Stories 429 and 430,
I had the same reaction as you for a fleeting second. But you and the readers of this platform already know this: she’s on that list because she is in the seat. Not because of what she has accomplished or destroyed.
That is one of the biggest fallacies of the old structure: confusing the seat with respectability, accountability, fairness, equity, leadership, you name it.
I think Dame Jane represents an old era. The advice to laugh off misogyny and suck it up is the response many women were taught to adopt in a world where there was no recourse that would have helped, because speaking up and standing up would have made things much worse.
But progress toward justice is seldom won in a single triumphant moment. It takes many voices and many small steps for the wave to build and spread.
Dame Jane’s biggest challenge is her doggedness in claiming success at transformation when she has dogmatically pushed “reform” down from the top. In doing so, she fails to recognize that transformation happens by engaging people and shaping them over time. The “get off the bus if you won’t align” approach doesn’t work.
When she started as CEO, many doubted her ability to deliver results, since she had rotated jobs every two years or so. Delivering results demands more than an edict from the top or a sharp pitch to the Board. That is what consultants don’t know how to do. Yet she has hired a bunch of retirees from the Big Four to help her.
Citi faces another conundrum: an unprecedented legal crisis, with many legal actions, some public and some private, targeting multiple leaders across many departments.
Citi has never been held accountable, and that’s how we ended up here, with the alleged behaviors, wrongs and harm now under contention. By refusing to admit fault when in the wrong, settling without admission of guilt, and continuing to employ the executives they protected, they only teach bad actors to perpetuate the behavior.
That’s the tragedy of Dame Jane’s fight at the present time, and it may well be the defining moment of her tenure as CEO.
It’s a terrible legacy. But ridicule doesn’t kill, and her retirement will be well funded.