Two years ago someone said in a meeting that people were frightened of a member of your senior team. It was noted. The same description came up in an exit interview. Then it came back in the staff survey, in the free text box, where three words appeared forty times: “culture of fear”. You commissioned an independent review.

The review took four months and made fourteen recommendations. The board considered them, the executive prepared a response, and at the next board meeting the response was agreed and each recommendation signed off with an owner and a date against it. Eighteen months later one of the people who gave evidence to that review brought a claim, and won.

Nothing about those eighteen months was hidden from you. The people who gave evidence went back to their desks and carried on reporting to the people they had described. They watched the action plan appear on the intranet and made private comments. Some decided the board knew. Others decided the board didn’t know and were inaccessible. Eventually someone decided to escalate which is how you find yourself here. 

Dysfunction does not present itself in a form that maps neatly onto fourteen recommendations. It shows up as communication breakdowns. Decisions nobody will own. Resentment. People who will not speak, and people who will not stop. Defensiveness where you used to get candour. Decisions taken twice. Papers arriving already agreed, because the disagreement happened somewhere you were not. Directors who are courteous with you and candid with each other. A vacancy that takes three rounds to fill. A candidate who joins and leaves within a fortnight.

Then the staff survey goes out and a third of people complete it. The disengaged ones have concluded that telling you what they think is wrong achieves nothing. Middle management being right is not the problem you have. What they have stopped saying is.

So what do you do with fourteen recommendations that sit across business as usual, with friction over what they mean and who owns them, and no arbiter to help decide which one to address first, which one unlocks the others, and which one compounds the damage if you leave it until next year? No report answers that, and the difficulty is never the recommendations themselves; it is what happens when someone has to implement them.

We scope the work with the chair or the chief executive, read the findings and the papers that sit alongside them, and set a baseline against what the findings said. That baseline is our Organisational Repair Index®, applied at board level as Board ORI®; it measures expectations against past behaviour and current behaviour. It maps where you are and comes back as a conditions report you can act on, with the data to decide which recommendation goes first and which one produces a second event if it is left. We work with the people the review included and affected, and with the people responsible for delivering the recommendations, one to one and in groups, for a booked block of days. We future-proof the original recommendations, so what the review asked for is still standing once we are no longer in the room. Then we measure against the same baseline again, and you have evidence of what changed.

Write to [email protected] and we will show you what the first month looks like.

In the week where Cambridge University found itself in hot water, Nigel Farage won back Clacton and with it the standards investigation that had been paused when he resigned, the UK saw its deepest partial eclipse since 1999, and Kew Gardens recorded the hottest day of the year, the question is not whether these reports are valid, but whether their recommendations produce the change that is needed.

investigation of the week 🕵🏽‍♀️

Cambridge University has opened an independent investigation into how Jason Arday came to be appointed, after he resigned as professor of sociology of education amid plagiarism allegations, which he denies, and questions over claims he had made. The vice-chancellor has said it will be carried out by senior academics from within and beyond Cambridge, and that the findings will inform a review of how senior academic posts are filled. The appointment process is now the thing under examination, not the professor.

employment tribunal of the week 👩🏾‍⚖️

An employment tribunal upheld eleven of fourteen alleged detriments brought by an astrophysics professor at Cambridge University who had made protected disclosures about the treatment of female staff, with the vice-chancellor among the respondents. It found that a response issued in her name had been written solely by the registrar and presented to her as a fait accompli, and that ghostwriting was a consistent and concerning theme throughout; in one instance the person complained about drafted the rejection of the complaint against them. A tribunal loss and an appointments inquiry inside three days is not bad luck, it is a pattern.

regulator of the week 👸🏽

The ICO issued the Metropolitan Police with an enforcement notice and a reprimand on 5 August, after officers served unredacted documents on a man subject to a stalking protection order, disclosing the victim’s new address and telephone number along with the details of three witnesses; he later contacted her on the new number. The officer responsible for a second disclosure had not completed data protection training in over four years, and neither had their line manager. The regulator found wider weaknesses in policies, procedures, and assurance rather than two isolated mistakes, and set compliance deadlines at three and twelve months. It has itself been without a permanent commissioner since June, when John Edwards resigned after an investigation found a case to answer on conduct falling short of what is expected of a public official.

surprising intervention of the week 👩🏽‍🔧

Fifty policing and law enforcement leaders signed a joint letter to the prime minister urging every lawful option to prevent the early release of PC Andrew Harper’s killers, and asking that public protection be explicitly considered when release arrangements for the most serious offenders are altered.  Curious that fifty chief officers found unity in a fortnight when the injustice was about them. 

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Leah Brown FRSA is Britain’s leading workplace repair expert, fixing the things everyone else would rather sweep under the rug 🧹