access, but they are learned quickly. And once learned, they shape behavior more powerfully than any dashboard.
This is why implicit incentives are such a dangerous Antagonist.
Because people do what’s rewarded and avoid what isn’t. They notice that speaking up might result in fewer meeting invites. They notice when speed matters more than quality. They notice when loyalty to a person matters more than loyalty to the whole. They notice when risk is celebrated in language but punished in practice. They notice when the work they produce matters differently from the work others produce.
And once those lessons are learned, the incentive system is set, whether you intended it or not.
This is why adding more incentives rarely fixes the problem. You can layer on bonuses, redesign scorecards, or introduce new frameworks, but none of that matters if the implicit incentives remain untouched.
Leaders who want healthier incentive systems make the invisible visible. They name the real incentives out loud. They close the gap between what they praise and what they promote. They ensure that the behaviors required for the future aren’t penalized by the past.
The Antagonist is already at work. Are you?
Put This Enemy to Work
What behavior is most rewarded in your organization, regardless of what the metrics say?
Where do people play it safe because the real cost of failure is unclear?
How could you rally as a team against implicit incentives?
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Hi, I’m Brad Abare. If the challenges I write about sound familiar, it’s because I spend my time helping executives and their teams work through them. Over the past 30 years, I’ve been a founder, principal, board member, CEO, and chief of staff. If you’re interested in a conversation about working together, I accept a limited number of new engagements each year. You can send me a message here.