How to get your employees to go to war against each another in one easy step

My company wanted to move faster.

"Why aren't we building new things as fast our forecast?" we shouted, shaking our fists at the sky.

Then we hit on a brilliant idea!

Let's add variable compensation incentive plans!

This was GENIUS.

People would work much harder if part of their salary depended on crushing their specific targets.

What could possibly go wrong?!?

Everything went wrong

People were KILLING IT at their specific jobs. You should have seen the laser focus on individual KPIs.

But we'd obscured the big picture.

Our goal was to move faster as a company, not as individuals.

Goodbye teamwork, hello battlefield

Every person … every team … every department … clawed, scratched, fought and stole to hit their numbers. It became a zero-sum game where everyone was perfectly incentivized to put their own success ahead of the company's.

We moved slower, not faster.

Don't incentivize for individual objectives

We learned the hard way that getting a company to move faster isn't about coercing individuals to work harder to hit their numbers. It's about getting the collective business to work in better harmony.

If your company isn't moving as fast as you want, look for places where there's confusion about what's the highest priority for the COMPANY—and incentivize everyone to go after the same company priorities first.