The Alternative Manager’s Guide to Influencing Your Team

This story is excerpted from the cover story from INSTORE’s January 2026 edition, “The Alternative Manager’s Toolkit” by Chris Burslem.

Challenge/Task: Influencing Your Team

Traditional Playbook: Most bosses rely on bonuses, awards, or inspirational pep talks to inspire employees. It’s all about carrots and sticks—throwing rewards at the goal or rallying the troops with grand speeches.

The Problem: Rewards can be expensive and encourage short-term thinking or unhealthy competition. Pep talks may spark excitement, but rarely sustain motivation in the long run. Emotions are, by definition, temporary.

The Alternative Manager’s Fix: Nudges. What if instead of pushing from outside, you gently guide your team’s behavior with clever, subtle cues? Think of nudges as tiny prompts designed to steer people toward better habits — without forcing or fussing. This method taps into how humans actually make decisions, making motivation feel almost effortless.

How to Make It Happen

• The most successful example of nudges is “defaults.” People defaulted into pension plans, two-sided printing, or renewable energy for their home tend to stick with it. In the workplace, an example would be automatically enrolling staff in a development or training program at certain points in their tenure, so growth becomes a no-brainer decision.
• “Salience” is something that most savvy merchandisers know well — like shining a brighter light on a high-margin item or putting a promotional item at eye level. In the staff room, grabbing a ceramic cup conveniently stacked next to the coffee machine instead of a paper one from the cupboard does not require your workers to think about saving the rainforest before their morning coffee. The less conscious the nudges are, the less they are prone to wearing off or even backfiring, regardless of whether the individual agrees with the goal of the nudge or not.
• Make teamwork the easy option — place shared tools or team goals front and center.
• Ordering and docs: Put preferred actions or upsells first in checklists and UIs.
• Auto-reorders: Set replenishment for hot sellers to avoid second-guessing demand.
• Dashboards as defaults: Use shared dashboards as homepage defaults so collective goals are always visible.
• Employ public recognition by celebrating wins to inspire everyone else to follow suit.
• Use social norms to boost accountability. For example, emails that state “85% of your peers completed X” as a way to raise participation.
• Public commitment boards: a visible tracker of team goals (sales, safety checks, learning hours). Pair with weekly shout-outs.
• Burn your boats. Or in our case, take a long leave from the store so you can get a proper restorative vacation. It forces you to put systems and policies in place, ditch ad-hoc email-based triage, empower other people with rules and tools, and otherwise create a machine that doesn’t require you to be behind the driver’s wheel 24/7. Once in place, such systems will likely stick.
• Use “sludges.” Sometimes friction is good (think speed bumps or beeping seatbelts). At work, you may want to set limitations to how quickly money is disbursed. Sometimes, you want your employees to resist impulsive or instinctive moves. “To do creative work right, teams need to slow down, struggle, and develop a lot of bad ideas to find a rare good one,” Stanford business school professors Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao write in their recent book, “The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder.”