Bill CanadyCEO & Founder, The 80/20 Institute · Be a Great CEO: Learn how to Fix it, Grow it, & Sell it.

Incentives: Be Careful What You Reward, People Do It! #shorts

29 Aug 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:48

In this YouTube short, the speaker warns that incentives directly shape employee behavior. He argues that to achieve specific outcomes—such as teamwork or lead generation—organizations must design commission structures that reward the underlying activities, not just the final results. Relying solely on outcome-based rewards assumes every sales rep will intuitively perform the right actions, which is risky. Instead, the speaker advocates deeper, activity‑focused incentive designs, like rewarding the number of leads generated, to ensure productive behaviors are consistently pursued.

Chapters

Careful what you incent because people will do it, right? So people do what you incentivize them to do. And so when you're creating a new incentivization, you know, commission structure, incent them to, if you want them to work together as a team, you have to incent them to work as a team. If you don't want them to work together as a team, you have to set up the comp structure that way. So everything you have to incentivize the activities that create productive outcomes. If all you do are incentivize outcomes, you're just hoping that every sales rep is smart enough and experienced enough to do the proper activities. So go deeper in an incentive and incentivize how many leads do you need?