Blame for failures and toxic culture at Nine Network must go all way to top

A company director’s handsome pay packet comes with serious responsibilities, but the Nine Entertainment board has failed to live up to its side of the bargain.

While Nine management bears most of the blame for the extraordinary workplace failings exposed in Thursday’s cultural review, the directors can’t escape culpability.

The Nine directors, led by former Treasurer Peter Costello until only four months ago, don’t have responsibility for the media group’s day-to-day operations, but they are entrusted to provide the oversight that ensures its moral compass is pointing in the right direction.

Forget about all the regulatory and internal company protocols supposedly steering good conduct, if the board is asleep at the wheel and not asking questions, bad things happen.

The behaviour exposed by the cultural report is almost as bad as it gets in a workplace. Consultants Intersection found that bosses at Nine fostered a toxic culture of sexual harassment, bullying, misogyny and humiliation, and then covered up the wrongdoing, destroying careers and pushing some workers to self-harm.

It was a brave decision to publicly release the report, and one that will likely provide the ammunition for a rush of civil lawsuits by the victims of what Intersection described as Nine’s “systemic issues”.

But now Nine’s management and board are expected to make the changes needed to back up their promise to fix the company’s workplace.

As a first step, surely the perpetrators of the sexual harassment and bullying exposed in the Intersection report need to be managed out of the company.

However, it’s difficult to see how the same executives and directors who have failed their staff so badly are the right people to drive the cultural reset with a sceptical workforce.

Chair Catherine West’s challenge is now to ensure the company’s management appoints a new generation of leaders with the capabilities to foster a safe workplace and hold wrongdoers to account, while at the same time she refreshes the board with new directors better able to hold those executives to account.

And then West should follow most of her current fellow directors out the door.

Nine itself has admitted that the long-running misconduct in its offices was partly the product of a lack of accountability by its leadership.

“The executives and board need to inform themselves about workers’ concerns,” one anonymised employee quoted in the Intersection report said.

“The engagement survey is rolled out every 12 months and we raise the same concerns and no action is taken — we just get slogans and platitudes in response . . . ‘turn every stone, walk the talk’ . . . I mean this is so hypocritical — are they walking the talk?

“If the company compels us to live by these slogans and they don’t adhere to these behaviours themselves, it makes you question the morals of the senior role holders.”

Other interviewees were in no doubt that Nine had promoted people, particularly in its broadcasting arm, who were ill-equipped to handle leadership roles, and then failed them by not providing management training.

“They are not nurtured or developed in the management roles, and they have no role models to emulate,” one said.

“For a lot of people in management roles here, Nine is the only place they’ve ever worked — they don’t know any better. It’s a cowboy operation.”

The review found Nine’s senior leadership, particularly in the TV arm, routinely covered up misconduct perpetuated against mainly women. The directors could not have not known what was occurring.

Unusually for an ASX200 company, female directors dominate the Nine board after the departures of Costello and chief executive Mike Sneesby.

Surely, they should have had more awareness of the workplace failings in a susceptible industry given they are more likely than their male peers to have experienced some of the same issues, including discrimination and harassment, in working their way up the corporate ladder?

After all, they’re hardly newcomers.

West has been a director at Nine for eight years. Samantha Lewis 7.5 years. Mickie Rosen nearly six years. A former director at broadcaster Sky in the UK, West has more than 25 years of business and legal experience in the media industry. Lewis was a partner with Deloitte, where she worked for 20 years. Los Angeles-based Rosen had led businesses for Yahoo, Fox and Disney.

Along with the rest of the board — newcomer Mandy Pattinson, who joined in August 2023, and major shareholder WIN’s representative Andrew Lancaster — they are highly qualified, smart people.

However, they’ve failed in their obligations to ensure a safe workplace for their charges. And a simple apology shouldn’t be enough to make up for those failures.