When Doing the Right Thing Destroys Your Career: The Dark Reality of Whistleblowing

What happens when doing the right thing comes at the cost of your career?

In this episode, Dani and Si tackle the uncomfortable subject of whistleblowing and ask a question that sounds simple but rarely has a simple answer: are whistleblowers heroes, troublemakers, or something in between?

Together, they explore what really happens when someone inside an organisation raises concerns about wrongdoing. While policies and public statements promise protection, the reality is often very different. Careers can be derailed, reputations damaged, and lives turned upside down.

Drawing on major UK cases including Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, the Shrewsbury and Telford maternity scandal, and the Lucy Letby inquiry, Dani and Si examine how cultures of fear, reputation management, and institutional self-preservation can override ethics, accountability, and even patient safety.

The conversation also ventures into some of the world's most controversial whistleblowing cases, including Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, while unpacking why existing legal protections often fail the very people they are designed to protect.

Along the way, they discuss whether meaningful reform is possible, what role leadership plays in creating safe cultures, and why ordinary people continue to speak up despite the personal risks involved.

Thought-provoking, frustrating, and surprisingly hopeful, this episode explores the individuals who refuse to look the other way and asks whether organisations truly want the truth, or only when it's convenient.

Grab a brew and join the conversation.

About Simon and Danielle:

Simon and Danielle are both business owners, based in the East Midlands, who met through mutual business contacts and who share a love of all things business. 

Simon runs Skylight Media – Award-winning experts in Website Design, E-commerce & Marketing running since 2003.

Danielle runs Goldspun Support – a multi-faceted support service for fractional directors and small business owners across the globe, running since 2009.

Since they first met Simon and Danielle have spent a ridiculous amount of time talking about the subjects that interest them – usually over a drink in the pub – and they decided that now was the time to bring these conversations to a wider audience and invite them to join the chat. 

Both Simon and Danielle are successful business owners in their own rights with big plans for the future but will never lose their love of talking all things business… and the pub.

Transcript

Hi, I'm Dani,
and I'm Si. Welcome to Business in the Broom, a podcast dedicated to Winfrey's business with the occasional cover.
We take a business story, theory, or something we just want to chat about. Indeed, adjusting on our own special personality and sense of humor, combined with our experience and knowledge. We're both business graduates and have run our own businesses for many years. We can't wait to listen.
Hello, right. Okay, this one today. I've got a topic for you that might interest you.
Okay. Well, everything you say interests me or interesting.
Thanks quite now to take that right. This is whistle blowers. It's
a compliment, personally, but you know, whistleblowers,
heroes or villains. What do you think could be a very short?
I think they're heroes because they tend to bring to light something that shouldn't exist, and people aren't talking about,
and that thing that normally gets brought to light is something
bad and ethical, wrong.
Yeah,
but I'm happy to be not persuaded otherwise to be open to debate.
Well, have no fear, I'm not going to dissuade you. Yeah, okay. So, simple question, please answer this instinctively,
okay,
without thinking about it. I need to keep my mouth near the mic.
Please answer this instinctively without thinking about it. You literally just said the same sentence twice.
Yeah, you work for a large company. You discover that your employer is doing something seriously wrong, harming people, breaking the law, even defrauding customers. You report it. What happens next?
Are my employers aware? Who am I reporting it to? To be clear, my employers,
well, let's say you, well, report it to a higher authority. Yeah,
well, if my employer, I'm getting fired
through what
if I'm reporting it, and then my employers find out I'm probably getting fired because I'm a loose cannon.
Okay, that's really what you think.
Yeah,
okay, all right. Well, you're not far off.
Okay, yeah. Is it death?
So, in an ideal world, what I was expecting you to say was they investigate it and they fix it. Oh, don't be ridiculous. I'm realistic for bringing it to their attention. I did suspect something was going on. You're the first person to step forward.
We didn't notice we were killing people off. Thank God you brought that up. Now, can you
walk through this door into this empty lift shaft? Thank you.
Yeah, I'm a bit realistic. I didn't expect that they've done it with open arms and a solution.
Yes, quite so. That's that's the ideal world that's taken seriously. The actual world, you get fired, and everyone hates you. Yeah,
pretty much. Yeah,
right. So, yeah, that is unfortunately the second route is unfortunately closer to statistical reality, and that gap between what should happen and what does happen is what we're doing here today is where the whistle blows. Well, it's funny you should say that. Yeah, people who see something say something,
sort it.
Yeah,
sorry, that's the British transport bullies.
They seem to have it sussed, and then frequently spend years wishing they hadn't. So imagine that that underlying urge to say something to someone, because you know something is going wrong, but then the other flip side of it, that you did, and then you remove your
friends and your job and your life, I mean, it's,
it's pretty, it's pretty unbelievable, and yeah, it kind of makes you feel a bit low, actually, when you think you do the right thing, essentially, and then look at what happens to people who do do the right thing, yeah, and it's moral clarity in theory and brutal reality in practice is kind of at the heart of every one of the whistleblowing stories that I've been looking into, and I've only looked at a few, because, of course, there are lots of them, but
you've also got a full-time job.
Well, yeah, and we've only got 20 minutes, so I'll take you through a few key cases to explore the law as it stands. Try and answer the question in a title: Are there are whistleblowers, heroes, or villains, and the case that changed everything, really, and actually brought it to the fourth. There have been other cases, but it's a big one. Was the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust called the Staffordshire Care System, so between two. 1005 and 2008 an extraordinary number of patients were dying at the Stafford Hospital, and unnecessary deaths were caused by catastrophically poor standards of care. The Care Quality Commission eventually found mortality rates between 412 100 times higher than they should have been, and throughout the period, people within the trust have been raising concerns, nurses, doctors, healthcare assistants, and the institution's response was not to investigate, it was to manage the complainants.
So, strictly speaking, a whistleblower is actually the last straw.
Yeah,
because it's not like they're the only person who's ever mentioned it.
I've got to tell someone else, yeah, yeah, so, yeah, so it was managing the complainants right to conduct disciplinary procedures against them to question their motivations to make their working lives miserable until they left,
like Nazi Germany,
and nobody was acting on the actual concerns about page patient deaths, and that was well, that was nobody until it became impossible to ignore the Francis inquiry that was set up, eventually examined what happened at Mid Staffs and found a culture, and this phrase appears in whistleblowing case after case, a toxic culture of fear, where whistleblowers were ignored or victimized, where speaking up was professionally dangerous. You think about, yeah, silence was the rational career choice. This wasn't unique to mid staffs. The same phrase appeared in the investigation into maternity services at Shrewsbury and Telford, in the inquiry into Lucy Letby at the Countess of Chester Hospital. Senior doctors raised concerns about about her that were dismissed, and the doctors themselves referred for psychological counseling. The now retired Ombudsman, Sir Robert Behrens, reflecting on that case, said more babies would have been harmed unless systematic or systemic changes were made to end what he called the defensive leadership that makes speaking up so dangerous, and that from his comment in The Guardian, time and time again, we've seen senior managers and boards are more interested in preserving the reputation of their organization rather than dealing with patient safety issues, and this thing, this thing about preservation of reputation, where it's only a matter of time before that reputation is brought into question. What you're always
making it worse, if you dealt with at the beginning, someone could have gone, "Do you know what? They saw a problem, they dealt with the problem.
Absolutely, covering it
up makes your reputation 100 times more damage.
Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah, so the short-termism, you know, couple of years left till I retire, you know, till I pick up my big fat pension, that I'm just not going to ruffle any feathers, you know.
I don't worry about dead people,
yeah. And it kind of makes you think the question, the question that kind of came to mind when I was writing this up was, was, is there actual legal protection for whistleblowers?
I don't know. Well, there isn't. There is, in
theory, the Public Interest Disclosure Act. It's been a statute book since 1998 It's supposed to give legal protection to workers who make what's called a protected disclosure, reporting illegal activity, health and safety risks, financial fraud, miscarriages of justice, or cover-ups of any of the above. If you're dismissed for blowing the whistle on any of these things, you can bring a claim for automatic unfair dismissal with no cap on the compensation. Oh, okay, that sounds fair, doesn't it?
Yes,
yeah,
yes,
yeah. So, you are protected, but why does it keep going wrong?
You'd have to want to follow it through, have not been intimidated, not been mentally and physically beaten down by the entire process.
Yeah,
because suing an employer is not an easy process.
No, no wolf depends for what, though, doesn't
it? Well, if you're suing them for conversation from fair dismissal, it's not an easy process.
No, it's exhausting. Got to show that constructive dismissal, dismissal, for example. Yeah, you have to show that there was a process leading to that, you know. But that the comment I made before about making people's working lives miserable until they left. I've known several people who've had that, and that wasn't because they were whistleblowing. It's because management decided that they had a different trajectory, and they didn't see certain - they saw certain people weren't actually going to fit into it. That's different to whistleblowing, similar experiences in
my corporate career.
Yeah, yeah, so why does it keep going wrong? It's because the law has some significant gaps,
shocking,
yeah, and because employers have blind
spots.
Yes, the employers have become quite sophisticated at navigating around these gaps. The central problem is cause they. Discussion, so to win a whistleblowing case, you have to prove that your protected disclosure was the principal reason for any detriment or dismissal.
Is so hard to do when you go, so your calls report call
in a trap. Yeah, and employers rarely say, even internally, we fired this person because they blew the whistle.
That's not why you wrote down the exit paperwork.
Instead, they find conduct issues, they cite communication style, they say the working relationship broke down.
You would have had to have a spotless record to the point of whistleblowing in order to feel safe doing that,
which, after a whistleblowing episode, it usually has. You know, I mean, you know where you, where, where do you stick with that, or where do you, where do you end up with that? They say that, so it usually has caught the courts are found on more than one occasion an employer can dismiss a whistleblower for the breakdown in relationship that follows their disclosure rather than disclosure itself.
That's just disgusting.
Yeah, effectively you blew the whistle correctly, but the fallout from doing so correctly is itself a valid reason to fire you? Yeah,
but that that breakdown wouldn't be a two-way street, necessarily. Just because you think they're doing something illegal doesn't mean you start acting like a complete tool at work. Yeah, it'll be them that are alienated. Oh, yeah,
yeah, and it's often people who have spotless records, it's people who are reliable, it's people who are conscientious, yeah, yeah, so it's pretty much a loophole you could drive a bus through, and it's been deployed recently, sorry, repeatedly. Dr. Chris Day was a junior doctor who raised patient safety, safety concerns about understaffing in an intensive care unit at a hospital in London. I'm not disclosed the name of it. In 2014 he was removed from his training post. His training number, the number you need to progress through your medical career, was taken away. He spent years working as a locum doctor rather than consultant. He should by now have been. His case revealed another gap in the law. The body responsible for his training said the whistleblowing protections in law simply didn't apply to them because they weren't his direct employer, so all it needs is the little wink, you know, this guy's a rotten egg, just
because he's got a moral up,
yeah,
that's
so even when there's a law, it doesn't always protect you, yeah, I feel
so safe now. Thank God, I work for myself,
exactly on myself. Yeah, but it's big organizations. Yes, it's
very rare.
They don't have the layers, yeah. And it's the layers, it's this, it's this deflecting, deflecting the, the bullshit downwards.
Yes,
sparing the upper management, yeah. So, like, lenience, yeah,
convenience of an issue,
yeah. Schmouth, deal with this. I don't want to hear another word, yeah. You can just imagine it, yeah, yeah. There are also the cases that complicate the hero narrative entirely, which, because not every whistleblower is straightforwardly heroic, not every disclosure is straightforward in the public interest. Edward Snowden, for example, he revealed mass surveillance in the US and British governments, and depending on your politics, he's either he's either a courageous defender of civil liberties, civil liberties, or a dangerous traitor who compromised national national security. It's like, what performs a diff.. what's the difference between a freedom fighter and a terrorist? Well, it kind of depends which side you're on, doesn't it?
Yeah, there are.. I mean, there's a gray area everywhere, isn't there?
Yeah, Julian Assange public published material that exposed genuine war crimes that would also put individual lives at risk. At the same time, closer to home, the Lux Leaks case involved a PWC Cooper employee called Raphael Halle, who leaked documents revealing a vast network of corporate tax avoidance schemes based in Luxembourg. He was prosecuted for it. The European Court of Human Rights eventually ruled in his favor, but not before years of legal proceedings that would deter almost anyone
worked in the meantime.
Yeah. Oh, well, you know, whatever he's doing, since I haven't actually checked. So, sometimes the whistleblower crosses a line, only sometimes, though, and distinguishing genuine public interests from personal grievance or from recklessness is genuinely difficult. Charity Project, formerly known as Public Concern at Work, has been supporting whistleblowers and lobbying for legal reforms since the mid 90s, and they make an important point. The vast number of people, of people who blow whistles, are not idealists or crusaders. They're ordinary workers who simply cannot reconcile what they're seeing with their own conscience. A nurse who sees patients being harmed and can't stay silent. A file, a finance worker who notices, notices fraud and reports it. District nurse, as in one documented case, who raised concerns about. Dangerous staffing levels, and was sacked, winning 460,000 pounds at an employment tribunal, but only after years of legal battle and personal
emotional toll. Absolutely.
So, you asked me on the last episode, what would I do to fix something? So, what do you think you'd do to fix this? Go on now, quick stop
it. I, the trouble is, human nature is to conform.
We
are by nature a herd animal, and we want to be part of that herd. We want to swim the same direction as the rest of the salmon. I'm mixing a lot of animal metaphors here.
Keep going,
and a whistleblower is someone who turns against that, that flow of traffic, or the herd, or whatever else, and tries to stand out, and that, that in and of itself, is a frightened prospect psychologically for any human being. So, I think there is a degree
against the flow of
bravery to it. Yeah, I agree, there are situations in which people do it for their own game, you know, like when you've got a couple fighting over custody or whatever, and one's releasing naked photos of the other one or something, just to undermine their credibility.
Yeah,
so I get that there are two sides to every story.
Yeah,
I don't think you can fix it unless there's some magical, beautiful farm somewhere where all whistleblowers go to live happy, content lives away from the burden of society. Fantasy
land burn
cults,
quite attractive. I won't go out of my way to blow a whistle somewhere. Yeah, so, so the fixing it, well, that's not going to fix it, is it, Danielle? Come on,
no, there
is. Yeah, reform has to be.. I don't mean.. oh my god, sorry, no, not reform, reform, yes,
change,
reform the whole process, protect the aforementioned body, and others have been arguing for years for three things. Firstly, an independent statutory commissioner, which is a dedicated body specifically empowered to investigate whistleblowing disclosures, rather than leaving whistleblowers to navigate employment tribunals alone. Secondly, a public interest defense for national security disclosures, so it's so drawing lines between them, so the people who reveal genuine state wrongdoing aren't automatically criminalized. And third, stronger causation standards, so employers can't sack whistleblowers under the cover of pretextual reasons.
I feel, I mean,
that's a three - they're three levels,
I do, but I feel like they're all very nice to say, but in reality, people will still find loopholes. These people still be victimized if they are not fired. They will have their lives will be so awful within that role, they will choose to leave,
which
is worse.
Yeah,
you'd have to be a stubborn sod to sit there through bullying and marginalization, or whatever else.
Quite,
I think this would be great. I think. This is another level of protection that is needed, but I think, oh,
definitely, definitely, yeah,
yeah. I don't think,
yeah,
this is the solution. I don't think there is a solution.
Well, well, there is, there is a, there is a further, there is a, oh,
don't do bad stuff, and no one can whistle blow, that's another solution.
Don't do bad stuff, and then no one can whistle blow.
Yes, so there's no whistleblowers, there's no bad stuff, there's no whistleblowers.
Don't do bad stuff. Well, hang on, a lot of you know this is health related, you know, Hippocratic oath and all that, that seems to go out the window with some of these things. Oh,
yes.
All right, I know we've talked about financial and, you know, legal, but, but anyway, a cultural shift is also needed. Law itself can create incentives, but it can't create a culture where a nurse who speaks up about patient deaths is thanked rather than disciplined, or where a junior doctor who raises safety concerns isn't quietly excluded from the career path they've spent a long, spent a long time pursuing. Yeah, but that shift has to come from the inside, the inside of organizations. So it starts with leadership, and that's really, really where it is. So leadership, you know, you often hear about boards being pale male, stale.
Yes,
yeah, at the ends of their careers, maybe in some cases that we've had to deal with this before. We don't want to have to deal with it again, or, you know, will this ever go away? Just ignore it and not actually reshape, but you know, leadership that can change policy, and actually hearing bad news is better than not hearing at all, and turning a deaf ear.
Yeah, you've got that long-term view that we talked about earlier in the episode, about actually, if I deal with this problem now,
you've got bad, bad news, you've got an opportunity to fix it, put it, put it right, so it doesn't matter about
yourself. Yeah, brilliant.
You know, there's a board that takes responsibility, got. Corporate social responsibility for
the people that were pushing the bad behavior in the first place for cost.
Absolutely, yeah. So heroes of villains. No, I'm not. I
think they're heroes. The honest truth,
the honest truth of that comment, there was actually, it was rhetorical. I wasn't expecting you to answer, but I was
believed they are slightly heroic.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's my view on it. It's occasionally complicated,
yes,
almost always, regardless of the moral, moral clarity of what they did, paying a price that should embarrass everyone. And final thought with every case that I've kind of put in there today, mid staffs, Chris Day, Shrews Bryn Telford, the nurse in County Durham. It was a moment, a moment where one person looked at what was happening and thought I can't stay silent about this. Did the hardest thing imaginable, which is to say out loud in an organization that didn't want to hear it, and paying a price. Yeah, but they still come forward, new ones every year, in every sector, every level,
knowing what the consequences are going to be.
Yeah, which tells you something pretty wonderful about human beings, when you, when you think about it, even when the rational calculation says stay quiet, something,
yeah, that pros and cons list is very unfairly weighted,
yeah, yeah, and it's the living a life where I am denying other people, I'm giving up my own morals yet, so yeah, so just to kind of cut it to the end, the system definitely needs fixing, the law needs strengthening. Whilst we're waiting for that, there'll always be someone who can't quite bring themselves to look the other way, and that's what keeps the whole thing from falling apart. I think
you mean society as a whole?
No, the whole thing, no, not society. Oh, that's a loss. Anyway, we've
written that off, we're not worried about that.
Yeah, so we'll raise our brew to the heroes,
okay?
Yeah,
who may be slightly villainous at times, but mostly heroic,
mostly heroic, yeah,
80% heroic.
Great.
All right. Thank you.
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and a massive thank you also to Dawn, Emily, Nat, and Lewis, and the BTD Studios for all your expertise in bringing our podcasting dream to reality.
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