Leadership, she says, is demonstrated through consulting and listening to your workforce. It’s about modelling good behaviour. It’s about having robust measures for reporting and responding to sex-based harassment and gender discrimination. She wants to remind him that all employers now have a positive duty to eliminate sex discrimination, sexual harassment and sex-based harassment from their workplaces.
We didn’t have a positive duty to protect us back in the day when Darren Wick was allowed to roam free at Channel Nine. But everyone should have been able to trust their bosses to protect them from the kind of behaviour of which Wick – and others – stand accused.
I asked Leanne Cutcher, professor of management and organisational studies at the University of Sydney, about why so many chief executives and others adopt the stance of those three (unwise) monkeys. See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil.
She says it’s an evasion tactic. And no, I’m not accusing Marks particularly of this. I have no reason to believe he is not telling the truth that he knew nothing, saw nothing. But how does this happen time and time again?
Cutcher says companies too often treat complaints on an individual basis instead of recognising them as structural, endemic. A culture that is misogynistic enables this behaviour and also enables the person in charge to say: “I didn’t know that was going on”.
Loading
But I also run past her this idea I have, from personal experience, that some managers don’t want to know trouble.
She knows instantly what I’m talking about: “There is a kind of manager who it’s not actually possible to tell anything. They don’t want problems, they want solutions.”
Love that for them. Love those solutions, people! But seriously, sometimes there are genuine problems and employers need to understand that and deal with it. I mean on an organisational level. Don’t let victims feel so alone and so isolated.
So Cutcher also has advice for Marks. She says that the usual cliche when a new boss arrives is that they send an email to all staff that says: “My door is always open.”
“He’s got to mean it. He’s got to know as much about the workplace culture as he does about the television and radio ratings and which journalist has the most clicks. They need to care about this stuff at a strategic and organisational level. What is it about our organisation that makes it unsafe for these people?”
It is, as Cutcher says, not enough to say to individuals, “There, there, it will be OK after you’ve had a bit of a cry and a pat on the head”.
Just a reminder that I am confident Marks is not a patting-on-the-head kind of guy. But it’s difficult to fix a culture that’s so entrenched.
I wish him the best. I wish him a career with no chaos and I wish all of us a broadcaster that reflects a broader, bigger Australia and a government which funds that.
Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a regular columnist.