Honesty Is Always the Best Policy - July 2022

8 July 2022

By July 2022, I had spent years trying every avenue available to me. I had raised concerns internally. I had sought legal advice. I had lodged a workers’ compensation claim. I had contacted regulators. I had written to senior leaders. Yet the organisational psychological violence, the silence, and the institutional failure continued.

On 8 July 2022, I sent a short email to Professor Hayden Ramsay (DVC of Ethics). It was one of the simplest messages I wrote throughout this ordeal, but perhaps one of the most important.

I wrote:

“Honesty is always the best policy.”

It wasn’t just a statement. It was an appeal for someone in leadership to recognise that this wasn’t an employment dispute. It wasn’t a personality clash. It wasn’t a misunderstanding.

It was workplace mobbing.

I continued:

“Workplace mobbing is an example of the most common and accessible weapon of destruction human beings use: the tongue.”

Those words captured what I had been living through for years.

Psychological injury doesn’t always begin with shouting or obvious acts of aggression. Sometimes it begins with rumours, exclusion, repeated misrepresentations, insinuations, the questioning of a person’s credibility, and the gradual destruction of their reputation. 

Individually, each act can be explained away.

Together, they become a coordinated pattern that leaves a person isolated, disbelieved, and deeply traumatised.

That’s what workplace mobbing does.

I then identified what I believed was at the centre of the problem:

“Especially damaging to organisations are individuals like the university’s national manager of employment relations and safety.”

It was about accountability.

When the people responsible for protecting staff become the source of the harm, the consequences spread far beyond one worker. They undermine confidence in the institution itself. Every policy about dignity, safety and wellbeing becomes meaningless if it’s ignored when it matters most.

That’s why I reminded the university of its own values.

“Bullying, discrimination and harassment is not OK Professor Ramsay. Especially from a university committed to the dignity of the human person and common good in its mission. It’s unethical, immoral and wrong.”

Those words were written in disappointment.

I believe in those values. I’ve been working in that community for over two decades. I have served students, academics and colleagues because I believe universities should be places where people flourish, where difficult conversations are welcomed, and where leaders act with integrity.

Instead, I found myself pleading for the university to live up to the principles it publicly proclaimed.

This email marks another moment where I was still trying to solve the problem through honesty.

I was still hoping someone in leadership would stop, reflect, and ask the obvious question:

If an employee is repeatedly saying they are being bullied, traumatised, financially devastated, and psychologically injured… what if they’re telling the truth?

Instead, I was met with more silence.

But silence doesn’t erase the truth.

It simply delays the day it is heard.

Source: contemporaneous record of events - Document 431.

——

Further Reading — When Leadership Is Devoid of Empathy

Holt, S. and Marques, J. (2012). ‘Empathy in Leadership: Appropriate or Misplaced? An Empirical Study on a Topic That is Asking for Attention.’ Journal of Business Ethics. 105(1):95-105 DOI:10.1007/s10551-011-0951-5. [Open access version]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225160079_Empathy_in_Leadership_Appropriate_or_Misplaced_An_Empirical_Study_on_a_Topic_That_is_Asking_for_Attention 

The research paper Empathy in Leadership: Appropriate or Misplaced? by Svetlana Holt and Joan Marques provides a disturbing context for what I was trying to communicate in July 2022.

At its heart is a deceptively simple question: what happens to organisations when empathy is not considered an essential quality of leadership?

Holt and Marques found that empathy consistently ranked lowest among ten leadership qualities in their study of business students. But their paper goes considerably further. Through their review of the wider literature, they examine narcissism, psychopathic behaviour in organisational settings, ethical leadership, workplace culture and the consequences when people who lack empathy acquire organisational power.

When harmful behaviour is mistaken for leadership

Holt and Marques discuss Andrews and Furniss (2009), who link excessive organisational narcissism with psychopathic behaviour. The characteristics described in that research include superficial charm, grandiosity, deceitfulness, lack of remorse and empathy, irresponsibility and poor behavioural control.

But perhaps even more important is how such people can operate within organisations.

The literature reviewed by Holt and Marques describes individuals who can initially present themselves as exemplary workers, cultivate relationships with people holding formal and informal power, and eventually manipulate the organisational environment around them. Other research discussed in the paper describes how organisational upheaval and change can provide opportunities to play competing groups against one another for personal advantage.

Babiak and Hare’s work, as summarised by Holt and Marques, takes the concept beyond ordinary office politics. They describe organisational environments in which people can be assessed according to their usefulness: some cultivated, powerful people controlled or influenced, and others discarded. Clarke’s work goes further still, arguing that people displaying these characteristics may remain largely unchallenged while causing enormous damage to their victims and potentially to the organisations themselves. Significantly for my story, universities are specifically included among the workplaces discussed in that literature.

I’m not using this research to diagnose any individual involved in my experience, and that’s not the point here.

The point is the organisational pattern.

Reading this literature against my own experience raises a much bigger question than whether one employee was treated badly:

What happens when an institution’s structures of power protect, reward or fail to challenge behaviour that is manipulative, remorseless, destructive or devoid of empathy?

That question goes directly to what I had been trying to communicate.

I had raised psychosocial hazards, bullying, discrimination and harassment. I had asked for safety. Yet instead of the institution stopping and examining what was happening to me, I experienced an escalating exercise of organisational power against me.

And the people holding that power didn’t operate in isolation. There were hierarchies. There were professional relationships. There were internal processes. There were people capable of asking questions. 

There were senior leaders capable of intervening.

That’s why this literature matters to my story.

The damage doesn’t stop with the individual

The research reviewed by Holt and Marques also challenges the idea that destructive leadership is merely an interpersonal problem between a manager and an employee (that misunderstanding can be seen in the court registrar’s response to an APVO application - http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2025/07/apvo-court-registrars-response.html ).

They discuss research finding that the behaviour of corporate psychopaths can negatively affect employee commitment and an organisation’s corporate social responsibility performance. Employees in such environments may feel less involved, less appreciated and less rewarded. The authors also describe a downward spiral beginning with leadership lacking emotional intelligence, progressing to diminished empathy and social skills across the organisation, and manifesting in employer–employee abuse and growing employee discontent.

That distinction is crucial, because what happened was never simply about the conduct of one person.

Once organisational systems began reinforcing rather than stopping the harm, the problem became institutional.

And that is why the words I wrote on 8 July 2022 mattered so much:

“Especially damaging to organisations are individuals like the university’s national manager of employment relations and safety.”

I was trying to tell senior leadership that the problem wasn’t confined to what was happening to me. I believed the conduct itself posed a risk to the integrity of the institution.

There’s an extraordinary contradiction when the very organisational functions entrusted with employment relations and safety become, in the experience of the worker seeking protection, sources of fear and harm.

And there is an even greater contradiction when this occurs within a university whose stated mission invokes the dignity of the human person and the common good.

Empathy is not weakness. It is an ethical safeguard.

This is ultimately where Holt and Marques arrive.

After examining the literature on narcissism, corporate psychopathy, organisational ethics and leadership, they argue that empathy should be understood not as an optional “soft skill”, but as a serious leadership capability and an important protection against unethical and repressive organisational practices.

Their conclusion could hardly be more relevant:

“Empathy is an essential aspect of 21st century leadership.”

The authors argue that it can no longer be ignored if organisations want to prevent further ethical disasters. They also identify a troubling corporate paradigm in which narcissistic characteristics can be regarded as useful for succeeding in competitive organisational environments.

That brings me back to my own story.

I was asking university senior leaders to listen, investigate, recognise harm, exercise judgement, uphold their responsibilities and see the human being affected by their decisions.

That is empathy in leadership.

And perhaps that’s one of the most important lessons emerging from what happened to me.

• Policies alone cannot create a psychologically safe workplace.
• Mission statements cannot create one.
• Codes of conduct cannot create one.

A university can publish beautiful words about dignity, respect, wellbeing and the common good, but those words mean very little if the people entrusted with institutional power are permitted to behave in ways fundamentally inconsistent with them — or if other leaders remain silent when they do.

Empathy is therefore not peripheral to ethical leadership.

It is one of the safeguards against power becoming abuse.

And when that safeguard disappears, the consequences can be devastating for the person targeted — and ultimately for the integrity of the institution itself.