May 28, 2026
What BP’s Leadership Crisis is Really Doing to Its 93,000+ Employees
BP’s leadership crisis has dominated headlines this week. A chair removed after eight months over conduct deemed ‘unacceptable’. A fifth CEO since 2020 and a third chair search in just two years. Then there’s the strategic identity that has lurched from green energy pioneer to fossil fuel-refocused and back again, leaving employees, investors and observers collectively wondering what BP actually stands for anymore.
The financial press will track the share price and governance experts will debate board structures, but what is all of this doing to the 93,000+ people who still have to show up to work on Monday morning?
Beyond the problems it surfaces in the boardroom, leadership instability is also an employee experience crisis. One that unfolds in a very specific, very predictable sequence. Understanding the sequence is the first step to interrupting and responding to it.
The Cascade of Crisis
There are eight elements of employee engagement that leaders directly control or influence – regardless of what Gallup measures or what your annual survey tells you. When turmoil hits at the top, four of those elements collapse in sequence, each one triggering the next.
Clarity Collapses First
It starts with Clarity: clarity is the foundation of everything. Clear expectations and priorities reduce anxiety, focus effort, and give people a reason to care about their work.
When BP pivoted aggressively away from its green energy commitments (a strategy many employees had joined the company specifically to be a part of), that clarity evaporated. People who had built their professional identity around energy transition suddenly found themselves working for a company publicly retreating from it.
Shifting goalposts in this way causes employees to question: ‘does any of this actually mean anything?’ If the answer is ‘no’, motivation can fall off a cliff.
Capacity is Next
Leaders leave – voluntarily, involuntarily or ambiguously as has been the pattern at BP. Roles go unfilled and restructures create gaps. This leaves the people who remain having to absorb the difference, which means that the concept of a sustainable workload becomes nothing but a distant memory. Leaders, especially, are impacted, as they are stretched across numerous responsibilities and areas that were previously shared across a stable leadership team.
Somewhat ironically, the people most loyal and committed to the organisation – the ones who don’t leave – pay the highest price. They typically carry the heaviest weight, covering the gaps in an environment of increasing uncertainty and with decreasing resources, for a direction they’re no longer sure they believe in.
Overloaded and under-resourced, leaders respond with fear. Fear in leadership almost always produces the same response…
Tighter Control Takes Hold
This isn’t malicious, but instinctual. Unfortunately, what leaders reach for in moments of fear – closer oversight, more sign-offs, less delegation, more directives – is precisely what destroys autonomy and trust.
Employees who were performing brilliantly under conditions of ownership and accountability suddenly find themselves being micromanaged, second-guessed, and demotivated.
Autonomy, once removed, is extraordinarily difficult to restore because the trust that underpinned it doesn’t automatically just return when the crisis passes.
Connection is Lost Last
Finally, in that trust vacuum, connection gradually dies. There’s no time for togetherness and belonging when everyone is firefighting. There’s no psychological safety when you don’t know who is on whose side, whose role is secure or whose judgment you can trust.
Political instability at the top creates instability throughout every level of the organisation. Everyone is just trying to survive the latest crisis, so people stop being honest and collaboration becomes transactional.
The sense of belonging that made work feel worth doing and like a place worth going to dissolves into a generalised, low-grade anxiety.
What Good Managers Can Do Despite Crisis
In times of crisis and uncertainty, middle managers become even more pivotal to daily employee experience and overall engagement. They may not have created the crisis or be able to fix what’s on fire at the top, but they have more power than they realise to protect their people from the worst of it.
That power lives in the four remaining elements of engagement within their direct gift – regardless of what is happening above them or around them.
Competence
Keep developing your people and investing in their growth and overall wellbeing at work. Don’t let the chaos become an excuse to cancel 1:1s or postpone development conversations or deprioritise coaching.
The managers who hold space for growth during turbulence – even if it’s limited to stretch projects and some strategic delegation – build loyalty when it’s really needed. A monthly check-in or a 20-minute conversation about someone’s goals and progression this quarter costs nothing, yet signals a level of care and belief that money cannot buy.
Credit
Celebrate the small wins, every week, without fail. Specific, genuine recognition instead of just a blanket ‘great job, team!’ activates intrinsic motivation. Notice personality traits and behaviours that contribute to team performance and stability and express appreciation for these.
Beneath it all, everyone wants to feel seen, appreciated and supported. When the big picture feels uncertain, the small picture needs to be enhanced.
Consistency
Be the thing that doesn’t change. Show up the same way on hard days as on easier ones. Follow through on what you said you’d do. Be fair in how you treat people, transparent about what you know, and honest about what you don’t.
In an environment where senior leaders have repeatedly behaved in ways that surprised and disappointed even their own board, a manager who is reliably trustworthy is a profoundly stabilising force.
Contribution
Give people their voice back. Co-create solutions. Ask for input on decisions where input is genuinely possible. Make work feel meaningful and shared even when the strategic direction above feels opaque.
People can tolerate enormous uncertainty when they feel that their contribution matters and that someone is listening. They cannot tolerate feeling invisible or inconsequential.
The Leadership Lesson BP is Teaching in Real Time
BP’s leadership crisis is extraordinary in its scale and visibility. But the engagement cascade that it’s triggering – clarity to capacity to control and then connection – plays out in organisations everywhere, every time leadership instability goes unaddressed.
Leaders who understand this cascade and who consciously protect the elements within their control, are not just ‘good people’. They are the difference between an organisational workforce that survives a crisis and one that cannibalises itself from the inside. This kind of leadership is not a ‘soft skill’. Human-centred leadership – especially during times of turmoil and in the age of AI – is a strategic imperative and it’s the best thing any leader who cares about employee experience, can do right now.
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.
