Recognition from outside is not feedback. It responds to what you have shown, not to how you make decisions. And the louder it gets, the fewer people around you dare to say what they really see.
In 2013 the trade journal American Banker named John Stumpf, chief executive of Wells Fargo, Banker of the Year.12 In the same period it named Carrie Tolstedt, who ran the bank’s retail division, the most powerful woman in banking.1
Read that sequence again. The award for the most powerful woman in banking went to the head of exactly the division where all of it was happening.
Under pressure from sales targets, employees in that division opened accounts that customers had never asked for. There were two million of them.3 They did not do it out of greed. They had targets that could not be met any other way, and they knew what would happen if they missed them.
In September 2016 the bank was fined 185 million dollars and dismissed 5,300 people. Stumpf resigned in October and gave back $41 million in unpaid compensation.1 The final settlement reached three billion dollars in 2020.
Those awards were not a mistake. They were an accurate response to what those people saw. They saw nothing.
None of the judges sat in the meeting where the sales targets were set. None of them spoke to the branch banker who had to meet them. They assessed what they were shown. That is no criticism of the juries. It is a description of what an award of this kind can measure at all. It measures results and it measures impressions. It does not measure how those results came about, because it has no access to that.
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