Activism changes shape.

I am indebted to Charlotte Moore, CEO of SIGWATCH, the proactive pressure intelligence group, for sharing highlights from a new report from Foreign Affairs entitled The End of the Age of NGOs? 

The big players of the NGO world, such as the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace and Amnesty International, have morphed into corporate giants, with ballooning costs, global workforces and established relationships with governments and business. (Ironically, emulating the organisations they initially ‘despised’.)

Where their power and influence once seemed unstoppable, as they worked to create a new global order, today they are in decline. Indeed, many are struggling to stay relevant in a society where the public views them as less ethical than business, donations are being slashed and authoritarian governments are restricting their powers.

These NGOs’ capacity to set the agenda has diminished. But any company sighing with relief that the days of activist scrutiny are over, should think again. As Britain’s other water companies can attest: activism can spring up anywhere. Who would have thought that 80s pop star Feargal Sharkey would become a scourge of the industry?

And, according to SIGWATCH, the number of NGOs/activists is mushrooming. Today, it tracks more than 13,000 organisations, a number that is rising by around 50 new entrants every month. The era of predictable campaigning activism is no more.

Moore believes today’s activists fall into one of four buckets.

There’s the digital first campaigners, with activism that can go viral within days. The bad news for their targets is that they often lack formal leadership, making it difficult to enter into dialogue.

There are the shareholder activists, who buy stakes in companies. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but where once a disgruntled customer or employee might buy a share to raise their personal gripe at an annual meeting, today’s shareholder activists use their investor rights to force climate, governance, or human rights resolutions.

Influencer-led consumer advocacy can rally large audiences to demand change. Robbie Starbuck, the American conservative social media activist, epitomises this group. He has successfully forced American companies, such as Target, Harley-Davison and brewers Molson Coors, to roll back their DEI policies. Initially, he targeted companies with large conservative customer bases, but today he spreads the ‘love’. It has been said that a phone call from Starbuck is now enough to effect change, as companies seek to avoid a customer boycott.

And finally, there is grassroots legal activism, where small, specialised groups file strategic lawsuits to set precedent or delay projects.

One issue for organisations targeted by this new wave of activism is that it can become a game of Whack a Mole. The recent TV documentary on Thames Water revealed myriad localised activist groups along the river. They may have a common cause but each might pursue a different approach.

As Moore points out: ‘Fragmented actors are harder to monitor. Traditional stakeholder mapping misses diffuse networks or digitally coordinated campaigns.’ The other is that the new players can be ‘less predictable and more confrontational’.

They’re scrappy. They’re less beholden to donations. They take higher-risk, higher-impact actions. Remember Just Stop Oil throwing tomato soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflower painting or when members glued themselves to a road in Central London?

In short, the old ways of communicating with NGO stakeholders needs to be rethought.

SOCIAL MEDIA

CEOs neglect LinkedIn at their peril

Much excitement on LinkedIn at the news that PayPal is looking for a ‘Head of CEO Content’ on a salary of up to $236,500 per annum. (Can a Brit apply, she wonders, dusting down her CV.)

I’m surprised by the buzz. Do we really believe that busy CEOs are carving out time each day to post their own content? Admittedly, some might. I doubt Jon Gray, chief operating officer at private equity giant Blackstone, employed a professional videographer for his 30-second update, while on an early morning run in Melbourne in April.

While few will have a dedicated team of nine (as one former CEO of an energy company reportedly enjoyed), most are likely to have some form of official scribe, who captures their ‘authentic voice’.

Nowhere is that more important than on LinkedIn. At lunch with Katie Buckett, co-founder of OneFifty Consultancy, she argues that it’s the platform where CEOs can own their own narrative, reach core audiences directly and amplify the brand more effectively than corporate pages can.

In contrast to traditional media, which is shrinking and offering fewer opportunities for business leaders’ voices to be heard, LinkedIn is growing. It had 1.2 billion active users in January. Now, obviously not all of them are reading your CEO’s pearls of wisdom, but journalists are increasingly sourcing stories from the platform.

People, Buckett says, perform better than pages. CEOs and other leaders may have fewer than ten per cent of the followers that their company pages enjoy, but they generate, on average, 35% more engagement. ‘You won’t win on LinkedIn as a brand without activating your people,’ she explains. ‘And the CEO or senior leaders are by far your strongest asset.’

And perhaps, more importantly, stakeholders expect it. ‘Employees, clients and investors want leaders who are human, visible and present, not just figureheads behind a logo,’ she says.

That view is echoed by Navigating societal issues on social media, a report by FTI Consulting looking at how companies communicate financial results on social media, which describes LinkedIn as ‘the cornerstone of digital reputation in the FTSE 100’.

Its analysis revealed that 92% of employees expect business leaders to use social media to build meaningful relationships with them. And at least ten per cent of comments on CEO posts come from employees.

‘There is clearly a knock on effect from employees, who feel confident in their own ability on a very micro level to post and share on social media, which means the story gets amplified,’ explains author, senior managing director Andrew Williams.

‘But, on a non-digital micro level, it also gives people confidence that they work for an organisation that is making progress, because they understand the strategy as it’s been communicated in a transparent, clear and consumer-friendly way.’

But the research also found that 81% of global institutional investors now expect the CEO of a listed company to have a public LinkedIn presence, with 54% stating that they would like senior leaders to share financial performance insights on the platform.

In fact, seven in ten (71%) said they would prefer to invest in a company where senior leaders regularly communicate on social media versus one that does not. Why? Six in ten claim it gives them a better understanding of what is happening in the business, while 57% say it gives them confidence in the management team.

FTI Consulting has produced the Reputation Engine Index, which ranks how effectively FTSE 100 firms use social media to support financial communications. Among its top ten, the average one-year share price was up 24.6%, compared to a FTSE 100 average of 4.6% over the same period. Now, Williams is certainly not claiming a link between correlation and causality, but… it’s interesting, is it not?

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

The culture conundrum

Culture does not change because of a fancy new mission statement. Nor because the corporate values have been updated. Empathy, anyone? Respect. And let’s not forget to embrace Customer-centricity.

As a new report from Harvard Business Review makes clear, culture only changes when it REALLY comes from the top with meaningful actions and substantive change.

Sadly though, in an analysis of 164 senior leaders involved in cultural change initiatives over the past 18 months, across North America, Asia and Europe, the authors found many still believe that culture is, at its heart, a communications issue, embedded through thoughtful narrative and internal campaigns.

It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, to discover 72% of companies that launched formal culture change campaigns since 2022 experienced no substantial improvement in employee trust, engagement or retention one year later. Despite all the time, effort and resources poured into these initiatives, employees viewed them more as performance than practice.

However, in organisations where bosses changed the way they led – taking on board feedback, embracing transparency, altering the way they ran meetings – trust scores rose by an average of 26%.

Culture fails when it is treated as a branding exercise. (Please stop marketeers saying they ‘own’ it!) Leaders’ words and deeds need to reflect updated corporate values. Employees are alert to any discrepancy; indeed, 59% claimed that senior leadership actions contradicted their corporate values on a weekly basis.

Is it any wonder that cynicism and apathy creep in? The report claims that the strongest cultural signals are those that involve visible, and indeed personal, risk. That might mean changing how incentives work. Or losing a top performer who has behaved inappropriately. Employees have to see action.

Sometimes, however, cultural change initiatives fail because people are afraid to speak out. Seven in ten employees don’t voice concerns either because they believe nothing will change, or they fear being marked down as difficult. Many, particularly those from marginalised groups, perceive ‘anonymous feedback’ to be a misnomer.

This silence is misread as consensus, when it is, in fact, discontent. The report highlights a tech firm that changed its approach to town hall meetings. Instead of being staged and scripted, employee councils selected and read the most critical questions – without any warning. On camera. In just nine months, internal trust scores rose 32%; employees felt their voices made a difference.

The report found that, too often, organisations try to bolster culture by offering myriad wellbeing initiatives, such as unlimited holidays or digital detox days. If there is little operational change to support such initiatives, they often backfire.

Rather than feeling supported, 57% of employees said they felt worse after the introduction of these perks. Why? They acted like a Band Aid over deeper problems, of which management were either unaware or ignored. Where organisations invested in structural changes, however, such as management training or clearer work boundaries, burnout scores fell 22%.

The final point of the report makes clear that it should not be down to middle managers to solve culture. Too often they are expected to cascade down new values or other initiatives, ‘translating intent into authority’, often with little training.

But the real issue is that, while they act to demonstrate new behaviours, those at the top do not. In one global services firm, 69% of middle managers felt solely responsible for delivering cultural change – yet only 14% believed their bosses to be living by example. Such a gap, between responsibility and example, is the biggest indicator of manager burnout.

Across every sector and region studied by the authors, they concluded: ‘Culture only changed when leaders changed first. Not in tone, but in structure. Not in principle, but in power. The most effective teams weren’t following a campaign—they were following a pattern. In those environments, culture was shaped by three levers:

Power - Who makes decisions, and who gets heard;

Risk: What leaders are willing to lose to live their values; and,

Modelling: what behaviours get demonstrated, not just demanded.’

FROM THE ARCHIVES 📚

How UBS rejuvenated its culture

I’ve written about many cultural change programmes in the past decade or so. And, one common theme emerges: they always take longer than expected. This is not a quick fix!

After reading the Harvard Business Review report, I am minded to reproduce a short piece I wrote in 2023 – my bespoke version of recycling: one from the archives – which puts some of this theory into practice.

Twenty years ago, the City of London was viewed as a cesspool of swirling testosterone. Investment bank UBS was a fixture of the regulatory body’s naughty step, particularly after rogue trader Kweku Adoboli lost more than $2 billion because of fraudulent activities.

Annie Coleman joined UBS on the day Adoboli’s losses were announced. After the arrival of new chief executive Andrea Orcel, she and a colleague were tasked with changing the culture of the investment bank.

For his part, Orcel shed troubling divisions, de-risked the balance sheet and launched a new strategy. But, as Coleman concedes, there’s no point in having a new strategy if the people don’t work and think differently.

A large part of making that happen is to make people take responsibility. Bad behaviour doesn’t happen in isolation. Bullies are rarely shrinking violets. People usually know who should be avoided in the workplace. Colleagues within UBS could see that something was wrong with Adoboli’s trading, but they either felt it was not their responsibility to speak out or were worried about recriminations. Culture is not something that is simply done to people.

At UBS, Coleman sought to demonstrate that the people were its culture, in how they behaved, in the decisions that they made. If people were to speak out, they needed to feel safe. UBS introduced a digital platform enabling mentoring at scale, which allowed people to tap into the wisdom of the organisation rather than seeking the opinion of their line manager or teammates. Junior colleagues asked questions anonymously, which were answered by identifiable senior colleagues.

Such anonymity removed unconscious biases which may have shaped potential responses, leading to real openness and transparency. But Coleman also gave people ownership.

Having offered insights into the negatives of working at UBS, colleagues were given three-month ‘sprints’ to work together to come up with solutions. The best ones would be implemented across the bank. Work life balance emerged as an issue. A team of younger bankers proposed ‘Take two’, an initiative that allowed everybody to take two hours once a week – to have a lie in, for example, or attend a child’s concert – as needed, with the agreement of colleagues. Flexibility became permissible.

In a world where hybrid working is now commonplace, it is hard to imagine how ground-breaking this simple action was. True change, however, is impossible without the backing of senior leadership. At UBS, Orcel regularly discussed both the strategy and culture, and – more importantly – the role each department, team or individual played in its delivery.

He also hosted annual town hall meetings where colleagues could ask questions or raise issues anonymously. The new culture also allowed leaders, such as Orcel, to admit they did not have all the answers. The historic top-down directive-style leadership had gone, to be replaced by a more collaborative, thoughtful approach.

But Coleman concedes that there will always be some people who ‘get it’, and others who will resist. She concentrated her efforts on those senior leaders who would act as cheerleaders, and champion the new culture. As this trickled throughout the bank, gathering momentum, it would – on occasion – force the refuseniks to adapt, if not change.

ODDS & SODS

Sadly, Odds & Sods is missing this week. I am in Dublin, preparing for the upcoming Corporate Affairs Summit in Ireland on 16 September, and it seems that my pre-prepared Odds & Sods failed to make it past customs -

it stayed UK-based on my desktop. It will return with a vengeance next week!

But it does give me the opportunity to NUDGE/SHOVE/PUSH/SCREAM for entries to the CorpComms and Corporate Reporting Awards. They truly are the celebration of the best of the best - so shouldn’t you be part of that?

And London, don’t be jealous of the Irish Corporate Affairs Summit! The UK version returns on 8 October. I’ll shortly be revealing the programme, but I promise that it’s a corker! Book here https://buytickets.at/corporateaffairssummit/1734090 It’s just £50 per head. Other summits may be available 😉 - some even on the same day - but I promise this is the only event to attend!

Back to full strength💪next week with details of our first Unpacked event - cyber, we’re coming for you! Plus much more….