The Culture of Collaboration

Getting High on Collaboration

        Is collaboration or competition in our DNA?

        The answer is both, but we enter this world collaborative. We are naturally inclined to work together to create value. But competitive organizational cultures short circuit our collaborative instincts.

        Lux Narayan, CEO of the data analytics company Unmetric, analyzed two thousand New York Times non-paid obituaries. In a TED talk, he describes how he used natural language processing on the first paragraphs of these obituaries and found that the word help appeared more than almost any other word.

        The lesson is that people want to help. Our instincts are to work towards common goals. Psychologists including Sander van der Linden write about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. When we are intrinsically motivated, we take action because we want to help or because it’s the right thing to do. In contrast, competition involves extrinsic motivation which is derived externally rather than internally. An incentive system that rewards sharp elbows in an organization is extrinsic motivation.

        The more educated people are, the more competitive they are. Our educational system has traditionally used extrinsic motivation to beat collaboration out of us. In high school, we compete to get into college. In college, we compete for admission to graduate school. In graduate school, we compete for grants and fellowships. We enter professions, careers and corporations conditioned to compete.

        In smaller communities where many people get jobs right out of high school, people are driven more by intrinsic motivation—and they’re used to working together. They organize fundraisers and cook together at the VFW, fire stations and churches. They help neighbors repair tornado or hurricane damage.

        It’s this type of attitude that we need to nourish in companies, higher education, government and in our communities. Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini lit a spark that is taking hold at Aetna. In a "corner office" interview in Sunday’s New York Times, Bertolini describes how drugs and Western medicine failed him after a serious ski accident. His success with alternative therapies propelled him to introduce yoga, meditation and an enlightened approach at Aetna. According to Bertolini, the CFO’s initial reaction was “We’re a profit-making entity. This isn’t about compassion and collaboration.”

        Nevertheless, leaders became more enlightened and began paying attention to the struggles of front-line team members some of whom were on Medicaid and food stamps. Aetna raised the minimum wage to $16 an hour and improved benefits. Next the company stopped giving quarterly guidance to investors and focused more on collaboratively creating long-term value.

        Studies show we feel good physically and psychologically when we help people. Psychologists calls this the “helper’s high.” There’s no research I know of yet, but I suspect there is also a “Collaborator’s high.”

Fixing Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf will testify before the Senate Banking Committee next Tuesday about the company’s sales practices. This word comes less than a week after Wells Fargo agreed to pay $185 million in fines from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Comptroller of the Currency and the City Attorney of Los Angeles. So what went wrong?

Well, I’ve seen similar disasters in other companies when the structure—and, yes, the culture—of  the organization encourages competing with colleagues and cutting corners rather than collaborating with colleagues, customers and partners. The key building blocks of the organizational structure are principles, practices and processes. We get clues about Wells Fargo’s principles from its written “vision and values” which include:

“Our ethics are the sum of all the decisions each of us makes every day. If you want to find out how strong a company’s ethics are, don’t listen to what its people say. Watch what they do.”

So what exactly did Wells Fargo people do to cost the company $185 million plus untold damage to its brand and reputation?

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Wells Fargo opened over 1.5 million unauthorized deposit accounts and may have funded these accounts by transferring funds from existing customer accounts without consent or through “simulated” funding. This practice generated about two million dollars in fees from 85,000 accounts. The CFPB consent order also states that Wells Fargo submitted credit card applications, ordered debit cards and enrolled consumers in online banking without customer consent. Clearly, this behavior represents at best a disconnect between principles and processes particularly the reward system process.

© John Doe / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

Wells Fargo’s “vision and values” cover everything from ethics to doing what’s right for customers. But written “vision and values” and mission statements don’t tell the whole story for many companies. Often, the real principles that govern an organization are unwritten. These principles manifest in break rooms, cafeterias, meetings, “off-site” sessions and sometimes during dreaded performance reviews. At best, Wells Fargo’s unwritten principles echo its written values and the problem is a disconnect between principles and processes that culminated in widespread abuses.

At worst, the company’s unwritten principles are something like “win at all costs” and “loyalty above all” which by some accounts were the unwritten principles of Lehman Brothers.  Lehman, once the fourth largest investment bank in the United States, no longer exists. Neither does Enron which embraced the principle of following orders without questioning them. The wrong unwritten principles or a disconnect between the right principles and processes can start small with, say, approving mortgages for people who don’t qualify and culminate in a near collapse of the financial system.

Many organizations espouse collaborative principles while short circuiting collaboration and value creation through reward systems that reinforce internally-competitive, command-and-control behavior which can easily morph into cutting corners and illegally fudging numbers. Along the way, trust dies among team members and ultimately among customers, partners, regulators and others. This happens in industries ranging from financial services and healthcare to manufacturing and technology. And it doesn’t help that increasingly team members across multiple industries prefer to interact with devices and computer systems rather than with their customers.

Why would the third largest U.S. bank by assets—and a favorite stock of Warren Buffett—risk its reputation by cutting corners? The most likely answer: to keep the squeeze on team members through a reward system that the bank believed would deliver ever better quarterly returns.

When I hear analysts and others suggest that a company has a secret sauce shrouded in mystery that delivers outlier returns, alarm bells reverberate in my brain. This is also true of financial advisors touting a particular investment. In 2009, Warren Buffett suggested in a Fortune interview that there was something special about how Wells Fargo does business. “The key to the future of Wells Fargo is continuing to get the money in at very low costs, selling all kinds of services to their customer and having spreads like nobody else has.” This sounds sort of like a secret sauce—and there go the alarm bells. Sometimes there’s a reason why a company is an outlier. Mostly, what Buffett was referring to is the Wells Fargo practice of cross selling which is simply selling more products to existing customers. It turns out that cross selling involved phantom sales. Wells has told some team members to stop cross-selling amid the crisis.

So how can Wells Fargo be fixed?  The company has fired more than 5000 employees, because of the illegal practices. But is the real problem these team members or the company’s principles, practices and processes?  Wells Fargo CFO John Shrewsberry apparently feels it’s the former. Shrewsberry reportedly told the Barclays Global Financial Conference in New York on Tuesday that the team members who committed the illegal acts were “at the lower end of the performance scale” and they were trying to hold onto their jobs.

Wells Fargo senior leaders are missing the point. The real villain is the reward system they created or approved that drives the behavior of team members at bank branches. This system apparently rewarded employees for opening accounts regardless of whether customers funded these accounts with new money. What value does this create? None. In fact, it likely costs more to open and ultimately close an unauthorized account than to do nothing. It makes little sense to blame bank branch employees for trying to retain their jobs when senior leaders have likely created principles, practices and processes that prevented more than 5000 people from acting ethically, selling products and creating value.

As its CEO prepares to testify before the Senate Banking Committee, Wells Fargo announced today the company is eliminating sales goals for retail bankers. Fixing the reward system without systemic repair may help for a while, but a lasting solution requires a more comprehensive approach. I’ve learned that trying to change an ingrained culture fails without changing the organizational structure.

The unfolding crisis provides an opportunity for Wells Fargo and many other companies in multiple industries with similar issues to replace an obsolete organizational structure while revamping the flawed reward system. This involves focusing like a laser beam on the key building blocks of a value-creating collaborative company: principles, practices and processes. Only then can the culture evolve.

Accenture Scraps Reviews, Rankings and Joins The Bounty Effect Bandwagon

Nothing impedes collaboration more than outmoded recognition and reward systems. And replacing annual performance reviews and rankings advances collaborative culture, behavior and organizational structure.

Many organizations promote themselves as collaborative while simultaneously reinforcing internal competition through annual performance reviews and rankings. This process squanders time and distracts the organization while pitting team members against one another. Performance reviews and rankings incent team members to hoard information and maintain hidden agendas rather than share ideas and work together towards common goals.

Accenture is the latest major organization to eliminate rankings and performance reviews. “Massive revolution” is how Accenture CEO Pierre Nanterme characterized the organizational change as quoted in the July 21 edition of The Washington Post.

In the Spring of 2013, Microsoft Co-Founder Bill Gates read an advanced copy of The Bounty Effect: 7 Steps to The Culture of Collaboration® which demonstrates why ranking team members falls short and how a Collaborative Reward System creates greater value than an internally-competitive system. Replacing performance reviews is the first of seven components of the Collaborative Reward Process (CRP) that I outline in the book.  In November, 2013, Microsoft eliminated rankings of team members. You can read more about Microsoft’s reward system shift in my January 20, 2014 post.

Many legacy recognition and reward systems are based on the premise that individuals have different goals and must be motivated using “carrot-and-stick” approaches. But in a collaborative organization, people share the same goals so “carrot-and-stick” performance reviews and rankings are obsolete.

So why do organizations persist in ranking and annually reviewing the performance of team members? The justification is weeding out non-performers and promoting “star” players, but the real reason is clinging to an outmoded command-and-control organizational structure. Remnants of this structure include not only performance reviews and rankings, but also organization charts, meetings and mission statements. These remnants inhibit organizations from maximizing value through collaboration.

Undoubtedly, more organizations will follow Accenture, Microsoft and other major companies in replacing rankings and annual performance reviews—and in adopting a more collaborative organizational structure.