In response to over two million fake accounts created at Wells Fargo, over five thousand employees lost their jobs, and it’s fair to say the bank’s brand took a big hit. And while it’s easy to picture these employees simply as bad people that needed to be purged from the corporate culture, it’s critical we know the truth. The exact same employees exist in every company, but maybe not in the way you think.
Not only is it statistically improbable to assume a high percentage of wrong-doers simply wound up at Wells Fargo, and how they all somehow colluded with each other on a massive scale, but a little background paints a different picture entirely. The negative employee behavior is a symptom of a larger problem.
The Wall Street Journal reports for over 15 years the culture at Wells Fargo has been obsessed with cross-selling and pushing products to such a degree most employees were uncomfortable. And while setting high sales goals is never bad, the way those goals are realized can be. WSJ details the immense pressure at the company, stating that employees who seemed to take the customers best interest at heart, suggesting only relevant products, were reprimanded. Branch leaders were even chastised on conference calls and threatened with termination for not meeting these goals.
Employees were pushed to sell eight products per customer. When asked why, the CEO of Wells Fargo, John Stumpf, stated “eight rhymes with great.” This flavor of culture doesn’t only make people feel uncomfortable, however; it could have very well triggered the employee’s bad decisions in the first place. When facing the stress of unreasonable goals from superiors, and the threat of job loss or humiliation simultaneously, research shows people behave in ways they wouldn’t normally.
In 1971 at Stanford University, Philip Zimbardo led a study with the backing of the US Office of Naval Research, which would later inspire Mario Giordano’s book Black Box and then made into a German movie called Das Experiment. You may be familiar with the US version, starring Forest Whitaker and Adrian Brody titled The Experiment.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a mock prison scenario where willing participants opted to be guards and prisoners. “Guards” were tasked to keep control, but for a simple study designed to document personality changes, it got ugly fast. The participants were screened and verified to be mentally stable but ended up breaking the rules of the study, violently attacking each other and psychologically torturing each other. The study quickly got out of control and had to be canceled within six days, despite the original duration being set at two weeks.
A simple change of environment, an increase in stress and an unreasonable request from a superior were the only factors necessary for people to act in ways not typical. When the pressure of failure became imminent, the participants went as far to injure others to maintain control and achieve their objective, despite them knowing they were being observed for a study. This data points to a very scary question: If ordinary, mentally stable people are willing to violently attack each other to satisfy a demand by an authority figure, how much more willing would they be to sign up a fake account, or two, or three (or eight)? And what if the threat of job loss was added to the mix? It doesn’t seem like an unreasonable jump at all.
While employees should certainly be held responsible for their actions and there is no justification for unethical or illegal activity, it’s important to know that the culture and environment leaders create for employees set the tone for how they act and how they treat their customers. If leaders respond to employees with empathy and treat them with respect, they will do the same to the people they interact with.but your reputation.
Justin Brady cultivates creativity and helps others do the same. Find him at www.justinbrady.me
This piece originally appeared in Medium, on October 11th.