Leader Behaviour Is the Signal
The tie-breaker rule across Martin's systems and culture work. Organisations receive strategy through multiple channels at once: what leadership says (strategy documents, OKRs), what the organisation rewards (incentives, promotion), and what leaders do (attention, praise, tolerance, example).
Organisations receive strategy through multiple channels at once: what leadership says (strategy documents, OKRs), what the organisation rewards (incentives, promotion), and what leaders do (attention, praise, tolerance, example). When the channels conflict, and after The Barnacle Problem, they usually do, people believe the behaviour.
Why: behaviour is the costly signal. Words are cheap; incentive formulas are abstract; what the CEO actually spends time on, gets angry about, and celebrates is unfakeable and observed daily.
Implications:
- A strategy the leadership team does not visibly live is, operationally, not the strategy
- Redesigning incentives without changing leader behaviour repackages the old signal, the core of Culture Change Is Retail Not Wholesale
- CEO as Chief System Designer includes designing their own observable behaviour as the most-read system in the company
Diagnostic: ask employees what actually gets you ahead here. The answer is the real strategy.
Seam with the OKR system: the reason Empowered OKR Teams requires push-and-pull management, and why an Executive Sponsor who never attends a check-in has already communicated the real priority.
Our synthesis of Roger Martin’s published work, sources credited. Read the originals: they’re excellent.
Reading about method is not the same as running it. We install this system and build the capability that stays.
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