It’s difficult to work out what the Chartered Management Institute’s real aim was in announcing that sports talk should be banned from the workplace – but it’s unlikely it was to turn a benign, corporate membership organisation into a laughing stock.
If you missed the story, the CMI’s chief executive, Ann Francke, went on the Today programme (starts around 20 minutes in) to campaign for sports chat to be discouraged because it excludes women and can be a ‘gateway’ to ‘laddish banter’, including men bragging about sexual conquests.
There’s a lot to unpack there. It’s almost as if it’s been carefully calibrated to include something to alienate everyone. It certainly had the feel of a story tucked mischievously into the Radio 5 Live news round-up on April Fool’s Day.
I suppose by some measures it was successful. It probably did stop people talking about sport. For a short while on Monday morning in offices up and down the land, people were talking about someone trying to ban them from talking about sport instead.
Ratner’s gaffe surpassed
It’s been compared to Gerald Ratner’s gaffe of many years ago in how it has backfired but I’d say it’s even worse than that. As ill-advised as Ratner’s comments were, at least you got the feeling he was being honest.
There’s a sense with the CMI announcement that it’s been cooked up specifically to get media and public attention. As the BBC’s veteran sports reporter Rob Bonnet pointed out:
Maybe I’m being cynical. But if so, I’d like to know more about the thinking and the process that preceded the Today programme. The journey from raw idea to the CEO sitting in the BBC studio.
Was the policy debated by a committee; did it emerge from an academic paper; what are the corporate bona fides of taking such a pantomime inflammatory stance?
I can’t picture a route that doesn’t involve a Monty Python sketch. In fact, in the interview itself Ann Francke attempts to back up her argument with the claim that:
“It’s very easy [for men] to escalate from VAR chat to slapping each other on the back and talking about their conquests at the weekend.”
In the week we lost Terry Jones, this is surely one of the most comically surreal statements ever to be aired on the BBC.
A missed opportunity?
Buried beneath all the anti-sport rhetoric is a potential missed opportunity to talk about banter culture. Something that no doubt would have been useful to the CMI’s 80,000 members in their everyday management responsibilities.
But by clumsily conflating banter with men talking about sport she has trampled over this in favour of grabbing a couple of sensationalist headlines, and in the process given a mainstream audience a reason to dislike and discredit an organisation that most had probably never heard of.
Ordinarily, I’d try to avoid the cliché of calling this an own goal but there really is no other way to describe it. And in this case, it’s fitting that sport should have the last word.
Richard Ellis Communications 