Is your company mired in the culture wars? Stop fighting

THE US election daily reminds us that we live in hyper-politicised times. Not only do people from different political tribes refuse to have anything to do with each other, but politics also invades every nook and cranny of daily life. As so often, America’s bad habits are spreading to the world: Political operatives increasingly think in terms of harnessing “negative partisanship” (aka “loathing along party lines”) rather than solving collective problems.

What should organisations do about such powerful political passions? Over the course of the past decade – and particularly after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 – organisations decided that they had no choice but to join the fray. Organisations of every variety and in every corner of the world condemned Floyd’s murder. Senior British civil servants proclaimed their commitment to LGBTQ with lanyards and flags. Universities adopted official positions on oppressions of every stripe. Corporate reports began to devote more and more pages to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

The result has been problematic. Companies have become embroiled in fights that they cannot win. Activist-employees have agitated for increasingly radical policies. Universities have alienated their donors. And DEI initiatives have often backfired – or “morphed into a set of rules and prohibitions that divided, not included, and that shamed and shut down people with non-aligned views and values” as Diversity by Design, a pro-diversity group, argues in Flying Flags and Ticking Boxes. As a result, a growing number of institutions are reversing themselves and running away from politics and all it entails. The phrase of the moment is “institutional neutrality”.

But what is “institutional neutrality”? And why does it offer a way out of the mess that so many institutions have got themselves into? A conference at Worcester College, Oxford, on impartiality, put on by Civic Future, which encourages people (particularly those starting their careers) to get involved in public life, and featuring academics and policymakers, addressed both questions.

The core idea of “institutional neutrality” is that organisational leaders don’t go out of their way to take party political positions on behalf of their organisations. Permanent civil servants (as opposed to political appointees) don’t commit themselves to one particular political party. Chief executive officers of regular public companies (as opposed to founders) don’t throw the company’s weight behind one particular party.

But in today’s world, where politics is extending beyond traditional boundaries and becoming entangled with culture wars, institutional neutrality needs to go further. Organisations need to avoid taking official positions on all sorts of politically controversial subjects such as the war in Gaza or even Ukraine that don’t touch their core missions. They need to stop displaying partisan flags or other symbols in official places. And senior members of organisations need to try harder to distinguish between their private and public selves.

The popular injunction that we should bring our whole selves to work is in fact the reverse of good practice. We should try harder to distinguish between our public selves and our private selves (it’s called “work” for a reason). Civil servants should leave their private beliefs at home when they act in the name of the public. Academics should suppress their personal prejudices and give a fair presentation of all sides of the argument. One Oxford academic at the conference said that he didn’t have a presence on social media because he didn’t want his students to know what his private opinions were. His job was to teach, not convert.

This is a demanding agenda. The politicisation of organisations is so far gone that many people would regard the adoption of “institutional neutrality” as an assault on their political rights to free speech. And many organisations are so ideologically homogenous that they don’t recognise that flying a flag or endorsing a good cause is an exercise in politics rather than common humanity. (The economist Joan Robinson pointed out that ideology is like breath – you never smell your own.) But the arguments in favour of institutional neutrality are strong enough to justify a little turbulence in implementing it.

First: institutional neutrality gives leaders of organisations a fail-safe defence against lobbyists and activists. People on both sides of the political divide commonly criticise leaders for being cowards because they give in to this or that cause. But the problem is not an outbreak of cowardice in the elite but a failure of institutional design. (“If men were angels,” James Madison told us, “no government would be necessary”.) If you endorse one “good” cause, then you are logically driven to endorse many more, since not endorsing them is read as opposing them; and if you give in to one set of lobbyists/activists, then you will whip up another opposing set. The seemingly innocuous act of supporting Black Lives Matter inexorably leads you into the current mess over Palestine. It’s far simpler to say that you don’t take institutional positions on anything and leave it at that.

Second: institutional neutrality allows organisations to preserve the broadest possible legitimacy. These days organisations are often dominated by educated elites who are more progressive, on average, than their customers/clients. They are also increasingly swayed by small pods of activists who carry liberal causes to their most extreme conclusions. The more they wear those progressive values on their sleeves, the more they will alienate significant sections of the population. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is driven, in large part, by the (risible) idea that he represents ordinary Americans who are looked down on by the sort of people who run the big organisations: McDonald’s Man versus Organisation Woman, as it were.

Third: institutional neutrality makes it easier for institutions to focus on their core businesses. It frees up time that would otherwise be spent on meetings and form-filling. If “the problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings”, as Oscar Wilde reportedly said, that is doubly true in the world of Zoom meetings, hyperactive human resources (HR) departments, and corporate affinity networks. The one thing that unites academics and corporate employees these days is that they all complain about having to spend so much time on HR box-ticking. Neutrality may also boost corporate performance by making it less likely that executives with minority political views will go elsewhere. A new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on “the political polarisation of corporate America” by Vyacheslav Fos, Elisabeth Kempf and Margarita Tsoutsoura found that the departure of “politically misaligned” executives imposed incremental losses of more than US$200 million on shareholders of the average firms in their sample. In polarised times anything that draws attention to people’s political positions can cost money.

In 1946, the Labour prime minister Clement Attlee got so tired of receiving advice from the hyperactive academic Harold Laski that he sent him a note saying, “a period of silence on your part would be welcome”. The recent era of politicisation and polarisation has led to a plague of Harold Laskis. Institutional neutrality is an ideal way to tell them all that a period of silence is not just welcome but necessary.