What Are Organizations Actually Rewarding?
The qualities organizations intend to value are not the ones they reward.
Posted June 2, 2026 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
Over the last 10 years at Uptimize, we have spent a great deal of time inside organizations, gaining insight into hiring processes, leadership discussions, talent reviews, manager conversations, and the many moments where important decisions about people get made.
The work began from a relatively straightforward observation: Different thinking and working styles were often poorly understood, undervalued, or simply difficult to fully leverage in typical workplaces. Much of the focus became helping organizations better understand those differences—often in situations where specific challenges had led to team friction, confusion, and HR escalations—and build environments in which a wider range of people could contribute effectively.
Over time, similar situations were repeatedly encountered, and patterns started to emerge. Employees delivering strong outcomes would remain under-recognized, while others progressed despite less distinctive contributions. People would often reach very different conclusions about the same individual. Decisions that felt entirely sensible in the moment became harder to explain when viewed from a distance, and that decision variability put organizations at risk (and continues to do so).
Initially, these moments appeared disconnected. Different organizations, different teams, different decisions. Yet the more we looked, the more familiar they became. Similar themes seemed to recur regardless of sector, geography, or context. And the overall, underlying theme behind every pattern was this: Organizations would often describe one set of values while rewarding another.
They would, for example, talk about leadership while responding to confidence , emphasize strategic thinking while rewarding verbal fluency, or describe collaboration as essential while favoring social ease and the ability to handle constant interruptions.
These distinctions may seem subtle, but over time they shape something much larger. What organizations reward eventually becomes what organizations select for. In the busy workday, individual decisions rarely feel significant in isolation. A hiring discussion, a promotion conversation, a manager interpreting one employee differently from another. Yet decisions accumulate, people notice what succeeds, and managers calibrate around it. Teams adapt to these norms, and employees become increasingly fluent in (and expectant of) the behaviors that appear to matter.
Eventually, what began as a series of small interpretations becomes embedded in culture. Once embedded, those patterns stop feeling like choices and start feeling like good judgment. This matters because organizations invest enormous effort trying to identify, develop, and retain capability; redesigning performance systems, revisiting leadership expectations, investing in learning and development, and refining hiring processes. Yet, surprisingly few stop to ask a more fundamental question: What are we actually rewarding, and is it what we want to reward?
That question feels increasingly important because organizations are encountering a wider range of thinking, communication, and working styles than ever before. Gen Zers, in particular, are far more conscious of such differences and more confident in raising them. Meanwhile, midlife employees too can find themselves on their own voyages of discovery around their own thinking style, sometimes prompted by a child receiving a diagnosis that they themselves never had access to.
Teams, meanwhile, are becoming more varied, and career paths are becoming less linear. Work and teamwork are changing fast, not least due to the rise of AI teammates. Organizations are thus asking another, related question: What should humans uniquely contribute in these hybrid (Human plus AI) contexts?
The answers tend to sound familiar: things like judgment, creativity , leadership, adaptability, and the ability to manage relationships, change, and shifting contexts. Yet these qualities are difficult to evaluate directly, rarely appearing in a neat, observable form. Instead, they emerge over time, through interaction, under pressure, and in the context of the busy workflow.
Organizations—and the people who manage their critical processes—therefore do what humans naturally do: They interpret, infer, and rely on visible signals as proxies for less visible qualities. Sometimes those shortcuts work—but in reality, at some point, they will always break down. As, fundamentally, capability doesn’t always present itself in expected ways. For example, good judgment does not always sound confident, and leadership does not always look charismatic . Strategic thinking does not always emerge in fast-moving discussions. Collaboration does not always look social. Potential does not always make itself obvious.
Over the years, we have repeatedly seen that some of the most capable people are not overlooked because they lack the capability and skills to do their jobs to a high standard. Rather, and more insidiously, they are overlooked because capability is interpreted through signals that only tell part of the story.
We have seen so many examples of this. The candidate who does not create immediate rapport in an interview but goes on to excel. The employee is described as lacking leadership because they are thoughtful rather than charismatic. Or of the strategic thinker whose strongest contributions emerge through writing rather than in real-time discussion, and who finds themselves unable to contribute fully in a meeting designed for more visual, verbal operators.
We have seen specialists repeatedly encouraged to become more rounded, more polished, or more generalist despite being exceptionally strong in the part of the role that creates the greatest value (when logic would suggest the latter be highlighted and rewarded; think of a soccer team vilifying a star striker for sub-optimal marking when their team is defending corners). We have seen high performers who deliver exceptional business outcomes and build strong client relationships through those outcomes—but who find themselves punished, and find their progression path blocked, for lacking polish, presence, or social fluency.
Individually, these situations could seem reasonable—but collectively, they shape who gets hired, who gets developed, who gets listened to, and ultimately who succeeds in a way that doesn’t truly reward what organizations are seeking to reward. Over time, then, organizations are not only selecting people; they are shaping what capability comes to look like. And that realization, and how to optimize for it far more effectively than most organizations are today, may be one of the most important organizational questions of the next decade.
As AI continues its march into corporate work, this question becomes more important, not less—given that where human contribution increasingly depends on judgment, creativity, context, adaptability, and relationships, our ability to recognize those qualities becomes increasingly consequential.
Perhaps that means there are questions worth asking in our own organizations.
What does capability actually look like here?
What gets interpreted as leadership?
Who gets described as high potential?
What behaviors seem to progress people?
And if we looked honestly at outcomes rather than intentions: What are we actually rewarding?
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Ed Thompson is the founder and CEO of Uptimize, an expert in neuroinclusion in the workplace, and author of A Hidden Force: Unlocking the Potential of Neurodiversity at Work.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.