The Committed Challenege

If you work in an industry that focuses on meeting goals as the primary focus of your organization, then you are likely operating in the Committed Dimension. We see this type of culture prevail in sales organizations. 

But, as with any of the Four Dimensions, it is all about balance. When a Committed culture becomes unbalanced and overplayed, people eventually feel disconnected from the organization and feel their value is only what they produce. They usually either burn out or leave for a culture that values them for more than just achievement. 

For those businesses that need a healthy emphasis on Committed culture, let’s look at how their people would think, act, and interact. 

To start, the prevailing thinking is We can do this! Nothing is impossible if we set the right goals. Winning (getting results) is what matters, and success is found in beating the competition. 

As a result, leaders act by challenging everyone to improve, make the extra effort. When a team is aligned, they are motivated by achieving these outcomes and are willing to push each other for the “win.”  

Everyone measures their success with a given set of metrics, and achievement is rewarded. 

As a leader looking to motivate your team to buy in to the Committed Dimension of your organizational culture, recognize that there are some key motivating factors to leverage:

The challenge in the Committed Dimension is to not become so focused on meeting goals that all other elements of a healthy culture suffer. 

When a Committed culture is overemphasized, leaders begin to think achievement is all that matters and winning must happen at all costs. They focus always on doing more, better, and they rarely if ever celebrate what is already good. 

Relationships suffer because the focus is entirely on an employee’s outcome and whether he or she is making the numbers versus making an impact. 

When culture is driven entirely by high-performance achievement and effort, people can’t sustain it. For a time, everyone can rally around achieving a specific goal. The problem is when you win the Super Bowl, then what do you do?

Well, you could say that you go win another Super Bowl. But each time you do that, it becomes less and less motivating and inspiring. The only next thing is to set the bar higher, raise the sales goals, until people just get burned out.

A Case of Over-Committed

One notorious example of a Committed culture going completely out of control with disastrous effects can be found in the Wells Fargo account fraud scandal from several years ago (from which, at the time of this writing in 2022, they are still fighting to recover). 

It started with a “Jump into January” sales initiative set to motivate retail employees to start the new year strong by achieving and exceeding their January goals. What began reasonably enough soon grew out of control with retail employees pressured to sell and open an unattainable number of customer accounts. 

The goal was to aim for the “Great Eight”, a minimum of eight accounts per client. As a result, nearly 5,300 employees across the organization opened additional accounts for customers without notifying them. 

One example was a branch manager who set up her teenage daughter with twenty-four accounts, her husband with twenty-one accounts, her adult daughter with eighteen accounts, her brother with fourteen accounts, and even her father with four accounts. 

According to one report, “many employees believed that their future at Wells Fargo depended on how many products they sold.” This fraud controversy led to the resignation of CEO John Stumpf, an investigation into the bank by the US Senate, and a number of private settlements between Wells Fargo and various parties. 

There has to be a greater emotional drive other than just achieving a goal, which is when you need to evaluate the other three Dimensions of your culture and find a better balance. Here’s how you can make that assessment.