The new director general of the CBI Rain Newton-Smith has now had just over two weeks to have a look under the lid of the organisation she hopes to save.
She has hired a business ethics consultancy Principia to review the CBI’s culture ahead of a meeting of its membership that could decide its future.
Newton-Smith has acknowledged the scale of the challenge. Tweeting an apology to those women who have come forward, the new boss rightly said “there is so much to do to win back the trust of members”.
On the plus side, there is an admission of failure, an acceptance of what has gone very wrong, not only in allowing such behaviour to go undetected by senior management but also in the initial handling of the crisis, when it “communicated poorly and ineffectively”.
The CBI concedes it paid too much attention to the legal aspects and not enough to the leadership aspects.
The group’s action plan to rebuild trust and win back stakeholders includes giving HR some teeth and delivering targeted training on what constitutes harassment or bullying. This is another welcome step.
But it will take far more than a compliance-led approach to address such serious failings.
The CBI needs to know what good looks like, not just the bad practices to avoid. It must place a lot of emphasis on reinventing its values and culture. This will be critical if the new director general is “to rebuild and reimagine” the organisation.
I would suggest three more interventions that would help to ensure this kind of thing will never happen again and that the culture will become genuinely inclusive.
Firstly, the CBI must change their mindset that competence matters more than behaviour. Every performance review or results discussion should look at not only what was achieved but how it was achieved. Behaviour should always matter and be openly talked about, good and bad. Leaders need to swiftly admit when they’ve got it wrong. From the top table to the new recruit, any sense of entitlement needs to be banished.
Secondly, senior leaders and managers need to be highly engaged and curious as to what’s actually going on at all levels in the organisation, and actively seek out information and views. This will only work if the leaders are acting authentically, and not as a result of the advice they will receive in the legalities of employment law.
The third point is that the organisation needs to train its people how to be better managers and leaders. Good line managers and leaders will develop their people, communicate clearly and appropriately, and support them. They create an honest and open atmosphere where good and bad feedback is encouraged.
A positive culture is one in which colleagues trust one another and truly collaborate. Professionally-trained managers are integral to improving workplace standards, yet Chartered Management Institute (CMI) research finds that 71% of employers do not train their managers. Sadly, the CBI is not alone in needing serious reform.
Recent research by the Fawcett Society and my organisation found that almost 40% of women have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace.
With many of us switching to remote working, the same report found that 45% of women had reported experiencing harassment online. Such behaviour is a longstanding problem.
In recent years, there have been high-profile allegations of toxic cultures at companies such as Uber and BrewDog affecting not only staff members and companies’ public image, but also their profitability. Leadership at the CBI face an unenviable task, but this crisis offers a lesson for all workplaces: how you treat people matters.
With women in particular continuing to experience everyday sexism, bias, and worse, companies and organisations that truly want to succeed face a race to find and train leaders who can build a workplace that prioritises trust, transparency, and respect.
