Every company loves to talk about teamwork. They slap the word on posters, paint it on walls, and preach it in meetings. They say things like “We win together” and “There’s no ‘I’ in team.” But then, when it comes time to hand out bonuses, promotions, or praise—they reward individual numbers, not collective effort.
And that’s the problem. You can’t preach collaboration while paying for competition. You can’t tell people to work together, then build a system that rewards them for protecting their own turf.
That’s not a culture—it’s a contradiction.
- Most companies claim to love teamwork — but their bonus plans scream “every person for themselves.”
Walk into almost any sales meeting, and you’ll see it: charts, rankings, leaderboards, and bonuses based on personal quotas. Not team goals. Not shared wins. Just me vs. you.
Then leadership wonders why salespeople hoard leads, why engineering won’t help production, or why departments treat each other like rival tribes. It’s not a mystery—it’s math.
When people are paid to compete, they compete. When they’re paid to cooperate, they cooperate.
We love to believe we’re driven by mission, values, or purpose—and yes, those matter. But when paychecks and promotions depend on individual performance, that’s what people will chase. Every time.
You can hang as many “Teamwork Makes the Dream Work” posters as you want. If your incentive plan tells a different story, nobody’s buying it.
- Culture follows compensation. If you pay for solos, you’ll never get harmony.
Culture isn’t built in retreats or slogans—it’s built in payroll.
The quickest way to see what a company truly values is to look at its comp plan. If every metric is individual, you’ve built a culture of independence, not interdependence.
Want proof? Try asking a salesperson to spend two days training a new hire when their pay depends solely on their own sales. Good luck. Or ask production to pull a team off one project to help another group hit a deadline. If their bonus is based on their own department’s output, forget it.
Everyone talks about culture, but few realize that compensation creates it. You can’t expect people to sacrifice their own pay for someone else’s success. Not in today’s world. Not ever.
Culture follows compensation. Every time.
If you want harmony, pay for harmony. If you want collaboration, design your pay plan to make it profitable.
- Why sales vs. ops wars exist — and how leadership quietly fuels them.
One of the oldest, ugliest rivalries in business is sales versus operations. Sales wants everything yesterday. Operations wants everything perfect. Sales blames ops for delays. Ops blames sales for chaos. And leadership acts surprised—like this is some unsolvable mystery of human nature.
It’s not. It’s leadership’s fault.
When sales is paid for volume and ops is paid for efficiency, they’re set up to fight. Sales wins by saying yes. Ops wins by saying no.
And the poor customer? They’re caught in the middle.
The irony is that both sides want the same thing: a satisfied customer and a healthy company. But the systems in place pit them against each other.
You can’t expect alignment when your incentives are misaligned. The war between departments isn’t about personalities—it’s about priorities. And leadership writes those priorities into every paycheck.
Until you fix that, you’ll keep wasting time on “team-building exercises” that won’t build anything at all.
- The fix: align incentives to shared wins, not departmental victories.
Here’s the good news: this isn’t hard to fix. You just have to stop pretending that teamwork can exist without financial alignment.
The best organizations reward shared results. They tie bonuses to company profitability, customer satisfaction, on-time delivery, or multi-department goals.
When sales knows their paycheck depends on product quality and customer retention, they sell smarter. When ops knows their work directly impacts customer renewal and referrals, they care about more than just throughput.
Shared success creates shared behavior.
You want sales and ops to stop fighting? Give them the same scorecard. You want marketing to care about qualified leads instead of vanity metrics? Pay them based on what converts. You want engineers to design with manufacturability in mind? Include production yield in their performance review.
If you want collaboration, you have to engineer it—just like any other system. It won’t happen by accident.
- People do what they’re paid to do — not what’s written in the values statement.
You can’t manage by memo.
You can’t expect people to “do the right thing” if the right thing doesn’t pay. Every organization has its “core values” framed somewhere. Integrity. Teamwork. Excellence. But ask anyone on the floor what really matters, and they’ll tell you: whatever gets measured and rewarded.
If your values say teamwork but your rewards say individualism, don’t be shocked when you get silos, turf wars, and burned-out employees.
People follow incentives, not intentions.
That’s not cynicism—it’s reality. Humans are wired for self-preservation. You can appeal to pride, passion, or purpose, but at the end of the day, most people make decisions that align with their self-interest. Smart leaders design systems where self-interest and company interest are the same thing.
That’s how you get real alignment. That’s how you build trust. And that’s how you get a culture that doesn’t just talk about teamwork—it lives it.
- Common sense: If you want collaboration, pay for collaboration.
This is one of those truths that seems so obvious, it’s almost embarrassing we have to say it out loud. But look around—most companies still haven’t figured it out.
They say they want unity but pay for division. They say they want trust but reward secrecy. They say they want teamwork but celebrate lone heroes.
Then they hire consultants, schedule retreats, and wonder why morale still stinks.
The fix isn’t another seminar—it’s a spreadsheet.
Change how you pay, and you’ll change how people behave. Align incentives to collective outcomes, and you’ll stop fighting human nature. You’ll start seeing departments pull together instead of apart. You’ll watch silos fall, ideas flow, and productivity soar—not because people suddenly became saints, but because the system finally makes sense.
At the end of the day, teamwork isn’t a speech—it’s a strategy. It’s not a feel-good concept; it’s a financial design. You can talk all you want about collaboration, but until your comp plan reflects it, you’re just creating noise.
So here’s the challenge: go back to your organization and look at how people are actually rewarded. Trace the incentives. Ask yourself, What behavior are we really paying for?
If the answer doesn’t match your values, don’t rewrite the values—rewrite the compensation plan.
If you want collaboration, pay for collaboration. It’s only common sense.
