You wouldn’t think that mandatory training on company fine print could come across as a beacon of enlightenment, but that’s how it did for me.

Last week I had to take a number of modules on internal policies and procedures. The whole concept of mandatory training remains a new and refreshing one, and on the naive straight-out-of-academia level it still seems startling that in a business where we are selling our time to clients, we are actually being compelled to set some of our contracted hours aside to complete learning tasks.

 Policies & procedures might sound as dry as it gets, and unsurprisingly there was a bit of grumbling from colleagues about having to devote time to it, but y’know what? I loved it. Absolutely loved it.

Here we had, in page after page, followed by test after test and completion after completion, a company spelling out its values to its employees and communicating how those same employees were expected to represent those values in the way they conducted themselves at work.

Controlling? Coercive? Cultish? Not a bit. This was the opposite. It was inspiring. 

The entire notion of an institution clearly broadcasting its values and policies to each and every employee, asking that they respect and follow those policies, and then using interactive (and actually rather fun) tests to check that they understood them seems nothing short of revolutionary to me.

In 20+ years in academia I don’t ever recall a similar experience. I recall contracts. I recall some directives arriving in my inbox. I recall some press statements, some commitments and fine words (MeToo and BlackLivesMatter standing out as recent examples), but nothing that actually came close to an implementation at the level of an individual. I don’t ever recall an institution focusing on me. I don’t ever recall having the feeling that an institution was sitting down with me directly, and taking the time to explain how and why my behaviour at work needed to represent a particular philosophy.

This was the absolute antithesis of an empty commitment, the antithesis of fine words but no follow-through. There were no empty platitudes here at all: this was a wholehearted, full-blooded commitment from the top. 

I’m generally a fan of bottom-up development, about laying the foundations for things and building a coalition, and I think if you’re looking to enact large-scale changes this is still the best way to go about it. You’re not going to get buy-in from people unless you’ve already got hearts and minds on your side. But the downside of bottom-up organisation is that it can easily be rendered impotent or fail to kick on to make meaningful changes unless at some point it acquires institutional support.

This is how tokenism comes about. You’ll get the press releases, and the inspiring words on websites, but little actual change. You’ll get the progressives being invited to set up committees and make recommendations and then these things will get politely but unmistakably ignored. You’ll get bodies being set up to support some fine ideals which are lovingly spelt out in every institutional brochure, only to find that those bodies don’t have any teeth. You’ll eventually get people leaving, having realised that they’re not going to be able to make the changes they want and were led to believe were required, because those with their hands on the levers simply don’t care enough to instigate a change.

These things are the opposite of what I experienced last week. Last week I saw strong and inspiring leadership incarnated in the driest and humblest of documents. This was top-down leadership as it should be practised.