A strategic priority becomes difficult to follow when the organisation continues to reward decisions that work against it. Staff may understand the direction and support it, yet face a performance discussion, customer commitment, or management request that gives them a reason to choose something else.
Incentives are part of that explanation, but they are not a complete account of behaviour. People also act from professional standards, relationships, interest in the work, and concern for customers. They may challenge a target or accept a short-term cost because they believe another choice is right. An organisation should not depend indefinitely on those efforts to compensate for conflicting expectations.
The practical task is to identify where the conflict enters a decision. A statement that the culture rewards the wrong things is too general to correct. A description of which choice is encouraged, who bears its cost, and what the organisation expects instead provides a better starting point.
Follow the Priority Into a Real Choice
Suppose a software company decides that retaining existing customers deserves greater attention. Investigation shows that customers struggle with a particular integration after purchase. Resolving the problem would require coordinated work across Product, Engineering, and Support.
At the same time, a prospective customer requests an additional capability. Sales sees a near-term opportunity, while the integration work promises a less immediate benefit. The team has limited capacity and needs to choose how to sequence the requests.
The company’s compensation plan might favour new contracts, but the decision could also reflect the size of the opportunity, an existing promise, uncertainty about the integration fix, or the fact that nobody has prepared a feasible proposal for it. Calling the outcome an incentive failure before examining these factors would be premature.
Map the decision. Who selected the work? What information did they have? Which targets or commitments mattered? What happened to the people or teams affected? This can establish whether the strategic priority was genuinely considered and why it did or did not prevail.
The result may reveal a direct conflict: the company asks Sales to favour suitable long-term relationships while rewarding contract value without considering delivery feasibility. It may instead reveal an unclear priority or a capacity choice leadership has not resolved. Those findings need different responses, even if they produce a similar delay for existing customers.
Look Beyond the Bonus Formula
Pay can provide a strong signal, particularly where staff can see a direct connection between a decision and their earnings. It is still only one part of the arrangement. Recognition, promotion examples, preferred assignments, management attention, and the treatment of mistakes also shape expectations.
An engineer may see that visible feature delivery receives detailed attention in promotion discussions while integration maintenance receives a brief acknowledgement. A manager may learn that a missed quarterly forecast produces immediate scrutiny while delayed preventive work rarely does. Neither signal requires an explicit financial reward.
For the software company, review what happens when someone proposes the integration work. Is there a route to obtain capacity? Can the contribution be explained in a performance discussion? Does leadership ask about the customer problem consistently, or only after a renewal is at risk?
Use specific examples rather than assumptions about what motivates everyone. Ask employees what expectations they are trying to satisfy and compare those accounts with actual decisions. A pattern across cases is stronger evidence than a single unpopular allocation.
There can also be disagreement about what the strategy requires. Retention may depend on several things, and staff may reasonably disagree about the integration’s importance. Better evidence about the customer need may help more than changing rewards. Incentive analysis should not become a way to dismiss a substantive difference of judgement.
Connect Local Measures to the Wider Result
Departments need measures that help them manage their work. Sales needs to understand demand and contracts, Engineering needs to assess delivery and reliability, and Support needs to know whether customers receive useful help. Different measures are not automatically evidence of organisational conflict.
The problem arises when improving a local figure creates costs that the decision does not account for. A contract can increase bookings while committing the company to work it cannot support profitably. Closing a support case quickly can improve handling statistics while leaving a customer to return with the same problem.
A shared view should make those consequences visible. For the integration issue, the company might examine affected accounts, repeated contacts, implementation effort, and the reasons customers give during renewal discussions. No single measure establishes the whole result, but together they can improve the basis for choosing work.
DORA’s guidance on software delivery metrics warns about using measures in ways that encourage gaming and stresses improvement in context. That is a useful caution when connecting operational measures to performance expectations. A number designed to help a team understand its system may become less informative when treated as an isolated target to maximise.
Adding a company-wide outcome to every employee’s scorecard is not a complete solution. People have different influence over retention, and broad outcomes can be affected by pricing, market conditions, and decisions made elsewhere. Assessment should consider the person’s responsibilities and contribution alongside the shared result.
Resolve the Resource Decision as Well as the Signal
A company can tell staff that integration work matters and recognise their effort while still leaving no time to do it. The strategic priority needs a feasible place in the combined workload. Otherwise employees must choose between disappointing existing commitments and leaving the new priority unaddressed.
Leadership should compare concrete options. The company could schedule a limited integration correction, defer part of the new capability, assign additional specialist support if available, or revise a commercial promise. Each option changes a commitment and needs an authorised decision.
The trade-off should reach the affected teams. If Engineering pauses another project, its plan and expectations need to change. If Sales cannot offer a requested capability immediately, it needs an explanation it can use with the prospect. A priority is easier to follow when the organisation accepts the consequences of choosing it.
The transition may need temporary arrangements. Performance expectations set before the new direction should be reviewed in light of legitimate changes to the work. That does not require guaranteeing results or discarding accountability; it requires explaining what people are now expected to contribute.
This is part of making strategic choices hold. Resource decisions, management instructions, and performance discussions should tell a coherent story. Revising one element while leaving the others unchanged can preserve the original conflict.
Test the Proposed Change for Unintended Effects
Changing an incentive can move the problem rather than solve it. Rewarding renewal rates alone could discourage teams from addressing unprofitable arrangements or create pressure to offer concessions without examining their cost. Rewarding the number of integration fixes could encourage small, easily counted changes over a more consequential improvement.
Before adopting a new arrangement, consider how someone could meet the measure while failing its intended purpose. Ask which customers or tasks might receive less attention, what behaviour could be discouraged, and whether the underlying data is reliable. Involve people close to the work because they often understand the practical responses a rule could produce.
Where feasible, test the change in a bounded setting. That might involve revising a team’s review criteria, changing how commercial exceptions are approved, or reserving capacity for a defined customer problem. Not every intervention needs to begin with compensation.
Evaluate behaviour and outcomes together. Did the integration work receive an explicit decision? Did teams cooperate earlier? Did customers experience a useful improvement? Did the change create new pressure elsewhere? These questions provide more information than whether the target rose.
Allow enough time for relevant evidence while keeping early problems visible. Customer retention may take time to assess, whereas a new approval bottleneck can appear immediately. Review both without demanding that a long-term result improve at every short-term check.
Make Management Behaviour Part of the Arrangement
Staff will interpret a change through what managers subsequently do. A leader who endorses the integration priority but repeatedly reallocates its staff without revising the commitment makes the priority less credible. A manager who recognises preventive work and accepts the agreed effect on feature delivery provides a more consistent signal.
The same applies when evidence changes. If the integration fix proves less valuable than expected, leadership should be willing to reconsider it. Supporting a strategy does not mean protecting every initiative from scrutiny or asking staff to preserve a measure after its meaning has weakened.
Keep the reasoning visible: what the company is trying to improve, which choices it expects people to make, and how conflicting commitments will be resolved. Staff should be able to raise a case that does not fit without being assumed to lack commitment.
Incentives support strategy when the desired choice is understandable, feasible, and fairly assessed. They compete with it when people are asked to accept one set of responsibilities while being rewarded or pressured according to another. Identifying that conflict in ordinary decisions gives the organisation something concrete to change.
