Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves is the latest senior leader to be embroiled in a scandal about the ways in which she may have exaggerated her CV. It’s hardly a new theme in politics or business, but it’s worth considering its implications.
Reports on the Guido Fawkes blog and in The Times suggest Rachel Reeves has repeatedly inflated her professional experience in order to boost her credentials as an economist. She allegedly claimed to have worked as an “economist” at HBOS in the late 2000s, when she was in fact “running a small administrative complaints department” within the retail division of the bank.
The Chancellor also appears to have rounded up the amount of time she spent working at the Bank of England to a “decade” when her actual service was around six years, including a secondment to the Foreign Office and a year spent at the LSE. Her LinkedIn page has now been updated to more accurately reflect her experience.
So does any of it matter? In political terms, the brouhaha is undoubtedly an annoying distraction from the messages the government wants to convey. Reeves’ opponents are busily trying to whip up interest in the story as evidence that “Labour has not been honest”. In our febrile, “post-truth” political environment this is no minor damage.
But should those of us not actively engaged in politics concern ourselves with the Chancellor’s rounding errors?
The misjudgements of which Reeves is accused are all too common in the private sector. The management due diligence we undertake often uncovers fudged employment dates, “mis-remembered” job titles and the excision of less glamorous roles. The objective is almost always to paper over cracks and overstate the importance of a candidate’s contribution in the workplace. For many these “white lies” seem to be the price getting ahead in a hyper-competitive marketplace.
The consequences often come much further down the track. For those charged with hiring senior C-Suite executives, the real risk of not paying attention to CV inflation is appointing a candidate who, when confronted with complex challenges, simply doesn’t have the experience or understanding to make good decisions. When considering a plausible candidate for senior leadership, the impulse towards benefit of the doubt can be powerful.
But subsequent revelations about CV embellishment can leave an organisation managing a crisis of trust that calls into question not only the embellisher but the entire operation they represent.
In business, the people who suffer from the fall-out of such failures are the shareholders and customers. Loss of trust among these vital stakeholders is not easily regained.
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