Create Lasting Impact
The strategy is ahead of the organisation
Which behaviours does it depend on, and what currently rewards the opposite?
Which behaviours does it depend on, and what currently rewards the opposite?
The strategy was approved a year ago and the slides are known by heart. Responsible performance, decisions that weigh the client, the margin and the footprint together, transparency when the news is bad, long-term value over the quarter. And quarter after quarter the organisation does what it did before, because what it did before is still what gets people promoted. The sales incentive rewards volume. The project gate rewards speed. The leaders who built the current performance are the ones in the room. The behaviours that got them there are not the ones the new strategy asks for.
Sixty-three per cent of employers name skill gaps as the biggest barrier to transformation, by the World Economic Forum's 2025 count, ahead of culture itself. The two are the same problem seen from two sides: the organisation lacks the capability the strategy assumes and rewards the capability the strategy is leaving behind. People inside see it, and so do the clients, partners and communities watching from outside. They draw their own conclusion about which of the two is real.
What to stop rewarding, what to start building, who leads while the two cross over.
Culture does not change by announcement. At scale, the behaviours that persist are the ones that are rewarded, modelled by the leaders people watch and structurally reinforced by promotion, incentive and decision rules. The decisions the leadership team has to take are therefore mechanical before they are inspirational: which incentives change and when, which criteria enter the promotion process, which capabilities are built at which level, which leaders are developed, moved or replaced so that the strategy has someone to carry it in the moments when commercial pressure makes it hardest.
The work is Culture & Capability Building. It treats culture as a mechanism design problem first. It includes the leaders.
We diagnose the culture as it is: leadership behaviours, decision patterns, team dynamics, the gap between the stated values and the behaviour that actually gets rewarded, with the mechanisms that produce each named. For the CHRO this separates the capability gaps that training closes from the ones that only a change of incentive or of leader will close; for the CEO it says which of the behaviours the strategy depends on are currently punished.
Then we design the capability architecture: the skills, roles and learning paths at each level, from the technical literacy that responsible governance requires to the decision skills for trade-offs between performance and responsibility to the leadership capacity that builds trust with the people inside and around the company. We change what the organisation rewards alongside, because a capability built against the incentive does not last.
And we develop the leaders. For the executive team, the adaptive leadership, the communication when the news is difficult and the personal resilience the strategy demands, with one-to-one coaching by a Sightis Senior Partner built into the programme instead of bought beside it. For the pipeline, the strategic thinking, the accountability and the cross-stakeholder capability the next roles will need, built around the transformation the company is actually running rather than a generic model.
What leaves the room is the diagnostic, the capability architecture, the redesigned incentives and the leadership programme. The programme ends when the leaders carry the culture on their own.
In the case below we take an executive team whose ESG bonus pays out whether or not the target bites. We show the question the remuneration committee has to answer before the next plan: can the measure change the payout, and what result would reduce it to zero. The programme starts from that question, then builds the capability the new behaviour requires.
A sustainability bonus binds only when someone could have failed it.
ReadMaxime Ferrand, Senior Partner. Sixteen years at Enedis, from engineering projects to Chief of Staff, through a transformation that asked an engineering culture to become a service culture. He holds the programme: the capability paths, the rhythms and the leaders who have to change first.
Fabrice Macarty, Founder, CEO. He works with executive teams on the decisions where performance and responsibility are settled together. He holds the top of the house: the executive coaching, the incentive redesign and the decisions about who leads.
People and stakeholders are one of the five things responsibility protects performance from consuming. A strategy the organisation cannot yet carry is consuming them first.
Read the card in Our Approach: ResponsibilityThe strategy known by heart, the incentive that rewards the opposite, the leaders who built the old performance. Tell us where it binds and we will tell you where to start.