AUSTRALIA
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Management experts know that organisational culture is a key determinant of how an organisation engages with stakeholders and comports itself in its day-to-day operations. Organisational leaders are particularly important in demonstrating, through their practices, what values an organisation embraces as part of its organisational culture. In particular, how a leader behaves says a lot about an organisation because organisational members generally follow a leader’s example as being a tacit indication of how they should behave themselves.
It is extremely disturbing, therefore, to see how Australian Salvation Army chief, ‘Commissioner’ James Condon, has acted in relation to claims of child abuse by Salvation Army members, including accused paedophile Colin Haggar. Disturbing not just in its own right but because of what his conduct conveys to organisational members who take direction from their leader about what conduct is acceptable or unacceptable, whatever official policy documents may say to the contrary.
James Condon’s rather bumbling testimony about how he took confessed paedophile Colin Haggar to the police raised disbelieving eyebrows to all who listened to it. You could drive trucks through his story in places. Close and critical observers of his testimony, which had just the right mix of uncertainty and certainty in its telling to sound somewhat plausible to the casual listener, felt instinctively that it was clearly scripted and, to be frank, utter rubbish, and were clearly increasingly distressed at having to listen to it.
Witnesses to his self-serving accounts and his intermittent attempts to use a grave environment such as the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse to get in little ‘plugs’ for the Salvation Army also became increasingly angry as Mr. Condon continued on with his testimony in a way that indicated that Mr. Condon appeared to be using the proceedings to push the image of the Salvation Army.
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