Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
Shel Holtz, SCMP:
When conditions are right, employee behavior is shaped by what leaders say—reinforced by authentic values and consistent action.
More often, conditions aren’t right.
In many organizations, behavior is guided not by leadership messages, but by structural contradictions: formal systems that quietly reward behaviors that directly conflict with what leaders say they want.
Consider a manufacturing facility where brightly colored banners proclaim “Safety Is Our Top Priority.” Workers attend annual safety training. Teams hold weekly safety huddles. Leaders regularly emphasize transparency and proactive reporting.
Yet lost-work-time incidents continue to climb.
Or an engineering firm that recruits aggressively on the promise of career development—where managers are described as coaches and people leaders—only to see high voluntary turnover among employees two or three years into their tenure.
Or a consulting firm whose code of ethics is omnipresent: framed on walls, printed on security badges, reinforced in orientation. Still, rule-bending persists, costing the firm clients and damaging its reputation.
In each case, leadership communication is clear. The values are visible. Leaders may even “walk the talk.”
So why doesn’t behavior change?
Structural contradictions exist when an organization’s formal systems — incentives, metrics, workflows, governance processes — systematically reward behaviors that conflict with its stated priorities or values.
When faced with that contradiction, employees don’t get confused.
They adapt.
They ignore what they’re told in favor of what the system actually enforces.
In the safety example, the message says “report issues early.” The system says, “Reporting creates paperwork, scrutiny, and delays.”
You cannot reward safety outcomes while penalizing safety behaviors.
Employees hear leadership say, “We value transparency,” but experience something very different: “Keeping quiet is safer for me.”
In the engineering firm, managers are evaluated almost entirely on delivery—deadlines, budgets, and/or output. Coaching and development are invisible on the scorecard.
Employees were promised people leaders. What they experience are senior individual contributors with direct reports.
Feedback is delayed or skipped. Development conversations disappear during crunch time. High performers — those with options — leave first. The organization responds by recruiting harder while quietly lowering the bar.
In the ethics example, employees learn that rules are flexible when targets are at risk. They don’t learn what the values are; they learn when the values can be suspended.
In none of these cases are employees misunderstanding leadership intent. They are accurately interpreting what the organization truly prioritizes.
The issue isn’t that the process sent the wrong message.
It’s that the process told the truth more clearly than leadership did.
This reframes the central question for internal communicators.
Not: “How do we communicate this better?”
But: “What behaviors are we actually paying people to perform?”
Another way to define structural contradiction is this: When an organization asks people to believe one thing while paying them to do another — and then blames culture when behavior follows the money.
Internal communicators can play an outsized role in addressing structural contradictions—but only if they move beyond being message amplifiers and step into the role of sensemaking auditor.
That starts with a process audit, designed not to catalog workflows, but to surface contradictions between what the organization says and what its systems reward.
1. Start with the message, not the process. Identify a stated priority that isn’t landing: Safety is our top priority. We value collaboration. Quality over speed. Innovation matters. This gives you a clear claim to test.
2. Map the related processes that carry consequences. Structural contradictions live where consequences live. Focus on:
3. Translate each process into its implicit message. Ask:
Then rewrite each as a sentence an employee would believe:
If the system reinforces these beliefs despite leadership messaging to the contrary, you’ve found the contradiction.
This step belongs squarely with Internal Communications. It’s interpretive, not technical.
4. Validate through lived experience, not sentiment. Avoid questions like “Do you feel aligned?” or “Do you understand the message?”
Instead ask:
You’re extracting folk knowledge, not opinions and not sentiment.
5. Classify the contradiction. Not all contradictions are equal:
Only the first two are communication-adjacent problems. The third is something communicators must be willing to name — and refuse to paper over.
Internal Communication teams struggling for relevance might look here first.
The issue may not be unclear messaging. It may be messaging that is contradicted by design.
And if communicators don’t surface structural contradictions, we don’t remain neutral.
We become complicit.
+++
Shel Holtz, SCMP, is the Senior Director, Communication at Webcor, a San Francisco-based commercial contractor, and has over 40 years of organizational communications experience in both corporate and consulting environments
© 2026 Stratpair Ltd., trading as Strategic. Registered in Ireland: 747736
