What Happens When Leaders Look Away

There’s a paradox in leadership.
Most organisations have policies written down — health and safety, dignity at work, codes of conduct. On paper, they look impeccable. Yet the harm doesn’t come from what’s written. It comes when leaders look away.

That was one of the things I took away from my conversation with Claire Glasgow on The Whole Leader Podcast. Claire is a solicitor and director at Fieldfisher, working with survivors of catastrophic injury and sexual assault. Her career has been about standing alongside people who have been harmed within powerful systems.

What I took from Claire is that leadership isn’t abstract. It’s not a set of slogans or structures. It’s lived in moments of accountability — or avoidance. The difference between harm and healing often comes down to whether leaders pay attention when it matters most.

When Systems Fail, People Pay

Claire told me about her work with survivors of abuse connected to Harrods. Policies were in place. Procedures existed. But they were never enforced. The harm was devastating.

“Through that work,” she said, “you see what happens when there isn’t proper accountability.”

It’s a reminder that a company can have handbooks, posters, even public commitments. But if those commitments aren’t lived — if leaders model disregard, or look the other way — then the systems become theatre. And people pay the price.

I understand how easy it is to assume that processes will be enough. But culture isn’t what’s written down. It’s what people see and experience every day. Leadership lives in the details of follow-through. Without that, the best-designed systems are just window dressing.

The Silence Problem

One of the hardest truths Claire named is why so many people stay silent when harm is happening.

“It’s kind of human nature, isn’t it?” she said. “People see who’s in charge, and they don’t want to rock the boat because they’re worried about their own job or their own progression.”

This is where leadership meets psychology. Too often silence is dismissed as weakness. In reality, it’s survival. People calculate the risk of speaking up and conclude — often correctly — that the system won’t protect them. So they protect themselves.

That’s not a personal failing. It’s a cultural one. And it’s why the idea of psychological safety has become so important in leadership circles. Safety isn’t a poster on the wall; it’s a lived experience. People will only speak up when they believe they’ll be heard — and protected — if they do.

The responsibility sits with leaders. If the environment punishes honesty, silence will become the norm.

Justice and Recognition

We also spoke about justice. In Claire’s work, justice is rarely about money.

“At the end of the day you can’t put somebody back where they were,” she explained. “What people really want is accountability. To be believed. To have recognition for what happened to them.”

For survivors of trauma, being believed is itself a form of restoration.

There’s a parallel in leadership. People in organisations want fair reward, yes. But what they also want is recognition. To know that their work, their effort, even their struggles are seen. And to feel that when harm is caused, someone takes responsibility.

Recognition is a basic human need. When it’s absent, no amount of process or compensation can fill the gap.

Self-Awareness, Not Lip Service

This brought us to a deeper point. Systems alone don’t create safety or justice. People do. Leaders do.

“Honesty and self-awareness in leaders,” Claire said, “can’t be overstated.”

It sounds obvious. But too often, leadership closes ranks when trouble arises. Victims are left without support. Whistleblowers are punished. Policies are used as shields rather than tools for accountability.

This isn’t a failure of systems. It’s a failure of self-awareness. Leadership that can’t look at itself honestly will always reach for deflection. And that’s where the harm multiplies.

The alternative isn’t complicated. It’s leaders willing to look directly, to acknowledge what’s gone wrong, and to hold themselves accountable alongside others. It’s not perfection that builds trust. It’s honesty.

Building Human-Centred Workplaces

What struck me most is how these themes connect to the day-to-day of organisational life. Claire works in the extreme cases — trauma, abuse, catastrophic injury. But the lessons scale down into every workplace.

She put it simply: “You’re only going to get those performance indicators if your employees are working productively, they’re happy in their work, and they feel motivated… to feel like that, there has to be a human-centred approach.”

Performance doesn’t start with pressure. It starts with safety. People do their best work when they feel secure, valued, and trusted. Without that, the cost shows up in disengagement, attrition, and lost creativity.

This is where flexibility comes in too. One of Claire’s strongest points was that flexibility isn’t a perk. It’s what keeps people in their jobs. “That makes you want to stay,” she said. Leaders who can adapt around the realities of people’s lives are the ones who retain talent.

This isn’t softness. It’s strategy. Human-centred leadership isn’t a moral extra. It’s the foundation of performance.

What Happens When Leaders Do Look

So what happens when leaders do look?

The answer is: change. Sometimes painful, sometimes slow. But always better than the alternative.

Harm multiplies when leaders look away. Healing begins when leaders look directly. That doesn’t mean having all the answers. It means being willing to see — to hear — and to act.

For me, this conversation with Claire reinforced that leadership is not defined by policies or slogans. It’s defined by presence. The courage to see what’s in front of you, to accept responsibility, and to create the conditions where others feel safe to speak and thrive.

And perhaps that’s the simplest definition of human-centred leadership. To look, when it would be easier to turn away.