In September, McKinsey senior partner Chris Bradley got into a dispute in the comments of someone else’s LinkedIn post. The post was promoting Walking on Broken Glass, a new book by former Wall Street executives Julia Carreon and Shannon Nutter about the "glass cliff," the idea that women are more likely to be handed leadership roles when a company is already in trouble.

Bradley, who is based in Australia, has been at McKinsey for 27 years and was one of a handful of directors at the McKinsey Global Institute, the firm's research arm, questioned whether the glass cliff exists. According to Bloomberg, which first reported the exchange on September 29, he called it "a very convenient way to always be a victim in the rain." When Carreon suggested he actually review the research, he replied, "I am not going to start researching glass cliffs as I don't think it ranks in the top 1000 problems of the world." Carreon's response, "Aren't people from McKinsey & Company supposed to know these things?"

McKinsey has published its Women in the Workplace study with Sheryl Sanderg’s LeanIn for over a decade, and a 2020 McKinsey report on women in healthcare named the glass cliff as a hurdle women of color said they face.

McKinsey's first statement said the exchange was "inconsistent with our views and the standards we expect," that "the comments were made in a personal capacity and have since been deleted," and that "we stand by our research and leadership on these topics."

“Made in a personal capacity and since deleted” is in defense of the partner and it tells the reader what McKinsey isn’t responsible for at the exact moment Carreon’s question was about what McKinsey believes. There may have been a reason for the caution, for example if a review was already under way. But it could have said that. “We stand by our research, and we’re looking at this” would have cost them nothing and also left room for what came next. Instead the first statement read as the end of the matter, and twelve days later they had to write a second one.

On Sunday, October 11, after what it called a conduct review, McKinsey officially removed Bradley from his MGI directorship and from internal committees he led. "His public comments fell well short of the standards we expect at our firm," spokesman Taylor Burns said. Bradley remains a senior partner.

This tells us three things

As many communications leaders could have predicted, the "personal capacity" statement didn't hold up. It's the standard first move, and twelve days later the firm took formal action anyway. I can't tell you whether the review was already under way or whether continued coverage (Fast Company, the Sydney Morning Herald in Bradley's home market) forced a second step but either way, calling the comments personal did not buy them closure to this matter.

McKinsey did not fire him. Instead, it took away the research role, which is the part of his job his comments had undermined. Clients look to McKinsey for its credibility on workplace research, and a director of the research institute had just publicly dismissed some of that research, so that’s where the firm acted. I don’t know whether that was a deliberate choice or simply the easiest one since a senior partner is a part-owner of the firm, and removing an owner is a different and much heavier decision than taking back a title McKinsey had given him. But it’s the same option most companies have which is remove the title and the committee seats, keep the executive, and make the penalty fit the part of the business that was hurt.

The research on the glass cliff is contested, and a research director saying "the evidence here is more mixed than this book suggests" would have been doing his job. The problem was the approach he took, including the complete refusal to engage, from someone whose title made the refusal look like the firm's position.

How to counsel executives on commenting in public

Most of us have a media training program but few of us have the equivalent for the places executives now talk most: LinkedIn posts and comment threads, conference panels, podcasts, alumni events, industry Slack groups, the Q&A after a keynote. Media training assumes a formal process from the PR days of yore: reporter, notebook, scheduled interview. But this exchange happened in a comment thread on someone else's post which is where the exposure is now, and it's where most executives have never been coached.

Here's executive guidance I’d use as a starting point:

A sweeping policy that bans anything controversial would be a mistake, legally and culturally. In the US for example, federal labor law protects certain employee discussions about pay and working conditions, including on social media; whistleblower rules apply; and some states protect lawful off-duty or political activity. More to the point, a policy that scares people out of disagreeing with management is a worse outcome than the occasional bad comment.

So instead, agree on five things in advance.

First, be clear that only a handful of people are authorized to speak on behalf of the company, but that doesn’t stop readers from assuming an employee’s personal post is also the company’s view. The more senior someone is, and the closer the subject is to what the company does, the less the distinction protects them.

Second, a simple test for filtering disagreement from misconduct: could we (the company) defend what they said, and would we be comfortable defending how they said it?

Third, clear protection for the speech the law already protects, so nobody can mistake the policy for a gag order.

Fourth, expectations that scale with someone’s responsibility rather than their title.

And fifth, a response process with identified owners, so the first statement out the door says where the company stands and what it’s doing about it, instead of simply the exec’s comments were ‘personal.’

Communications should be writing this guidance not just getting pulled in when a thread starts getting heat. HR and legal can tell you what's permissible and what action is available but comms is the function who can say which part of the company's reputation is on the table.

The open question is whether McKinsey would have reached the same outcome without the second wave of coverage. I suspect most companies wouldn't which is the better argument for having this conversation with your executives now, while the comment thread doesn't exist yet.

If one of your senior leaders dismissed something central to the company's expertise in a LinkedIn thread tomorrow, would you have an agreed way to decide whether it was legitimate disagreement, unacceptable conduct, or a conflict with their role, and would you apply it the same way to someone three levels down?