Aligning Workforce Goals and Creating Winning Cultures

Many organisations say they want collaboration.

It appears in values statements. It shows up in engagement surveys. Leaders talk about it constantly. Yet when you look closely at how performance is measured and rewarded, a different message often emerges.

Targets sit with individuals.
Bonuses depend on personal results.
Promotions follow individual achievement.

And suddenly the collaboration problem looks different because people are rarely behaving irrationally. They are responding to the system around them.

The behaviour organisations actually reward

Most organisations don’t get the behaviour they aspire to.

They get the behaviour their systems reward.

That system includes:

• performance goals
• bonus structures
• promotion criteria
• reporting lines
• resource allocation
• how success is publicly recognised

When those signals are aligned, behaviour follows naturally.

When they are not, organisations experience something familiar:

Silos.

Internal competition.

Collaboration that looks enthusiastic in meetings but disappears under pressure.

Not because people don’t care.

Because the incentives quietly pull in a different direction.

A familiar example

In investment banking - where I spent the first half of my career - collaboration was frequently described as a core value.

Teams were encouraged to work together across product groups, geographies and client relationships.

But compensation and promotion depended heavily on individual performance and deal attribution.

That didn’t make anyone selfish.

It made individual success rational.

You built the system to reward independence.

That doesn’t make anyone bad but it makes the behaviour predictable.

Why leaders misdiagnose this

When collaboration weakens, leaders often look for explanations in personality or mindset.

“People are too territorial.”

“Teams need to be more open.”

“We need stronger cultural values.”

But behaviour that repeats across an organisation is rarely a coincidence.

It is usually a design signal.

People respond to the environment around them.

If the system rewards individual optimisation, that is what people optimise for.

Even when they personally value collaboration.

Even when the values on the wall say “Teamwork.”

Culture follows structure

Culture is often described as the shared behaviours and norms of an organisation.

But those behaviours do not emerge randomly.

They are shaped by the systems people operate within.

Goals influence focus.

Incentives influence priorities.

Recognition influences status.

Over time these signals compound.

They shape what people believe success looks like.

And culture follows.

What alignment actually looks like

Aligning workforce goals does not mean eliminating individual accountability.

High-performing organisations still set clear expectations for individual contribution.

But they also recognise that most meaningful work happens across teams.

That requires systems that reward shared outcomes.

For example:

• team-level performance measures alongside individual ones
• incentives linked to collective delivery
• promotion criteria that include collaboration and capability building
• recognition for enabling the success of others

These signals reinforce a simple truth:

Performance is rarely a solo activity.

The leadership question

When leaders say they want collaboration, the most important question is not cultural.

It is structural.

What behaviour does the system currently reward?

And does that match the behaviour we say we value?

Because organisations cannot incentivise competition and expect collaboration at the same time.

Thank you for your interest in people.

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