June 8, 2026

Happy Monday, everyone ☀️

Good morning — and welcome to a brand-new week! I hope you had a chance to recharge over the weekend and are stepping into today with a little energy and a lot of optimism. ☕😊

Here's a fun thought to start the day: have you ever played a team sport where everyone was trying so hard to be the star player that nobody was actually passing the ball? Individually, everyone looked busy. Collectively... not so much.

Funny enough, the same thing can happen in business.

Today's post explores why measuring people solely on individual performance can sometimes hurt overall team performance. When everyone is focused only on their own scoreboard, collaboration, communication, and shared success can quietly take a back seat.

Because at the end of the day, most great things are built together. Sometimes the biggest wins come not from asking, "How can I do better?" but from asking, "How can we do better?"

Wishing you a productive Monday and a fantastic week ahead. Let's make it a good one! 🚀✨

— Ryan Rincon, Founder at The Wealth Wagon Inc.

— Aristotle

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This is not about rewarding high performers.
This is not about eliminating accountability.
This is not about teamwork being more important than results.

This is about misaligned incentives, and how optimizing individuals can sometimes weaken the system they operate within.

Most organizations assume:

But systems rarely work that way.

People naturally optimize whatever they are measured on.

If one department is rewarded for:

Another for:

And another for:

Each group may improve its own numbers.

Yet the overall customer experience can become worse.

Everyone wins individually.

The system loses collectively.

Teams begin asking:

Instead of:

Or:

Success becomes departmental rather than organizational.

Helping another team may:

So people become less willing to assist, even when collaboration would benefit the business.

When incentives are misaligned:

Each group protects itself.

Nobody owns the entire experience.

Ironically, the people who optimize hardest for their metrics can create the biggest side effects.

Because they are doing exactly what the incentive system taught them to do.

Because individual metrics are easy.

They're:

System performance is harder to capture.

So organizations naturally default toward evaluating people independently.

High-performing companies balance:

with

They often include:

This encourages people to optimize for the whole system, not just their corner of it.

This shows up most often in:

Ironically, highly performance-driven cultures are the most vulnerable because incentives become incredibly powerful.