The bill has arrived.

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This week:

⬆ Up
The infected blood compensation scheme — £1 billion more, quarterly transparency reporting, and finally a feedback loop.

Tesco — first UK grocer to offer paid domestic abuse leave.

John Lewis Partnership — staff bonus reinstated after four years to put Partners before press releases.

The Post Office, Fujitsu, and the Department for Business and Trade — jointly funded five-year restorative justice programme with face-to-face apologies.

⬇ Down

Number 10 — pledged to restore integrity to government. Apologised from the dispatch box eighteen months later.

Disney/ABC/Hulu — cast a domestic violence investigation as a love story. Pulled it three days before air and called it supporting the family.

Oracle — laid off thousands this week by email and locked system access immediately.

👁 Watch

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office — will Olly Robbins be reinstated or is this where the road ends?

The Church of England — Wiltshire Police are now investigating fraud allegations into the Bishop of Salisbury

Thames Water — received £823 million in emergency lending, but there’s still no long-term plan.

There is a version of this week’s essay that opens with statistics of tribunal backlogs, compensation uplifts, and regulatory enforcement actions. I'm not going to write that version, because I know that’s not why you’re here. 

What keeps good leaders awake is a quieter, more subtle thing I describe in my TED talk. The senior person who presided over a mutual exit that definitely wasn't mutual. The board meeting where something was said, retracted and people were too scared to ask questions. The survey results attributed to the restructure, the cyber attack, the difficult year; when your people don’t trust leadership, including you.

What integrity actually means

Integrity in an organisational context is not a personal virtue. It is a structural condition: the alignment between what an organisation says it stands for and what its people actually experience. PwC asked CEOs and employees the same question about whether behaviour aligned with stated values. 15% of CEOs said it was a problem versus 39% of employees. We may think this is a communications problem but it would be better described as an “integrity gap”.

The Corporate Governance Institute's Boardroom Resilience 2026 report found that 85% of board directors feel confident in their board overall, yet only 35% have high confidence in their board's ability to address specific governance issues. 86% acknowledge their organisations must do more to address governance blind spots. It’s no good knowing the gap is there if you can’t pinpoint or shrink it.

The internal reality

When senior people escalate concerns to the board in writing, a defensive statement is rarely the right response yet it is almost always the first one. The Government's current difficulties with the Mandelson fallout are one version of something that happens in ordinary organisations every day, namely the instinct to move faster than trust requires.

EY's Global Integrity Report 2024 found that 67% of board members would behave unethically for their own benefit. That is not a statistic about bad people. It is shows there is a direct correlation between pressure and the inability for honesty to feel safe.

The case for integrity

Protect found that ignoring whistleblowers in just three UK scandals cost the taxpayer a combined £423 million. McKinsey's research across eight million respondents found that organisations in the top quartile for health deliver three times the shareholder returns of those in the bottom. Gallup estimates low engagement costs the UK economy £257 billion annually.

Most private company leaders I speak to are not bad people. They are people who made decisions that made sense at the time, or are trying to hold difficult organisations together under real pressure. The shame and the fear of being found out are not signs of malice. They are signs of caring about the thing you are responsible for.

The WayFinders Group measures the distance between how an organisation intends to function and what its people actually experience. Our Organisational Repair Index® gives boards a precise, evidence-based picture of what has been damaged and where. Boards that can demonstrate recovery rather than simply state it will lead differently, and be equipped to weather what comes next with far greater confidence.

The question is not whether you have a gap. You do. The cost of repairing is always lower than the cost of doing nothing. The question is whether you would rather know about it or wait until the bill arrives.

If something has happened in your organisation and you are not sure how much damage it has caused, that uncertainty is worth paying attention to. Why not request a confidential conversation with our team at [email protected]. 

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Leah Brown FRSA is the UK's leading specialist in organisational repair.