When the big fish should make the leap
The departure of Debby Blakey from AU$ 100 billion Aussie super fund HESTA this week illustrates an age-old principle: the fish rots from the head.
This isn’t to imply that HESTA is rotten, or indeed that Ms Blakey herself was 'bad'. Her departure is the right thing to do.
What it means is that (to invoke anther cliché) the buck stops — and should stop — with the people in charge. If a CEO doesn’t know what’s going on in their organisation, it’s no excuse — they should know. The same applies to politicians: ignorance is no excuse when you are in a leadership position.
If this seems unfair, just think about the generous pay packages top executives take home — not to mention generous perks, incentives and bonuses. Yes, they’re paid to produce market-leading results, but market-leading results aren’t going to happen if their organisation is mired in scandal.
If the culture of an organisation is corrupt, or slack, this is a failing of the entire organisation — but mostly, it’s a failing of its leaders. They set the tone, not just in their public pronouncements, but in their day-to-day actions. HESTA’s culture prioritises the rights and requirements of the organisation’s members, which is right for an organisation of its type. But if actions don’t match the ideal, that’s all just lip-service.
I’m no expert on HESTA's IT failings, but clearly they got it just as badly wrong when they cut countless members’ access to their own retirement savings for months due to a bungled system transition -- in contravention of their comms to their members that the transition would be as seamless as possible.
I once worked as a comms leader for an Australian ‘government-owned corporate entity’ that was under investigation for gross gender discrimination and bullying in the workplace. I sat in on crisis comms planning meetings and was asked to give my recommendations based on my experience of similar cases in the private sector. I said that pretty much whatever the inquiry found that looked bad for the organisation, one thing was certain: the CEO was likely to have to fall on his sword.
That was because while I’m sure he was a nice man who didn’t have a sexist bone in his body, he had presided over a long-term tendency in the organisation’s culture that victimised women. He hadn’t done much to sort it out. The standard he’d walked by was the standard he’d accepted, to paraphrase Lieutenant-General David Morrison in 2014.
Imagine my surprise then, when despite the investigation finding that the organisation had “unacceptable levels of bullying and sexual harassment, posing a threat to workers' psychological safety,” the CEO stayed on. Five employees had to leave immediately, though, and victims were required to sign NDAs if they wanted to stay on.
Even more damaging from a reputational perspective, though, was that staff were anonymously quoted by the ABC as saying that senior personnel who were known to have been part of the problem had escaped sanction.
All that comms strategising ahead of the verdict was for nothing. Two conclusions come to mind based on these examples:
If the organisation’s culture or practices are found to be flawed, heads should roll.
Comms teams can’t make up for the failings of their more powerful leaders. In the right circumstances, we can move the needle when it comes to damage limitation, but if highly-paid leaders are found to have failed, there’s no strategy or message tree that can make things right. We may be spin-doctors but we’re not miracle-workers.
My message to senior leaders who find their organisation under the pump for rule-breaking or poor behaviour: own it -- don't leave it to the company's small-fry to fix systemic faults.
