Enterprise A-Z: Incentives
What People Are Really Paid to Do
You’ve aligned on strategy, you’ve agreed the targets, the messages are out. Then you watch how people actually behave – what gets prioritised, what gets delayed, what gets quietly ignored – and it doesn’t match the words.
That’s usually not about bad intent. It’s about incentives.
Why incentives matter so much
People do what they are paid, promoted and praised for. If sustainability isn’t reflected there – if it only lives in values statements and slide decks – you are effectively asking colleagues to work against their own structure.
That creates a quiet but powerful drag: leaders nod in meetings, then go back to chasing the metrics that determine their bonus, their progression, and their standing with peers. Until those metrics and stories shift, your agenda will keep feeling like “extra.”
What incentives actually are
Incentives are broader than bonus schemes. They show up in:
Formal mechanisms – targets, scorecards, KPIs, variable pay, promotion criteria, performance reviews.
Informal signals – what gets praised in town halls, whose projects are celebrated, which trade‑offs are applauded or frowned on.
Your work is not to design the entire reward system. Your work is to help weave a small number of clear sustainability‑linked expectations into mechanisms that already exist, so it becomes obvious that “this is what good leadership looks like here.”
How to start
Observe the real signals. For a few weeks, pay attention to what senior leaders actually talk about when they recognise success: revenue, margin, speed, client wins, risk avoidance, innovation, people. Where does your agenda show up in those stories – or not? This tells you where you’re starting from.
Pick a small number of sharp measures. With HR and one or two trusted business leaders, identify 1–3 indicators that genuinely reflect the sustainability behaviours or outcomes you want to see (not 20 new ESG KPIs). Then explore where they could sit: in leadership scorecards, in team goals, in promotion or succession discussions.
Tie one concrete ask to the next cycle. Choose a specific move – for example, adding a sustainability‑relevant objective into the annual goal‑setting template for a key leadership cohort, or linking part of a bonus pool to progress on a climate, human rights or circularity commitment. Time that ask to your existing performance and reward cycle, and be clear about how it supports what the company already says it cares about.
You don’t need to incentive‑engineer the entire organisation. You do need a few well‑placed, believable signals that say: this work counts when we make decisions about money, careers and recognition. Once those are in place, a lot of conversations you’re currently pushing uphill get just a little lighter.
