People Aren’t Irrational - Your Incentives Are
- PG Geldenhuys
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
As a small business owner, I spent years stuck in an uncomfortable tension.
I wanted salespeople who were hungry, and I also needed them to be helpful. Core Value: “It’s about how well I do not my job.” (Thanks Rich Mulholland). Competitive, not territorial. Driven, not destructive. And it’s tricky.
So I did what most founders do: I tried to engineer the perfect incentive scheme, running the numbers and forcing it down people’s throats. Didn’t work, hey.
Every model looked logical on paper, and every model produced unintended behaviour in real life. Some liked it, many loathed it. And I made my life even more difficult. I blame Jack Welch for a lot of those early mistakes, truth be told. I feel I’m a bit wiser now.
I credit great mentors for my slowish evolution into semi-wisdom on this topic. Particularly Terry Munro from Beachcomber Tours (the no 1 company in tourism, and a place where the best people work, and nobody leaves). 8 years ago, with my (and my team’s) frustration at an apex, I asked him to be my mentor. He said hell no. But he did say yes to breakfast, and it was the most helpful 2 hours of my life at that point.
Our convo distilled to this:
“We tailor incentives to the role, the behaviour and the outcome. And nobody gets to have a bad day.”
I drilled deeper, and it turns out the incentives are carefully curated around the behaviour he wants to drive, underpinned by a relentless focus on culture. Fundamentally, if you’re at work, you’re on you’re a-game. If you can’t be on your a-game, take the day off. That simple.
That insight has quietly shaped how I think about culture ever since.
Whether we are talking Rassie, Cyril or Elon, here are some commonalities:
High-performance cultures don’t rely on motivation — they rely on design
Behaviour follows systems faster than it follows speeches
Alignment is rarely broken by bad intent, but by poorly thought-through incentives
In other words:
People are not irrational. They are responding perfectly to what the system rewards.
Take the Springboks. They don’t win because every player is a superstar. They win because the system rewards the right behaviour. And players trusting the bomb squad role even when it means less glory… that has been key. Less ego, more alignment. Last World Cup, everyone got paid exactly the same, from the superstar captain to the guys who hardly got onto the pitch. Players aren’t incentivised to shine individually. They’re rewarded for executing a role in service of the whole.
The flipside? SA Politicians in government on a five-year cycle. Career politicians who come from poor backgrounds are in a position of power and have their hands on levers that can make money for lots of people by way of lucrative contacts. They get their posts based on connections and patronage, not on merit and public trust. And in environments of poor governance where qualified audits are the norm, not the exception, where fingers are easily pointed at the “other” to justify or disguise unethical decisions, a lot of them end up “on the take”. The culture and the system support this behaviour, and the people they are supposed to serve continue to suffer as a result.
This week, I find myself in Guadalajara, Mexico, working with the Entrepreneurs' Organisation on a very fascinating challenge: The organisation wants to double in size, and the training community (of which I am a part) needs to be robustly capable to deliver on increased scale. Culture, incentives and systems need intentional design and updating to make that happen. What a great learning and serving opportunity for me!
In all cases, informal alignment collapses with rapid scale. This is where good intentions aren’t enough, and culture can no longer be assumed. It must be encoded.
This idea shows up everywhere once you start looking:
Atomic Habits → systems beat goals; behaviour beats intention
7 Habits of Highly Effective People → principles before practices
Good to Great / Great by Choice (Jim Collins) → discipline over drama
CEO Excellence → leaders design context, not just strategy
Traction (EOS) → what you measure and reward is what gets done
Scaling Up → incentives must evolve as complexity increases
Different authors, but same underlying truth.
Fairness, transparency, and consistency suddenly matter more than charisma. And once again, the conversation comes back to the same question:
What behaviour are we rewarding… deliberately or accidentally?
PG’s Pro Tip:
Before changing a single commission, bonus, or KPI, run this Behaviour-First Incentive Audit:
Inventory your current incentives
Financial rewards, promotions, recognition, informal praise, “hero stories”.
Write down the behaviour each one actually drives
Be honest. Observe reality, not intention.
Define the behaviours your product and strategy need next
Think collaboration, long-term thinking, quality, ownership, leverage.
Rebuild incentives across three horizons
Individual (daily & monthly habits)
Team (quarterly shared outcomes)
Leadership (long-term organisational health)
Only then do incentives become a force for alignment instead of friction.
AI Prompt for Execution:
“Act as an organisational design advisor. Audit our current incentives and map them to the behaviours they drive. Identify misalignments with our stated values and strategy. Then propose a revised incentive structure across individual, team, and leadership levels that reinforces the behaviours required for our next phase of growth.”
Design the behaviour first.
Let incentives do the heavy lifting.
And culture will stop being a mystery — it will become a system.
That’s when growth becomes repeatable, not heroic.
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