Martin Palethorpe, a CTT consultant and a member of the PRAGMA Group, has distilled the eight key lessons from Sir Christopher Kelly’s report on the Failings and Management of Governance–an independent review of into the events leading to the Co-operative Bank’s capital shortfall. Click here to see Martin’s summary.
Key among the lessons are:
Live your values
Make your values live and stick. Live them in all initiatives and embed them in behaviours. Translate your values into meaningful guidance. Make sure too that your espoused brand matches how you actually operate.
A healthy culture
Consciously and strategically develop your organisational & Board culture. The Coop had a culture that focused on good news, lacked accountability, tolerated underperformance, lacked transparency, discouraged challenge, and deferred problems.
Transparency, openness, debate, challenge, clarity & accountability are critical values needed in any successful Board or Executive team. These values will fundamentally impact how your Board works and how it makes decisions, which can be the difference between long-term sustainability & success and utter failure.
These issues come as no surprise to those of us involved in doing cultural values assessments and supporting cultural transformation.
Richard Barrett 