Wells Fargo’s paid $3 billion to federal prosecutors because of a fourteen-year failure of communication. That bank’s management communicated information in a condescending, emotionally laced, and unnecessary way. That created a culture where employees did not speak with transparency.
In the Wells Fargo scandal, the bank’s senior administrators urged its lowest level employees to meet sales goals that executives knew were impossible. For example, in a location with 11,500 potential customers and 11 other banks, the employee’s quotas were 3,000 new accounts annually and 12,000 daily solutions. When workers warned management that these goals were impossible without fraud, managers forced them to do it anyway.
If an employee failed to make sales goals, managers said the employee would be “transferred to a store where someone had been shot and killed” or “forced to walk out in the hot sun around the block.’” It led to those employees opening millions of accounts without cu
