Scoreboard Leadership

Part Two of a series on transformational and servant leadership

Eight is Great

John Stumpf grew up on a dairy farm in Minnesota, one of eleven children, and went to work in banking straight out of college. He joined Norwest Corporation in 1982 and spent the next three decades climbing through it, becoming president in 2005 and chief executive in 2007, the same year Norwest's successor, Wells Fargo, was about to be tested by the worst financial crisis in eighty years. Stumpf steered the bank through the acquisition of Wachovia during that crisis without the bailout drama that swallowed several of his competitors, and Wells Fargo came out the other side looking like the safest big bank in the country. In 2013, both Fortune and American Banker named Wells Fargo the least tarnished bank of its size, and American Banker crowned Stumpf its Banker of the Year.

The engine underneath that reputation had a name. Eight is Great, Stumpf's own shorthand for a target that wasn't actually a fixed list of eight named products. In a 2010 letter to shareholders, Stumpf wrote that the goal was eight products per customer because eight "rhymed with great." In practice, the number got filled however a branch could fill it, some combination of a checking account, a savings account, a car loan, a mortgage, a personal loan, a credit card, or another banking product, whatever mix got a household to eight. He called the whole approach cross-selling on earnings call after earnings call, and framed it publicly as deepening the customer relationship. For years it worked exactly as advertised. Analysts pointed to Wells Fargo's cross-sell numbers as a reason to buy the stock, and the value of Stumpf's own shares grew by more than two hundred million dollars while he made that case to investors.

The number becomes the mission

Underneath the mantra was a mechanism, and the mechanism had teeth. Branch employees were monitored daily and sometimes hourly, their numbers reported up the chain to managers who pushed back down the same day. The pressure on employees is documented in the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency's own Notice of Charges against former Wells Fargo executives. It found the bank's business model imposed "intentionally unreasonable sales goals and unreasonable pressure on its employees to meet those goals," enforced through daily or hourly monitoring, subjecting employees to what the OCC itself called "hazing-like abuse," and threatening to terminate, and actually terminating, employees who fell short. The same filing found the resulting turnover ran close to 35 percent annually, well above peer banks, a rate the OCC called evidence the sales pressure itself was excessive.

A separate lawsuit filed the same year, reported by Reuters, named former employees Alexander Polonsky and Brian Zaghi, who said managers pressed workers to meet quotas of ten accounts a day, demanded progress reports several times daily, and reprimanded anyone who fell short.

Employees who could not hit eight through honest sales started manufacturing it instead, and the manufacturing was not evenly distributed. Employees used customers' personal identification numbers without their knowledge to open products in their name, and reporting on the scandal found the victims were disproportionately elderly customers and Spanish speakers, the customers least likely to catch an extra account buried in a statement. By the time the pattern surfaced publicly, Wells Fargo employees had opened millions of accounts customers never asked for and never knew existed.

Wells Fargo told its own employees there was a proper channel for exactly this kind of concern, an internal ethics hotline called EthicsLine. Some employees noticed the fraud long before anyone outside the company did, and used that channel to try to stop it. Yesenia Guitron worked at a Wells Fargo branch in St. Helena, California, starting in 2008. She watched customers end up holding products they had never asked for, telling CBS News she saw "people ending up with 10-to-15 debit cards that they didn't request" tied to a single account. She raised it with her branch manager first. Nothing changed. She escalated to human resources and then to the company's own ethics department. She was fired. She later described the fight that followed as feeling like "this little me against a big powerful Wells Fargo bank."

Claudia Ponce de Leon had been promoted ten times over a decade at Wells Fargo, rising to branch manager on the strength of her performance. In 2011, she called the company's ethics hotline with concerns about the sales practices she was watching happen under her own roof. She was fired three weeks later. It took the Department of Labor until 2017 to order her reinstated with back pay, six years after she made the one call the company claimed to want employees to make.

Both women used the exact channel Wells Fargo told its own people to use, and both were removed for it, years before Congress ever asked Stumpf a single question. Wells Fargo fired roughly 5,300 employees over the fraud itself, almost all of them tellers and branch staff earning an hourly wage, not the executives who had set the target they were trying to survive. Two of those employees later sued, arguing they were fired for refusing to do the very thing the company's own incentive system was built to produce.

Congress asked Stumpf to account for it on the record. He resigned in October 2016. Regulators later found that Stumpf had ignored years of warning signs, including complaints that had already reached his own office, and never seriously examined the sales goals he had spent a decade defending to investors. The finding named the actual root cause: the business model itself, the unreasonable goals and the pressure built into hitting them. In 2020, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency banned Stumpf from the banking industry for life and fined him 17.5 million dollars, the largest individual penalty the agency had ever issued against a bank executive.

Stumpf did not fail because he lacked a method. He failed because the method he built had no room in it for anything but the number, and eventually the number ran straight through the people it was supposed to serve.

What Scoreboard Leadership is

That is Scoreboard Leadership. Transactional leadership with the morality engineered out, the same removal Bernard Bass made to James MacGregor Burns's definition in 1985, covered in the last post. The number becomes the mission. Metrics stop being instruments for understanding the work and become weapons for extracting more of it. People stop being the point and become inputs, valued at exactly the rate they produce and discarded at the rate they stop. I coined the term and own the domain, ScoreboardLeadership.com, because this failure mode deserved a name of its own. When leadership becomes a game to win instead of a mission to serve, everyone eventually loses.

It is not limited to companies. It shows up anywhere a relationship gets reduced to output, though the clearest, most measurable evidence of it right now sits inside organizations, which is where this post will spend most of its time before circling back to what the same trade looks like closer to home.

The end state

Amazon runs an internal system called ADAPT, short for Associate Development and Performance Tracker, that tracks each warehouse worker's productivity against a rate the company does not disclose to the worker. The system generates warnings automatically, without a supervisor reviewing the case first, and can recommend termination through that same pipeline. Amazon disputes how far the pipeline runs on its own. A company spokesperson has said "it is absolutely not true that employees are terminated through an automatic system," and maintains a manager always has final say before anyone loses a job.

What the workers say

The people living inside the system describe something closer to the harder version of the story. Warehouse workers have testified that managers stay vague about what actually gets a person fired, which creates an ongoing sense of paranoia on the floor, and that breaks and injuries get sacrificed because falling behind the rate carries a more immediate, visible consequence than an aching back does. In one of the most detailed accounts on record, investigative journalist James Bloodworth spent six months working undercover in a Staffordshire, England fulfillment center and found that roughly 1,200 workers faced a ten-minute, nearly quarter-mile round trip just to reach the two nearest toilets. Workers described skipping the trip rather than risk being flagged for time away from the line.

Not every challenge to the system succeeded. Nicholas Stover, a former Amazon employee with Crohn's disease, was fired over what his supervisor called time theft, unscheduled bathroom breaks he needed because of his condition, and sued Amazon under the Americans with Disabilities Act. A federal court granted summary judgment for Amazon, and the Sixth Circuit affirmed that ruling in 2022, finding no evidence his termination was because of his disability and that he had not properly requested an accommodation even after Amazon asked for documentation. The case did not establish that Amazon's system was unlawful. It established how hard that system is to challenge successfully from inside a single lawsuit, even when the underlying condition being described, an inflexible schedule enforced against a documented medical need, is the exact thing the ADA exists to address.

A separate case has not reached that stage yet. Lashone Brown, a warehouse worker in Las Vegas, was granted official medical leave for surgery to repair two hernias his complaint says he developed on the job. Five days into his approved two-week recovery, Amazon's automated attendance system misclassified his leave as unexcused absence and terminated him. His complaint alleges Amazon's own HR staff acknowledged the error was the company's fault and did not correct it. The case, filed in 2025, is still pending, and nothing here should be read as a verdict on it either way.

Whichever account is more accurate, the direction of the incentive is not in dispute. Documents obtained by The Verge and cited to the National Labor Relations Board showed roughly 300 workers fired at a single Baltimore facility in one year for failing to hit the rate, about ten percent of that site's workforce. In 2021, California passed a law, AB 701, written specifically to force warehouses to disclose these quotas to workers and to stop penalizing time off task taken for health and safety reasons. In 2024, California's Labor Commissioner's Office cited Amazon nearly 5.9 million dollars for violating that same law at two of its distribution warehouses, citing tens of thousands of individual violations. Amazon disputed the findings and appealed the citations, with a company spokesperson stating, "the truth is, we don't have fixed quotas." Disputed or not, a law does not get written for a rare practice, and regulators do not build a case of that size against a company that was never doing the thing the law was written to stop.

Look at what is actually running here, regardless of which account of the last human checkpoint you believe. Definition, invariance, and grading, the same three parts of The Process from the last post, applied to a person instead of a football play. Every task has a standard. The standard does not move. Every attempt gets measured against it. This is what a good method looks like with the caring stripped out. It does not become chaotic. It becomes more efficient, more consistent, and much harder to argue with, because there is far less room left in the loop to argue.

The current condition

Most workplaces have not gone as far as Amazon. But the direction is not unique to Amazon, and the data on where the broader workforce actually stands says the ordinary version of Scoreboard Leadership is not the exception. It is the norm, and it is getting worse.

Gallup's most recent measurement found that global employee engagement fell to 20 percent in 2025, its lowest level in five years, at a cost of an estimated 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity worldwide, roughly 9 percent of global GDP. It is the second year in a row engagement has dropped, something Gallup had not recorded in over a decade before this. The year before shows the same pattern already underway. Engagement fell from 23 percent in 2023 to 21 percent in 2024, and the drop did not come from individual workers checking out. Individual contributor engagement held close to flat both years. It was managers. Manager engagement has now fallen from 31 percent in 2022 to 22 percent in 2025, the steepest decline of any group Gallup tracks.

The people whose job is to lead others are, as a group, becoming the least engaged people in the building, two years running. The stakes are not abstract. Gallup's own Q12 meta-analysis, spanning over 183,000 business units across 53 industries and 90 countries, found engaged business units run 21 percent more profitable and see meaningfully lower turnover than disengaged ones. Separate research from the Corporate Leadership Council found engaged employees were 87 percent less likely to leave than their disengaged counterparts. A disengaged manager is not a neutral variable sitting off to the side of that outcome. A disengaged manager is the mechanism that produces it downstream, in every person reporting to them.

The mechanism producing that decline is not a mystery, and it is not new to this post. It is the same one running the warehouse floor, moved up a level. A manager scored on personal output while also expected to lead a team is being asked to do two jobs that draw on the same hours. Leading takes time off task by definition, the unscheduled conversation, the person who needs ten minutes before a problem becomes a resignation, the pause required to notice trouble before it shows up in someone else's number. A system that holds a manager to full personal efficiency has built no honest path to success for that manager, because the two things it is asking for cancel each other out. In the language this series has already introduced, that manager's team starts losing Trust first, because consistency of attention is one of the earliest things people notice slipping, and Drift follows close behind it, the gradual separation between what the manager says matters and what the manager actually has time to attend to.

I have written about this exact trade before. In The Producer-Leader Paradox, the argument is that a leader forced to keep producing at full speed loses the capacity to actually lead, because the two draw from the same finite hours. DDI's 2026 Global Leadership Forecast puts numbers on what that produces at scale. Seventy-one percent of leaders report increased stress right now, and forty percent have considered leaving their roles because of it. Only nineteen percent of managers report having strong delegation skills, the one capability that would let a person do both jobs without burning out, and most of them were never given the time to build it in the first place.

What it costs

Guitron and Ponce de Leon are the answer to a question this piece has not asked directly yet. What happens to the discretionary effort, the honest warning, the willingness to flag a problem before it becomes a scandal, inside a system built entirely around a number. It gets fired. Both women gave Wells Fargo exactly what a healthy organization should want most from the people closest to the work, an early, internal, correctable signal that something was going wrong. The system had no place to put that signal except out the door, because the system was never built to reward anything but the number going up.

Here is the part no scoreboard can show, because it was never built to measure it. Discretionary effort, the extra care, the honest warning, the willingness to stay late without being told, only ever flows toward earned authority. It has never once flowed toward a rate. Wells Fargo could replace 5,300 employees. Amazon can replace the ten percent it loses every year in Baltimore alone. What neither company can buy back is the trust of the employees who stayed, and learned exactly how much the company was willing to sacrifice to hit a number.

This pattern is not contained to the office.

It shows up in a marriage run on the assumption that everything is fine as long as the checks clear. I have heard a wife say the actual sentence out loud: I don't care what he does as long as the checks clear. Provision has replaced partnership as the whole language of care, and both people can point to the bank statement as proof nothing is wrong long after something already is.

It shows up in a friendship that flips to enmity the moment it stops paying out socially. I have lived this one myself. A friendship I trusted turned out to run entirely on what I could provide, introductions, favors, money, and the day I stopped supplying it, the friendship ended with it. I was never his friend. I was his bank, and once the withdrawals stopped, so did the relationship.

It shows up in a parent who measures a child's worth against a path the child never actually chose. It looks like a parent who wanted a doctor or an attorney and got a chef or a musician instead, and started grading the child's life against the credential that never showed up rather than the person who actually did. The relationship narrows to whether the milestones are being hit on schedule, and the child either produces on time or falls short of a scoreboard he never agreed to play on.

None of those relationships announce themselves as transactional. They just quietly start running on a ledger instead of a bond, and the person on the other side of the ledger tends to figure that out long before the one holding the pen does.

Where this leads

Scoreboard Leadership is not always cruel in intent. Stumpf did not build Eight is Great to hurt anyone. He built it because a number is simpler to manage than a person, easier to defend in a boardroom, easier to point to when investors ask why the stock keeps climbing. A rate does not have a bad week. It does not need a hard conversation. It does not require a leader to sit with someone else's pain long enough to actually understand it. That is exactly what makes it so easy to trust, and exactly why it is not trustworthy at all.

That is why it can win for a while. Wells Fargo posted strong numbers for years before anyone official said the word fraud out loud. Compliance is real and it is fast. What it cannot do is sustain itself, because compliance is the only thing it was ever built to produce, and it runs out the moment the person complying finds a door, or in Wells Fargo's case, the moment enough of them decide fraud is a smaller risk than losing the job.

And it does not end at silence. Silence is the leading indicator, the thing you can hear happening before the real cost shows up. The real cost is a pipeline that stops producing leaders capable of anything but running the scoreboard themselves. Seventy-seven percent of Chief Human Resources Officers say they lack confidence in their bench strength for critical roles, which means the people who would eventually replace a manager burning out under this system are not being developed either, because nobody in the chain has time off task left to develop them. The scoreboard does not just cost the organization the people it grinds down today. It costs the organization the leaders it needed for next year, and the year after that.

Stumpf held the pen for over a decade before the ledger caught up to him. He paid 17.5 million dollars and lost his career and his name in the industry he had spent his whole life inside. Guitron and Ponce de Leon lost their jobs years earlier, for doing the one thing that could have stopped all of it before it reached that scale, and no fine was ever paid to them. Amazon is still holding the pen today. The number always feels safer to the person running it, right up until the moment it fails, and by then the people who could have told him it was failing have already stopped saying anything at all, and the people who could have replaced him were never given the room to become ready.

That collapse, not just the silence, is where Part Three picks up.