How Leaders Close The Strategy Gap By Changing Goals, Rewards, and Permissions All Together
If the incentive structure still rewards the opposite behavior, people will follow it. They're complying with the system you created for them.
Conny Lin
Principal
Conny Lin Consulting
When a company announces a brand new direction at an all-hands, it expects behavior to follow. However, the performance review cycle, the bonus formula, and the promotion criteria stay the same in many cases, still rewarding the old, outdated standards. Employees tend to act on whatever version has money attached, and this result gets read as resistance, although they’re following rules the company hasn’t changed.
Conny Lin is Principal at Conny Lin Consulting, where she advises organizations on strategy, governance, and organizational design. She also serves as Development Director II at Electronic Arts, running cross-functional planning across globally distributed teams. Lin holds a PhD in neuroscience and an MBA, and has set strategy at board level and executed it from the middle across government, academia, nonprofits, and technology. She also serves as Executive Director of HirePhD Career Society.
“If the incentive structure still rewards the opposite behavior, people will follow it. They’re complying with the system you created for them,” says Lin. A manager asked to collaborate across teams while being rated on their own team’s output will protect that rating. Lin calls this a system problem, since the manager and the executive who set the direction are both following arrangements the company made earlier. Changing the outcome means changing those arrangements, and she starts with how the goals get set.
Permission to change the goal
Most companies turn a strategy into objectives and key results, then measure teams against them until the cycle closes. An OKR rests on what the company believed about the market when it was written. “If an OKR was set in a way that’s too rigid, it’s not adaptive to the change of time,” says Lin. “We know it didn’t make sense, but do we have time to go back and change it? No. So we’re still trying to hit it.”
Lin puts the fix at the start of the cycle. A team that knows it can reopen a goal from the outset will raise the problem while there’s still time to act on it. The same permission offered near the review date arrives after the work is already spent. “You need to give people the permission to feel that if the OKR doesn’t make sense anymore, they’re allowed to bring it up and request to change things,” explains Lin.
Whether a goal holds up over the long term depends on who was consulted before it was written. Lin doesn’t expect executives at a large company to consult everyone, and she points them toward the few who know the operational detail behind it. The way each manager approaches the question determines whether they get a real answer. “Each layer should be asking their people, ‘Does this make sense to you?'” notes Lin. “Not, ‘I said this, what do you think?'”
Incentives vs. strategy
Consulting the right people may produce better goals, but it doesn’t change what the company pays people to do. Lin counts an analysis of the reward system as part of the strategy work. Leaving the old rules in place while announcing a new direction leaves employees with two sets of instructions. “When you set a new strategy that’s a little bit drastic, or you’re trying to steer the ship away from the old ways, you need to look at the whole system,” says Lin. “You need to look at the HR incentives, you need to look at their working environment, not just, ‘Okay, let’s go this way and hope for the best.'”
BambooHR’s 2026 Employee Happiness Index found that the happiest companies lose 46% fewer employees than the least happy. Satisfaction also varies sharply inside a single company, with employees aged 26 to 30 reporting an eNPS of 31, seventeen points below the 51 to 60 cohort. The report finds that engagement programs built for an average employee under-serve every group they cover. Differences of that size sit inside the system any new strategy has to move, and someone has to reconcile them with the plan.
Middle managers tend to absorb the mismatch. Lin has been in the role herself, and describes the position as holding operational information the strategy needs while carrying targets the strategy contradicts. The time spent bringing that layer into the reasoning doesn’t come close to the rework it prevents. “Change management will be easier if people are participating in the reasoning at the beginning,” adds Lin. “You can communicate a strategy in an hour, but you can’t create alignment in an hour.”
Trust decides who speaks up
Asking people for input only works if they answer. When a room stays quiet, leaders take the silence as approval and move ahead. The information that would have changed the plan existed the whole time, held by people who saw no reason to volunteer it. “I will run strategic consultation sessions for a month and get nothing,” says Lin. “And then when you’re actually executing it, they start saying, ‘Oh, here’s something, we can’t do this.’ Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
Whether people answer depends on what they expect to happen to the answer. Lin makes it a question of whether employees trust leadership to act on what they say. They form that judgment from what happened the last time they were asked, and one ignored round of feedback shapes the next. “If you don’t trust the leadership to listen to you when they ask you for feedback, you think they’re just going to ignore it,” notes Lin.
Lin has worked in a company where employees did speak up. Most companies hold town halls, and the difference at this one came in the days afterward. She adds that telling someone why their expertise is needed does more than simply opening a channel and waiting for them to use it. “The CEO said, ‘I’ll talk to you later,’ and he did follow up,” concludes Lin. “When you see that kind of behavior in leadership, you have trust in the leadership.”
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TL;DR
Conny Lin
Conny Lin Consulting
Principal
Principal
When a company announces a brand new direction at an all-hands, it expects behavior to follow. However, the performance review cycle, the bonus formula, and the promotion criteria stay the same in many cases, still rewarding the old, outdated standards. Employees tend to act on whatever version has money attached, and this result gets read as resistance, although they’re following rules the company hasn’t changed.
Conny Lin is Principal at Conny Lin Consulting, where she advises organizations on strategy, governance, and organizational design. She also serves as Development Director II at Electronic Arts, running cross-functional planning across globally distributed teams. Lin holds a PhD in neuroscience and an MBA, and has set strategy at board level and executed it from the middle across government, academia, nonprofits, and technology. She also serves as Executive Director of HirePhD Career Society.
“If the incentive structure still rewards the opposite behavior, people will follow it. They’re complying with the system you created for them,” says Lin. A manager asked to collaborate across teams while being rated on their own team’s output will protect that rating. Lin calls this a system problem, since the manager and the executive who set the direction are both following arrangements the company made earlier. Changing the outcome means changing those arrangements, and she starts with how the goals get set.
Permission to change the goal
Most companies turn a strategy into objectives and key results, then measure teams against them until the cycle closes. An OKR rests on what the company believed about the market when it was written. “If an OKR was set in a way that’s too rigid, it’s not adaptive to the change of time,” says Lin. “We know it didn’t make sense, but do we have time to go back and change it? No. So we’re still trying to hit it.”
Lin puts the fix at the start of the cycle. A team that knows it can reopen a goal from the outset will raise the problem while there’s still time to act on it. The same permission offered near the review date arrives after the work is already spent. “You need to give people the permission to feel that if the OKR doesn’t make sense anymore, they’re allowed to bring it up and request to change things,” explains Lin.
Whether a goal holds up over the long term depends on who was consulted before it was written. Lin doesn’t expect executives at a large company to consult everyone, and she points them toward the few who know the operational detail behind it. The way each manager approaches the question determines whether they get a real answer. “Each layer should be asking their people, ‘Does this make sense to you?'” notes Lin. “Not, ‘I said this, what do you think?'”
Incentives vs. strategy
Consulting the right people may produce better goals, but it doesn’t change what the company pays people to do. Lin counts an analysis of the reward system as part of the strategy work. Leaving the old rules in place while announcing a new direction leaves employees with two sets of instructions. “When you set a new strategy that’s a little bit drastic, or you’re trying to steer the ship away from the old ways, you need to look at the whole system,” says Lin. “You need to look at the HR incentives, you need to look at their working environment, not just, ‘Okay, let’s go this way and hope for the best.'”
BambooHR’s 2026 Employee Happiness Index found that the happiest companies lose 46% fewer employees than the least happy. Satisfaction also varies sharply inside a single company, with employees aged 26 to 30 reporting an eNPS of 31, seventeen points below the 51 to 60 cohort. The report finds that engagement programs built for an average employee under-serve every group they cover. Differences of that size sit inside the system any new strategy has to move, and someone has to reconcile them with the plan.
Middle managers tend to absorb the mismatch. Lin has been in the role herself, and describes the position as holding operational information the strategy needs while carrying targets the strategy contradicts. The time spent bringing that layer into the reasoning doesn’t come close to the rework it prevents. “Change management will be easier if people are participating in the reasoning at the beginning,” adds Lin. “You can communicate a strategy in an hour, but you can’t create alignment in an hour.”
Trust decides who speaks up
Asking people for input only works if they answer. When a room stays quiet, leaders take the silence as approval and move ahead. The information that would have changed the plan existed the whole time, held by people who saw no reason to volunteer it. “I will run strategic consultation sessions for a month and get nothing,” says Lin. “And then when you’re actually executing it, they start saying, ‘Oh, here’s something, we can’t do this.’ Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
Whether people answer depends on what they expect to happen to the answer. Lin makes it a question of whether employees trust leadership to act on what they say. They form that judgment from what happened the last time they were asked, and one ignored round of feedback shapes the next. “If you don’t trust the leadership to listen to you when they ask you for feedback, you think they’re just going to ignore it,” notes Lin.
Lin has worked in a company where employees did speak up. Most companies hold town halls, and the difference at this one came in the days afterward. She adds that telling someone why their expertise is needed does more than simply opening a channel and waiting for them to use it. “The CEO said, ‘I’ll talk to you later,’ and he did follow up,” concludes Lin. “When you see that kind of behavior in leadership, you have trust in the leadership.”