I’ve had the good fortune of getting a lot of advice from folks who are farther along in their careers – either greater velocity, higher heights, more reps on the work, really a diverse crew of mentors and advisors.
During one of these conversations I was given the advice, to shift my thinking when it came to partners and stakeholders within the company, away from broader business goals, and instead try to focus on and get crisp on individual peoples’ incentives. Incentives, they pointed out, often illustrate someone’s motivation and behavior better than any other factor.
Teams at the end of the day are collections of people, and people (not teams) have relationships – but we have to remember that they also have motivations and incentives to do the things that they do. Especially at work, no one is a chaos agent, not really; folks are busy, and are trying to do the right thing for themselves, and for their team, and for their family.
I’m sure pure spite-based actions have happened, but the vast majority of the time, no one is actively working to frustrate or bypass you, your team, or your work. It’s true when we tell our kids and it’s true as adults: no one is thinking about you as much as you are. There is almost always a more parsimonious explanation that does not involve malicious intent. And, since malice and spite are not good predictors of future behavior, they’re not super useful in your mental model.
Like Heinlein tells us, we’re better off understanding and appealing to someone else’s self interest – similarly to how Ferrazzi describes co-elevation in “Leading Without Authority” (a great read for anyone working across multiple teams or organizations in any context), you have to understand what someone else perceives as valuable before you can start to explore what a mutual win would look like.
It feels obvious in retrospect – folks want to achieve a win, and we of course want to pursue our own success, but figuring out the way that those puzzle pieces can fit together can be much less clear. The problem of course, is that incentives are invisible. We don’t always even understand why we ourselves do what we do, how can we possibly hope to understand what is driving other people?
We have two kids (the featured image is us at Meow Wolf in March!) – they’re nine and seven. Our daughter, unbelievably, turns ten in May! They sometimes experience a flavor of this same social space. If a friend is unexpectedly unkind, or a coach or teacher says something that surprises them, we like to use the “Something Missing” framework to think it through.
“That doesn’t sound like something she would normally do – is there something missing that would help explain it?”
… often for kiddos it’s something like, having trouble with another friend, or losing in a game, and for teachers and coaches it’s often grounded in wanting a particular goal for the whole class or team. In a way that a lot of things start to stitch together, this Something Missing prompt also become a useful framework for me to think about my relationships in the workplace – “What incentive is missing here? What part of their landscape am I not seeing, that explains this behavior?”
Often the simple act of prompting myself to accept that there may exist some invisible factor that is not yet known to me, can be helpful to set aside my own (sometimes hurt!) feelings, and instead move into investigation and resolution.
Simon Ouderkirk 
I like this. Do you ever make a guess at an incentive and later ask to confirm it with the person in question? What is an example of an interesting incentive you’ve come across?
I always guess! I am getting better at it. Often you don’t find out directly but indirectly, from other people or observation.
I think one thing I’ve been surprised by is how important team size is to folks – the hardest part about incentive first thinking, for me, is getting out of the assumption that everyone has incentives that are roughly similar to mine. They don’t!