Editorial – Assessing failures of culture amid the fallout of the CBI scandal

Earlier this week, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) won a survival vote over its future following a string of misconduct allegations.

The CBI reported that 93% of the 371 members who voted had affirmed their support of its plans to reform the organisation, with its new director general Rain Newton-Smith calling the results, “a really strong mandate from our members“. However, coverage from the Financial Times quoted one executive at a company which has quit the CBI as saying the group has “a nerve” to claim the result was a vote of confidence.

Whatever your view of the vote, it seems that the way ahead is still not clear for the UK’s leading business lobby organisation which has faced claims of sexual harassment, a toxic working environment and two allegations of rape. Industry commenters have pointed to the need for the organisation to win over politicians and big business once more if it is to recover from the multiple body blows it has been dealt in recent months.

Broadly speaking, the insurance market reacted responsively to the allegations surrounding the CBI, with many top insurers and associations exiting the body, and coherently rationalising that decision. But as the tone of discourse around the controversy has evolved from a drip feed of shocking allegations to broader-level conversations around necessary reforms and a way back into the favour of government and industry alike – commentary has also shifted.

A #CBI hashtag on LinkedIn or Twitter will dredge up no shortage of individuals happy to share their 2020-vision insights into the oh-so-obvious mistakes made by the organisation. They point to the merry band of villains and fools that it takes working in conjunction to brew up a scandal of this magnitude, and the blend of complacency and complicity that it requires for a toxic culture to thrive.

That’s not to say these commentators are wrong. But these discussions need to be held in a broader context, swapping finger-pointing at the self-evident for an honest and open appraisal of where these same failures of culture are being carried out away from the glare of public opinion.

Make no mistake, these scandals have resulted from a breakdown in culture. And no business that prides itself on its culture can risk dismissing the graphic case study offered by the CBI of what that looks like when exposed to the light of day. A culture that champions accountability and does not shrink from culpability is as fragile as it is powerful and should not be taken for granted, but rather treasured and protected.

Culture has become a board-level agenda topic among insurance businesses of every size and scale, and rightly so. But whether it’s a question of culture, cyber risk or business interruption, companies run the risk that increased C-suite level scrutiny can lead to a reduction in the sense of ‘ownership’ of that risk across the lower echelons of the business. Every effort needs to be made to ensure buy-in across organisations and open up as many lines of communication as are necessary to allow every voice to be heard.

A root-and-branch approach needs to be taken to digging out poor behaviour and embedding accountability at the heart of insurance businesses – but fundamentally, this starts and ends with the individual. It’s one thing to be able to look back and identify poor behaviour by colleagues or breakdowns in the stated culture and values of your organisation. It’s another thing entirely to be on the front-line, pointing out those failures in real-time and running the very real risk of alienation or making yourself a target.

There will always be people who fall short of expected behaviours and no recruitment process or learning and development initiatives in the world can provide a fail-safe guarantee against these individuals. As we’ve seen from the discussions that emerge from failures in our police departments as well as our institutions – financial or otherwise – the argument of a “few bad apples” is often seen as discrediting, if not downright insulting, to the victims let down by institutional-level failures in culture.

But I would say businesses ought to take the “few bad apples” protestation not as a get-out-of-jail-free card but rather an admonishment. Is your culture so weak that a few bad actors can dilute it so completely? Are the fair or ethically-minded people who make up the bulk of your teams so inhibited that they can’t call out inequities they’ve witnessed?

Businesses across the insurance ecosystem need to engage in creating the right structures to empower the right behaviours as well as preventing the wrong ones. And the people within insurance businesses need to actively engage with these lest run the risk of becoming after-the-event prognosticators, able to predict only what has already been. Hindsight will always remain 2020 so it is better for us all if we focus on updating our present-day prescriptions.

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