July 03, 2026

Five Governance Gaps the Superdry Case Exposes in Toxic Retail Leadership

By Deborah Hartung

The latest retail scandal is more than another cautionary tale. It exposes how organisational systems fail to hold power to account when the person wielding it sits at the very top.

In May 2026, Superdry co-founder James Holder was convicted of raping an employee who had joined his new venture after leaving the fashion brand, and was sentenced to eight years in prison.

The case has reopened a familiar pattern in fashion retail. Harrods has run a redress scheme for victims of its late owner, Mohamed Al Fayed. Sir Philip Green has always denied misconduct allegations linked to his time at Arcadia Group, as has Ray Kelvin, who left Ted Baker following an internal investigation. Paul Marchant resigned as Primark’s CEO last year after an internal investigation into alleged “inappropriate behaviour”.

Together, they point to a structural problem in how the industry holds its most senior leaders to account.

A Drapers survey of 82 fashion retail employees found that 45% believe sexual harassment is “common” in the industry, and in 88% of reported cases, the perpetrator was a senior colleague with power over the victim’s career.

Only around a third of people who had experienced sexual harassment reported it at all – the rest, almost universally, described their harasser as too senior, too valuable or too central to the business to face consequences.

Sexual Harassment Prevention: “All Reasonable Steps”

From April 2026, sexual harassment disclosures automatically qualify for whistleblower protection in the UK. From October 2026, the employer’s duty rises from “reasonable steps” to “all reasonable steps”. In practice, this is likely to mean employers need to:

• Provide safe and accessible reporting channels.
• Respond to disclosures consistently and fairly.
• Protect individuals who report misconduct from retaliation, dismissal or detriment.
• Maintain clear documentation and audit trails.

As these protections apply to past, current and anticipated incidents, organisations need to critically evaluate leadership and culture norms, grievance policies, and escalation routes, especially at a senior level.

Five governance gaps in retail leadership 

Here are five governance gaps within retail leadership (and beyond) and five things chief people officers and EX leaders can start doing to close those gaps.

1. Culture as the Foundation  

Two cultural failures enable this problem. The first is societal: plenty of men are still socialised to treat certain behaviour as ‘harmless’, ‘banter’ or ‘locker room talk’. These beliefs follow people into their workplaces, and although we didn’t create the problem, we have a responsibility, at the very least, not to enable it any further.

A toxic culture cannot survive if we interrupt it daily by calling out unacceptable behaviour, no matter where it comes from.

For too long, we have protected employees who bring in the most money or are perceived as ‘high performers’, rewarding them financially and promoting them into positions of power.

At the same time, we have treated people who report their unacceptable behaviour as a problem to be managed with quiet payoffs, sideways moves, and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs).

2. Learn to Read the Signs  

Organisations aren’t usually blindsided by any of this. Long before a formal complaint is made, the data is often already there: attrition spiking in one team, a sudden rise in absenteeism, or engagement scores that diverge markedly from the average can all point to a problematic manager.

The problem is not a lack of information. Reports and dashboards are often designed to smooth out exactly the kind of outlier behaviour organisations need to address proactively.

We should treat these signals as behavioural risk intelligence rather than routine people metrics, applying the same discipline used to guard against financial or cyber risk to identify and mitigate damage before it becomes a catastrophe.

3. Performance Management: Call Out ‘Brilliant Jerks’

Our narrow, quantitative definition of ‘high performance’ enables and emboldens workplace ‘brilliant jerks’. Performance management needs to be redesigned to include qualitative measures, such as interpersonal relationships and ‘corporate citizenship’ – living the company’s values. It should also draw on a wider feedback pool than just the individual and their manager.

Bullying or abusive behaviour needs to be called out the moment it occurs. It should be discouraged and treated as just as unacceptable as failing to reach traditional business objectives.

4. Build Escalation Routes by Risk  

Most grievance and escalation procedures run in a straight line: raise a concern with your manager, or escalate to HR, who will escalate it to leadership. For minor workplace disagreements, this isn’t a problem. But when a complaint is serious or sensitive, and involves someone senior, a different approach is needed.

Not every concern carries the same organisational risk, so not every concern should travel the same route. A disagreement between two colleagues is a different problem from an allegation against a founder or CEO, and the reporting path should reflect that difference by design.

We need to guard against the chain of command becoming a closed loop, where every route passes through the person implicated, someone they appointed, or a colleague whose career depends on staying in their good graces.

For complaints relating to business risk and reputation (including fraud, corruption, sexual harassment, or ethics violations), it’s best to have a clear path to the Chair, a board committee, or an external whistleblowing provider with real authority to launch an investigation without executive sign-off.

The point is not to add another complaints inbox. It removes the burden of working out who is safe to approach from the person raising the concern.

5. Publish the Aggregate, Protect the Individual  

Transparency and accountability go a long way towards building trust, both within an organisation and with consumers.

Report complaint volumes, categories, and outcomes at an aggregate level, on a set cadence, to both the board and the wider organisation – not case details, but proof that the system produces consequences. If a number is too small to report without risking identification, say so, and report at a broader band.

What erodes trust is not confidentiality; it is the silence that looks like a cover-up from the outside.

The law is raising the bar on prevention, but it has less to say about what happens when prevention fails and the person responsible is one of the most powerful people in the building. That gap cannot be closed by legislation alone; it must be closed by leadership.

What “All Reastonable Steps” Looks Like

If we are serious about preventing the next scandal, rather than simply responding to it, we need to broaden our definition of high performance, treat behaviour as a business risk, and build governance systems robust enough to police power, wherever it sits. Only then will “all reasonable steps” become something more meaningful than words in a policy.

Deborah Hartung is a leadership & culture transformation consultant, executive coach and author with 25 years of experience working with progressive organisations globally. She writes about the future of leadership, employee experience, and what it takes to build workplaces that are both high-performing and deeply human.