good news: you control powerful and cheap incentives

We often reach for the School Leader Paradox when we’re working with clients in other sectors. It’s so potent and memorable. But clients who don’t work with kids now or who haven’t been teachers in the past often find the Paradox unhelpful. For these folks, the thought that you might treat your employees or peers like children is aversive at least and offensive at worst. 

Fair enough. Here’s a different way to look at it: when you lead a team, you’re at the helm of a small economy. In this economy, like in any other, people respond to incentives. As a leader, you control incentives and you can manipulate them cheaply. In fact, the most powerful incentives we know of – the social ones – are the cheapest for the leader to set and adjust. 

To be clear: “cheap” does not mean “effortless.” Setting up and delivering those incentives usually requires a change of habits for leaders. They have to intervene in ways that may feel awkward. 

In tech and research-driven sectors, there’s a common view that leaders should avoid the exact thing we’re recommending here. They should refrain from social leadership. In this model, the leader is a technical troubleshooter who makes special appearances. They deliver solutions only when reports bring them problems. Otherwise, the leader should be pretty strictly laissez-faire.

The laissez-faire approach will work out by coincidence if you have people who are already outstanding at their jobs and deeply aligned with your interpretation of the organization’s values. Most folks who have led teams know that this is assuming a can opener. 

Entropy happens by default; alignment does not. Deliberately, proactively setting up your social incentives is a way to beat back entropy and secure alignment. 

-ben & eric